Epistemic Carcerality and Resistance in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper draws on frameworks from the philosophical study of epistemic injustice and oppression to explore the epistemic manifestations of carcerality. We argue that people with histories of involvement with the carceral state (system-involved people) experience a distinctive array of epistemic exclusions that amount to epistemic oppression, and that this oppression is one mechanism by which the carceral state sustains and perpetuates itself. We introduce the term epistemic carcerality to refer to this form of oppression that is endemic to the carceral state. Using methods of empirically-engaged philosophy, we explore the contours of epistemic carcerality in the context of higher education both within carceral institutions (e.g., prisons) and on college campuses. We aim to establish epistemic carcerality as a valuable concept that identifies significant and unique epistemic harms encountered and resisted by system-involved people, and to establish it as a pressing concern for higher education institutions.

Introduction

More than 70 million people in the United States have criminal records—roughly the same number who hold bachelor’s degrees (Friedman, 2015). College and university decisions about whether and how to serve incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as those who have experienced arrest or conviction, have wide-reaching impacts across our communities. Despite recent initiatives expanding access to higher education, including restoration of Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated people in 2020, system-involved people ¹ face continued, significant barriers to undergraduate and graduate higher education access and inclusion, including lack of available and affordable courses, disclosure requirements on applications, and stigma on campuses (Castro & Zamani-Gallaher, 2018; Custer, 2018b, 2021b; Mukamal et al., 2015; Page, 2004; Stewart & Uggen, 2019; Uggen & Stewart, 2015). These barriers not only limit system-involved people’s access to the variety of social, political, and economic goods that are associated with higher education participation, but also undermine their opportunities to learn and contribute to shared knowledge in educational communities and society writ large. These distinctly epistemic exclusions resulting from carceral involvement are the focus of this paper.

Critics of the carceral state point to the ways that racism, classism, and other oppressive systems lead to acute and disproportionate concentration of police contact and incarceration among low-income, racially-marginalized groups, particularly Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations, as well as those marginalized by ableism and cis-heteronormativity (Harriet Tubman Collective, 2017; A. Jones, 2021; Nellis, 2021). Excluding system-involved people from epistemic practices thus intersects with and compounds racial, economic, and other forms of injustice. Among advocates, activists, and scholars working to address the systemic harms of carcerality, access to and inclusion in higher education for system-involved people has emerged as a significant site of struggle. Within this arena, the knowledge, training, and scholarship offered by higher education participation is identified as an essential means by which system-involved people can make sense of how their lives have developed within systemic constraints, revise existing narratives that may not accurately reflect their experiences, and advocate for policy change. Their resistance calls for increased attention to the epistemic dimensions of carcerality.

In this conceptual paper, we build on frameworks from the philosophical study of epistemic injustice, oppression, and resistance to explore the epistemic manifestations of carcerality. Epistemic injustice harms individuals by excluding them from knowledge making practices, amounting to a distinct form of oppression when pervasive (Dotson, 2012, 2014; Fricker, 2007; Kidd et al., 2017). We argue that system-involved people experience epistemic exclusions stemming from their interaction with the carceral state that amount to epistemic oppression, and that this oppression is one mechanism by which the carceral state sustains and perpetuates itself. We introduce the term “epistemic carcerality” to refer to this form of oppression that is endemic to the carceral state.

Using methods of empirically-engaged philosophy (Wilson & Santoro, 2015), we explore the contours of epistemic carcerality in the context of higher education both within carceral institutions (e.g., prisons) and on college campuses. We ground our analysis in scholarship and writing from currently and formerly incarcerated people, particularly those who also experience other intersecting systems of oppression, and allied scholars and activists. We also draw on our personal experiences as family of people who have experienced incarceration and our professional experiences of teaching, research, and policy work in carceral and anti-carceral settings (Lindahl, 2016; Lindahl-Ruiz & Taylor, 2021; Mukamal et al., 2015).

