UC-Berkeley Course on Prison Abolition Fulfills General Education Requirements

UC-Berkeley Course on Prison Abolition Fulfills General Education Requirements

Prison abolition is a progressive political concept. What does this have to do with education?

Campus Reform reports:

UC Berkeley prison abolition course fulfills general education requirements

The University of California, Berkeley is offering an undergraduate course during the upcoming academic year that teaches prison abolition and promotes what the course describes as a “commitment to create freedom as a place where all life/lives are precious.”

The four-unit course, “Prison Abolition,” appears as Gender and Women’s Studies 181AC and is cross-listed as Ethnic Studies 181AC and Social Welfare 185AC. The listing states that the course satisfies the American Cultures requirement and two College of Letters and Science breadth requirements.

Berkeley’s course web page says that the class will engage in abolitionist ideas and practices intended to create “worlds of care and mutuality beyond the harms that the prison produces and legitimates.”

“This course introduces students to the long history of the prison in the American experience, and does so by engaging ideas, movements, and practices to craft worlds of care and mutuality beyond the harms that the prison produces and legitimates,” the class listing explains.

”Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, the course engages with the full range of ‘carceral geographies’ in which social life is penetrated with the state’s power to surveil, arrest, judge, and punish its citizens; as well as the ‘abolition geographies’ that, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms, combine resources, creativity, and commitment to create freedom as a place where all life/lives are precious,” it continues.

Previously offered in the spring 2025 semester, the course instructs students to examine the history of prisons, policing, probation, surveillance, arrests, judgment, and punishment. A 2025 course description states that students would be introduced to the “long history of the prison in the American experience, questioning the shadows of inevitability and normality that cloak mass incarceration in the contemporary United States and around the globe.”

A student testimonial published by the university in 2025 says that the experience became a commitment “to each other, to abolition, and to the world we want to see.”

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