Urban Education · 2026
Joanna Weidler-Lewis · Roderick L. Carey · Bryant Best · Bettie Ray Butler · Howard Henderson · Jameel Spann
DOI: 10.1177/00420859261429484
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Published in Urban Education · NSF STEM-OPS Project
What actually happens when the voices of the formerly incarcerated are genuinely centered in educational research — not as data sources, but as collaborators with authority to transform practice? This study documents that rare event: a research team that listened to the lived expertise of a formerly caged co-author and changed how each member works, teaches, and thinks about equity, STEM, and freedom.
Mass incarceration touches millions of families and reshapes the communities that urban educators serve. Yet the people most affected by carceral systems are routinely excluded from the research and reform conversations meant to help them. This study, rooted in the NSF-funded STEM Opportunities in Prison Settings (STEM-OPS) project, documents what becomes possible when that exclusion is deliberately reversed.
Six authors — scholars spanning education, criminal justice, learning science, and STEM equity — reflect on how working alongside Jameel Spann, a Washington University graduate and survivor of more than twelve years of incarceration, shifted their individual educational practices and, taken together, advanced the collective project of dismantling carceral logics in research and teaching.
What We Did
Research Approach
The research team participated in the NSF-funded STEM-OPS project, an alliance and capacity-building initiative aimed at expanding STEM learning opportunities for people impacted by the carceral system. Over more than a year of shared work, the authors documented how one co-author’s lived experience produced measurable shifts in their own research practices.
To capture this, the team employed collective autoethnography: each author independently reflected on how centering Spann’s voice changed their thinking, their language, and their work. The analytic framework was equity-oriented scale-making (EOSM) — a tool for understanding how individual, localized transformations connect to broader social movements and systemic change.
1
Collective Autoethnography
Each author wrote an independent narrative account of their experience reflecting how Spann’s truth-telling altered their research posture, language, and practice.
2
Equity-Oriented Scale-Making Framework
EOSM enabled the team to analyze individual shifts as connected moments within two larger social movements: ending mass incarceration and advancing equity in STEM education.
3
Centering Lived Expertise from the Start
Rather than treating formerly incarcerated experience as data to be collected, the team structured its collaboration so Spann’s knowledge held genuine authority in shaping the group’s shared agenda.
What We Found
Key Findings
Three interlocking themes emerged from the autoethnographic narratives, each surfacing a dimension of carceral logic that had previously gone unexamined in the authors’ own work.
Finding 01
Language Conceals — and Language Can Reveal
Spann’s insistence on replacing “incarcerated” with “caged” forced the team to confront how sanitized language mutes the dehumanizing reality of imprisonment, rippling outward into how they listened for coded language among adolescent research participants.
Finding 02
Institutional Goals Routinely Override Student Needs
Spann identified a pervasive pattern: students and formerly incarcerated people are rarely named as key stakeholders in program design or research. This prompted the team to commit to compensated collaboration as a standard, not an exception.
Finding 03
Carceral Policies Sever the Relationships That Make Learning Possible
A no-contact policy prohibiting students from communicating with instructors after release exposed a fundamental contradiction: carceral institutions are structurally anti-learning, reframing relationship-building as a form of educational justice.
“One voice of the incarcerated experience can be the lever for transformation across multiple scales of practice. Hear those who have been silenced and render visible that which has been made invisible.”
— Weidler-Lewis et al., Urban Education (2026)
Crucially, the study also found that Spann’s impact was not a function of his being exceptional — it was a function of the conditions that allowed his expertise to land. The lesson is structural, not individual.
Why This Matters
Broader Significance
The communities most impacted by mass incarceration — Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities and people experiencing poverty — are the same communities underrepresented in STEM and burdened by under-resourced schools. Research on these overlapping crises cannot remain separate.
1
Carceral Logics Extend Far Beyond Prison Walls
Surveillance, punishment, and disposability mindsets embedded in schools drive the school-to-prison pipeline and deny Black and Brown youth the environments they deserve.
2
Quantitative Research Alone Cannot Get Us There
Data documents disparities, but it cannot identify the structural barriers formerly incarcerated people experience daily. Lived expertise reveals what regression coefficients cannot.3
STEM Equity Requires Confronting the Carceral State
Broadening participation in STEM is hollow if it does not address why the communities most underrepresented in STEM are the same ones most overrepresented in prisons.4
Reentry Programming Must Be Designed With — Not For — Formerly Incarcerated People
With more than 640,000 people returning to communities each year, programs designed without the expertise of those they serve will remain partial and inadequate.5
Individual Shifts Aggregate Into Systemic Change
Individual transformations in practice, when connected and documented, constitute real movement at scale toward dismantling the carceral state.Recommendations for Educators, Researchers, and Institutions
1
Compensate Formerly Incarcerated Collaborators as Experts
Include formerly and currently incarcerated people as compensated co-authors, co-researchers, and co-designers in projects that concern them.2
Listen for the Coded Language of Carceral Experience
Attend to how people — especially youth — describe their relationships to incarceration. These expressions carry grief, trauma, and resilience that deserve careful, respectful inquiry.3
Interrogate the Institutional Agendas That Crowd Out Student Voices
Examine whose interests drive program design in HEP settings and beyond, and actively work to elevate the priorities of the people programs are meant to serve.4
Build Relational Infrastructure That Survives Institutional Boundaries
Challenge no-contact policies and other regulations that sever the educational relationships essential to reentry success.5
Practice Constant Reflexivity
Reflect on the ways carceral logics may be embedded in your own practice, research design, and institutional culture, often unknowingly.One voice — heard with genuine attention and acted upon with genuine commitment — can be the lever that moves educational practice toward justice. The question for every educator, researcher, and institution is not whether the expertise of formerly incarcerated people is valuable. It is whether we will build the structures to honor it.
This research challenges the criminal justice and education fields alike to move beyond studying incarceration as a problem to be managed, and toward dismantling the carceral logics that reach into every school, every classroom, and every research methodology.
Publication Details
This research was published in Urban Education in 2026 as part of the NSF-funded STEM Opportunities in Prison Settings (STEM-OPS) alliance. It examines how centering the voice of a formerly incarcerated co-author produced transformations in the education practices of five scholars working across STEM equity, urban education, and criminal justice research.
Full Citation
Weidler-Lewis, J., Carey, R. L., Best, B., Butler, B. R., Henderson, H., & Spann, J. (2026). Dismantling the carceral state in educational practices: Centering collaboration and voice of the formerly incarcerated to enact transformation. Urban Education, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420859261429484