We begin the paper by identifying theoretical insights from the literatures on carcerality, intersectionality, and epistemic injustice that ground our account of epistemic carcerality. Then, we introduce the key components of our proposed account of epistemic carcerality—a form of oppression endemic to the carceral state that harms individuals who experience carceral contact, damages epistemic communities more broadly, and perpetuates carcerality itself. After a brief description of our methodological approach, we then introduce evidence of epistemic carcerality within the specific context of higher education in the United States, through attention to individual and collective resistance efforts. In the final substantive section, we revisit the proposed account of epistemic carcerality, further specifying its contours in light of the evidence from higher education.

We hope that introducing this concept of epistemic carcerality will spur further exploration of its theoretical and empirical dimensions, including how it is produced, contributes to the perpetuation of carcerality, and impacts the lives of system-involved people. We aim to advance epistemic carcerality as a valuable concept for understanding significant epistemic harms that arise through carcerality, and to establish it as a pressing concern for higher education institutions. ² Because colleges and universities are in a fundamental sense epistemic institutions—that is, institutions that are centrally involved in the development of knowledge and understanding through their educational and research missions—higher education is centrally responsible for recognizing and responding to the epistemic dimensions of carcerality.

Carcerality, Intersectionality, and Epistemic Injustice

Our examination of the epistemic dimensions of carcerality in higher education contexts draws on theoretical foundations from the study of carcerality, intersectionality, and epistemic injustice. Here, we introduce these foundations, which guide our inquiry into epistemic exclusions experienced by system-involved people in higher education contexts.

Carcerality

The term carcerality refers to punitive systems of social control that manifest in the carceral state, a system of governance rooted in surveillance and punishment (Khan, 2022; Simon, 2007; W. M. Weaver & Lerman, 2010). At the core of this system are networks of penal institutions such as prisons, jails, and detention centers; agencies ranging from police to criminal courts to departments of correction to probation and parole; and the practices and discourses of these agencies (e.g., security, surveillance, punishment, rehabilitation). Individuals are directly impacted by carcerality through carceral contact, which include experiences of policing, arrest, conviction, incarceration, and community supervision, among other forms of interaction with carceral agencies and institutions (Turney & Wakefield, 2019). While carceral contact could involve exclusively a brief encounter with police, carceral involvement may persist over a person’s lifetime.

Carceral systems exercise social control through overt forms of power (e.g., policing, incarceration) as well as subtle and often invisible forms of surveillance that exert authority over the individual (Foucault, 1977). These subtle forms of social control permeate broader sectors of society (Dizon et al., 2022; Foucault, 1977; Khan, 2022), manifesting across institutional contexts—including health, labor, and education—to form extended carceral networks. Educational institutions are among those implicated in these extended carceral networks (Castro & Magana, 2020; Dizon et al., 2022; R. M. Johnson & Dizon, 2021; Strayhorn, 2021). It is widely recognized that the U.S. higher education system promotes diverse ends like democratic equality and social mobility while also reinforcing stratification (Labaree, 1997, 2019). Recognition is growing that higher education’s complex functions are also intertwined with carcerality. R. M. Johnson and Dizon (2021) introduced the concept of the “prison-college nexus,” highlighting the “symbiotic relationship” between colleges and universities and carceral systems (p. 519). Indeed, recent scholarship identifies a variety of concrete ways that colleges and universities may exhibit and reinforce carcerality—through the adoption of disciplinary and security measures that are characteristic of penal institutions, relationships with prisons and other carceral institutions, and particular campus policies and pedagogical practices (Collins & Buenavista, 2023).

Intersectionality

We approach carcerality and its manifestations in higher education through the lens of intersectionality (Combahee River Collective, 1983; K. W. Crenshaw, 1989; K. Crenshaw, 1991). Intersectionality theory originally revealed how interlocking power structures render Black women’s experience invisible (Combahee River Collective, 1983; Cooper, 2015; K. W. Crenshaw, 1989; K. Crenshaw, 1991). It has developed into a theory for analyzing how individuals’ multidimensional identities and experiences are shaped and constrained within broader systems to create both privilege and oppression (Cooper, 2015).

