For July 2022, Not School is reading Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis.
I picked this book because I taught the intro chapter to my classes this past year. Their summer reading book was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, which is about a lawyer who goes to Alabama to run a non-profit group that helps get people off death row. I loved that book, even though he is arguing only for reform. So I added on some Angela Davis and Martin Luther King Jr. to expand our approach on the topic. When we got to Are Prisons Obsolete?, I saw how transformative it was. The participation I got and the references to the ideas in their papers made me see impact in a real time.
That is part of what inspired this whole program. I wanted to be able to go through the whole book. I wanted to share physical copies. I wanted more. So here we are.
Not School 