The mission of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project is to build relationships of reciprocity that bring artists, scholars, and writers together with incarcerated people and our communities. We believe that access to education and art is a fundamental human right with the capacity to transform people, systems, and futures.
At PNAP:
1. We are committed to building collaborative relationships with people who are incarcerated, their supporters, and communities.
2. We offer courses that introduce students to creative and critical practices, materials, techniques, and skills that can deepen and enlarge their capacities to give expression to their experience and understanding of the world of which we are a part.
3. We believe in developing curricula linked to the life experiences, stated needs, and expressed interests of students. Our educational practice assumes that the classroom operates as a site of collective learning, one in which instructors and students are involved in reciprocal exchange. Thus all participants are expected to contribute, and everyone is recognized as a teacher as well as a learner.
4. We are committed to building relationships with the communities on the outside to which those behind bars belong. We understand the art exhibitions and programming that we create outside of prison to be essential components of our work, which acknowledges that those behind bars retain an integral and vital link to communities, neighborhoods, and families.
5. We understand this work as an intervention in a carceral continuum in which a current focus on criminality and punishment is misplaced. The prison industrial complex removes people from vital systems and networks of support without adequately taking into account the social, economic, and political structures that produce the many conditions of which crime is but a symptom.
6. We also recognize that the practice of mass criminalization – especially the locking up of young Black and Brown men – is connected to our broken education system. The school-to-prison pipeline, the increasing privatization of public education, the emergence of a for-profit educational sector, and the exorbitant cost of much higher education all contribute to conditions of educational apartheid. These conditions shift resources away from those who have the greatest needs and transform education into a commodity reserved for those who can afford it. We recognize that these exclusionary practices fundamentally depend on the criminalization of poverty, which justifies and explains away the incarceration of poor people, while devaluing their contributions and denying their potential.
7. We believe in a world in which art and education are for everyone, everywhere.