Intersectionality points to the importance of understanding carcerality as a system of power that is both produced by and reproduces other oppressive systems, including racism and classism. Criminologists have long suggested that criminalization and incarceration are means of managing and controlling the “dangerous classes,” including low-income people, minoritized racial groups, and immigrants (Shelden & Vasiliev, 2017, p. 15). Researchers have documented racial bias, in particular, at every stage of the carceral system—policing, pretrial experiences, sentencing, parole, and post-conviction collateral consequences (The Sentencing Project, 2018). These biases exceptionally impact Black Americans (Alexander, 2012; Nellis, 2021; Sakala, 2014) and are compounded by economic biases (Looney & Turner, 2018; Western & Pettit, 2010). Given these biases, the contemporary carceral state is linked to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation as a system of racial oppression (Alexander, 2012; Wacquant, 2001).

Carcerality also reproduces various forms of oppression through a complex array of social, political, and economic restrictions that result from carceral contact. As described by Uggen and Stewart (2015), these restrictions are experienced “in combination—as a pile of hopelessly tangled problems” (p. 1871). These entangled consequences include social stigma (Brower et al., 2021; Denver et al., 2017), political disenfranchisement (Manza & Uggen, 2006), and economic exclusion (Pager, 2003), to name a few. In higher education, excluding people with arrest and conviction histories perpetuates racial and economic disparities in access to social, political, and economic goods (Castro & Magana, 2020; Castro & Royer, 2021; Castro & Zamani-Gallaher, 2018; Larson, 2019; Nixon, 2021; Stewart & Uggen, 2019). These indirect consequences stemming from carceral contact are experienced disproportionately by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in the United States, those who live in low-income communities, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people. For example, experience of arrest as a youth has been associated with lower college enrollment for Black males (R. M. Johnson, 2015). Those who experience multiple axes of marginalization are most likely to be impacted, reflecting the complex and cyclical reproduction of injustice for individuals at the intersections of these oppressive systems.

Epistemic Injustice

In addition to intertwined social, political, and economic harms, carcerality arguably leads to under-recognized epistemic harms, which impact individuals’ opportunities to learn and contribute to knowledge making. Due to carcerality’s intersections with other oppressive systems, these epistemic harms are also disproportionately experienced by individuals facing multiple forms of marginalization. Our exploration of the epistemic dimensions of carcerality is grounded in three core insights from the philosophical literature on epistemic injustice.

First, epistemic injustice occurs when people are treated unfairly in their capacities as knowers, as participants in communicative practices that inform our collective knowledge and understanding (Fricker, 2007; Kidd et al., 2017). Epistemic injustice causes uniquely epistemic harms that undermine individual and collective flourishing and may also further ethical and political harms (Kidd et al., 2017; Medina, 2013). These harms limit individuals’ epistemic agency—their ability to access epistemic resources (including shared language, knowledge, concepts, and understandings) and to participate meaningfully in knowledge practices within a community of knowers (Pohlhaus, 2012). Restrictions on individuals’ agency as knowers have been termed epistemic exclusion (Dotson, 2012, 2014). When populations experiencing marginalization are excluded from shared knowledge practices unfairly, they experience epistemic injustice that undermines their flourishing (Sullivan, 2017). Epistemic communities, in turn, are deprived of their unique contributions to knowledge production, further undermining the flourishing of all (Sullivan, 2017). These harms of epistemic exclusion mark an important and distinct category of harm, alongside other types, such as social, economic, and political harms (Dotson, 2014).

Second, pervasive or persistent epistemic exclusion constitutes epistemic oppression (Dotson, 2012, 2014), which is a central feature of intersecting systems of power (Collins, 2017). This persistent exclusion represents an infringement on the epistemic agency of people experiencing oppression (Dotson, 2012, 2014). Interpreting Dotson, Collins (2017) writes that, “The construct of epistemic oppression identifies how epistemology constitutes a structuring dimension of social injustice” (p. 118). Understanding epistemic injustice and its more pervasive or persistent form—epistemic oppression—can thus deepen our understanding of how social injustice and intersecting systems of power function. In the study of higher education, scholars have identified forms of epistemic injustice and oppression that structure whose knowledge matters in academia, disproportionately impacting faculty and students of color (Berenstain, 2016; Brust & Taylor, 2023; Collins, 2017; Davis, 2016; Settles et al., 2020). These more recent explorations through the lens of epistemic injustice and oppression, including our own, engage with longer standing themes in higher education research on marginalization in academic knowledge practices, such as the work of Bernal and Villalpando (2002), who proposed that higher education had enacted “an apartheid of knowledge” (p. 169) through the marginalization of the epistemic contributions of faculty of color.

