In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Talib Charriez, senior program coordinator for New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons program (also known as NJ-STEP). He is also teaching faculty in the Department of Urban Education at Rutgers-Newark. The conversation touches on a number of topics, including the carceral logic that informs schooling and creates the school-to-prison pipeline. A key aspect of this problem is the way that adolescent development is criminalized and racialized. We also discuss the nature of education in prison, where human contact and access to reading material are both limited as a means of punishment. As a justice-impacted scholar himself, Talib provides his perspective on the centrality of autoethnography as both a research method and a means of personal exploration and expression.

You can access the episode here.