Finally, epistemic injustice and oppression are met with epistemic resistance (Medina, 2013). Medina identifies the obligation of members of democratic societies to detect and correct “systematic disparities in the epistemic agency that different members of society can enjoy” (p. 4). Focusing on resistance to epistemic injustice and oppression both acknowledges the agency of individuals and collectives living in oppressive contexts and can help shed light on forms of epistemic injustice that might otherwise go unseen (Medina, 2013, 2021). In order to explore resistance to epistemic injustices emerging through carcerality, attention to higher education institutions is vital. Colleges and universities are implicated in carceral networks and are centrally involved in epistemic practices in society, conveying power to shape shared understandings of the world through research and teaching. It is unsurprising, then, that access to higher education for system-involved people has emerged as a significant site of resistance among advocates, activists, and scholars working to dismantle carcerality.

Bringing these theoretical foundations together, we understand carcerality as an enduring and pervasive system of social control, which is produced by and reinforces other systems of power. Carcerality produces a variety of intertwined harms, which include epistemic harms that warrant more attention. Exclusion from knowledge making practices in society limits individuals’ epistemic agency, harming them as knowers and participants in shared knowledge practices, and undermining individual and collective flourishing. When epistemic exclusion is discriminatory and persistent, it amounts to a form of oppression, which can be evidenced through attention to resistance. In the next sections, we build off these insights to propose a definition of epistemic carcerality and to explore its manifestations through evidence of epistemic exclusion and resistance by system-involved people and their allies in higher education contexts.

Epistemic Carcerality

We propose epistemic carcerality as a form of oppression endemic to the carceral state that harms individuals who experience carceral contact as knowers, particularly people with experiences of incarceration, and additionally damages knowledge-making communities and relationships more broadly. Our conceptual account of epistemic carcerality includes three key features: (1) Epistemic carcerality wrongly restricts the agency of system-involved people by excluding them from both using shared epistemic resources and impacting the revision of our shared epistemic resources; (2) these restrictions on the epistemic agency of system-involved people are pervasive across institutional contexts and persistent over individuals’ lifetimes; and (3) these restrictions harm system-involved people and all members of society both as individuals and as collectives. That is, epistemic carcerality is a form of epistemic oppression that restricts system-involved people from using and contributing to shared epistemic resources in pervasive and persistent ways, thus harming both system-involved people and all members of society individually and collectively.

Our account of epistemic carcerality is theoretically motivated by the proposition that one mechanism through which carcerality sustains itself is the pervasive and persistent epistemic exclusion of system-involved people. If this proposition is correct, then illuminating and understanding the epistemic manifestations of carcerality is a vital endeavor warranting further inquiry both within and beyond higher education. By offering the term epistemic carcerality, we aim to delineate and draw attention to the unique ways that epistemic oppression arises in the particular context of the carceral state. In the remainder of this paper, we first introduce evidence of epistemic exclusions facing system-involved people within higher education in particular. Then, we revisit our proposed definition of epistemic carcerality, drawing connections between the evidence presented and the elements of our account.

Methodological Approach

Our exploration of the epistemic manifestations of carcerality is a project in empirically engaged philosophy (Levinson & Newman, 2015; Wilson & Santoro, 2015). This approach involves using philosophical tools to tackle real-world social issues backed by empirical evidence. Empirically engaged philosophy encompasses various approaches, including applying philosophical ideas to understand real-world cases, conducting new empirical studies based on philosophical conceptions, and drawing on empirical evidence to analyze the normative dimensions of social phenomena which may involve introducing or revising philosophical conceptions (Wilson & Santoro, 2015, p. 116). In this paper, we engage in the third form, bringing philosophical insights on epistemic injustice to bear on the social phenomenon of carcerality, introducing a new conception of epistemic carcerality, and drawing on empirical evidence to analyze the dimensions of that conception.

In developing our account of epistemic carcerality, we are not conducting new empirical research, but rather using a philosophical framework grounded in epistemic injustice to analyze existing sources, including traditional social science research and media, in order to identify and explore the epistemic manifestations of carcerality. We emphasized the selection of sources from authors with direct experience with the carceral system out of recognition of the very epistemic exclusions that the paper is concerned with illuminating. While a few of the sources we reviewed directly apply epistemic injustice, much of the extant literature does not explicitly use this lens. Accordingly, we analyzed a wide array of sources looking for both implicit and explicit evidence of epistemic exclusion within the literature. From this analysis, we identified patterns in the manifestations of epistemic exclusion through the carceral state, which pointed to and helped specify its pervasive and persistent nature. Ultimately, we aim to offer an account of epistemic carcerality grounded in both evidence and philosophical insight that can deepen understanding of the connections between carcerality and our shared knowledge-making practices.

Evidence of Epistemic Carcerality: Resistance to Epistemic Exclusion in Higher Education

Epistemic carcerality functions through the pervasive and persistent exclusion of system-involved people from knowledge practices. In this section, we introduce evidence of the reach of epistemic carcerality within higher education rooted in the individual and collective resistance efforts of system-involved people and their allies. System-involved people have actively resisted various forms of oppression, from direct resistance to oppressive penal systems (Goodman et al., 2017) to participation in broader freedom struggles such as the Black Power Movement (Berger, 2014). They have organized as a political bloc, advancing movements for reform and abolition and advocating for increased access to higher education (Alexander, 2012; Goodman et al., 2017). Here, we will focus on the epistemic dimensions of their resistance within the context of higher education. Identifying these forms of resistance reveals a spectrum of exclusions that restrict epistemic agency and thus serves to illuminate forms of oppression that would otherwise go unseen (Collins, 2009; Medina, 2013). These pervasive and persistent exclusions serve as evidence for the existence of epistemic carcerality.

We explore five areas of resistance to epistemic carcerality that emerge as primary in the existing literature at the nexus of the carceral and higher education systems: (1) advocating for access to prison college programs, (2) challenging barriers that persist within existing prison college programs, (3) advocating for access to on-campus programs, (4) working to foster greater equity and inclusion for system-involved students on college campuses, and (5) revising existing epistemic resources through contributions to scholarship. ³ We highlight a spectrum of current and historical practices that have restricted the epistemic agency of system-involved people, from outright exclusion from the epistemic institutions that constitute higher education to more subtle forms of exclusion that limit full and authentic participation in these institutions.

Advocating for Access to Prison College Programs

Lack of access to higher education is one form of direct exclusion from epistemic practices and institutions often experienced by incarcerated people. Within the carceral system, advocates have pushed for expanding access to college programs. Although never universally available, higher education in prisons was most prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes heralded as a “golden age” for rehabilitative programs (Huerta et al., 2023; Mukamal et al., 2015; Norweg, 2021). During the “tough on crime” period of the 1980s and 1990s, however, college opportunities for people inside jails and prisons diminished significantly (Norweg, 2021; Welsch, 2002). Following the enactment of The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which prohibited incarcerated people from accessing Pell Grants, college access disappeared at most of the over 700 state and federal prisons that had some college programming in 1990 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1992; J. M. Taylor, 2005; Welsch, 2002). Given lack of funding, the forms of higher education that remained or emerged in carceral settings in the intervening years were extremely limited, primarily composed of distance learning through paper correspondence, non-credit-bearing in-person classes composed of a mix of on-campus and incarcerated students, or small in-person programs funded through private sources (Huerta et al., 2023; Mukamal et al., 2015). These closures occurred in the same period that prison populations expanded exponentially. The concurrent rise of highly restrictive housing units employed for long-term solitary confinement, lockdowns, and high security populations created even more restricted access to information and educational programs (Kilgore, 2013; Lindahl, 2016; Reiter, 2016). These restrictions on access constitute an overt form of epistemic exclusion, preventing incarcerated people from participation in knowledge making practices that occur within colleges and universities.

In this environment of epistemic exclusion, incarcerated individuals have engaged in private acts of resistance by sharing the resources they can access in order to help each other learn (Lindahl, 2016). In one example, Reginald Dwayne Betts, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar, described his informal education during his 8-year incarceration as beginning when another person incarcerated in solitary confinement slid The Black Poets under his cell door (Chiasson, 2019; Zito, 2022). This moment represents the individual ways in which incarcerated people have exercised their agency to resist epistemic carcerality.

In the last several decades, collective resistance to exclusion from higher education has grown and gained traction. In the wake of the Pell Grant ban, professors and students from universities in pockets across the country organized to teach college courses in local prisons relying on private donations and volunteer faculty (Huerta et al., 2023; S. Taylor et al., 2021). In some cases, these efforts resulted in the establishment of prison college programs and consortia—for example, Mount Tamalpais College (formerly known as the Prison University Project and Patten University) in California, the Education Justice Project in Illinois, and the Bard Prison Initiative (which began in New York and now includes 15 college and university partners across 10 states). Scholars have identified a variety of benefits of participation in higher education in prison ranging from epistemic goods like knowledge to social capital to valuable “soft skills” (Curtis et al., 2021), as well as reductions in recidivism (Denney & Tynes, 2021)—evidence used by advocates to communicate the value of prison higher education to policymakers and the public. Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people have also shared their first-hand experiences of the benefits of college in prison programs (e.g., Chartrand et al., 2016). In the last decade, formerly incarcerated activists and allies have pushed for increased access and quality of college programming inside prisons (e.g., Erzen et al., 2019), helped build and improve college pathways from prisons to campuses in the community (e.g., Halkovic, 2014; The Michelson 20MM Foundation, 2022), and successfully advocated for the reinstatement of Pell Grant access for incarcerated students enrolled in college (Kreighbaum, 2019; Martinez-Hill, 2021). These changes mark a significant development in increasing incarcerated people’s access to use and revise epistemic resources—including shared knowledge, concepts, and understandings—that come with college participation.

Yet, despite these examples of individual and collective resistance to exclusion, the vast majority of incarcerated people remain without access to higher education, especially Black people and other people of color (Huerta et al., 2023; S. Taylor et al., 2021). Although reliable data on the current status of access to prison college programs is limited, a variety of barriers to access identified in earlier reports and research persist (Castro et al., 2024; Huerta et al., 2023; Mukamal et al., 2015; S. Taylor et al., 2021). Prison college programs often restrict access based on demographic criteria such as age, time to release, sentence type, and other factors like disciplinary history, leaving many effectively without access even when incarcerated at prisons with college programs. Those confined on death row or other highly restrictive units are often unable to access educational programming. Additionally, jails are much less likely than prisons to provide access to college programs. Finally, access to high-quality, in-person instruction remains rare (Castro et al., 2024; Oakford et al., 2019). These persistent barriers continue to lead to the epistemic exclusion of many incarcerated people.

Challenging Barriers That Persist Within Existing Prison College Programs

Resistance efforts have targeted not only the outright exclusion of incarcerated people from higher education, but also other forms of restrictions on epistemic agency that arise within existing college programs. These examples of resistance have focused on limited access to college preparatory education, institutionally imposed constraints on the quality and content of college programming that can be offered in prisons, and epistemic relationships between students and program faculty, each of which we elaborate on here.

For incarcerated people without a high school diploma, adult basic education, literacy, and high school equivalency programs provided within prisons are often the exclusive pathway towards college readiness, and the quality and availability of these programs is highly variable (Couloute, 2018; Lin, 2000). Programs often maintain long waitlists. Students and incarcerated tutors within these classrooms have identified problems with quality instruction and materials and resulting struggles with student engagement and learning (e.g., Boudin, 1993; Kilgore, 2013). These limitations are one example of the reach of epistemic carcerality that excludes incarcerated people. While some teachers and incarcerated tutors have found opportunities to develop curriculum that connects with student experiences and provokes critical inquiry, these efforts are often short-lived and occur in resistance to dominant modes of instruction (Boudin, 1993; Kilgore, 2013).

Many individuals who have gained access to college in prison have been restricted to distance learning opportunities, which often consist of paper-based correspondence courses (Mukamal et al., 2015). Students in these programs have also encountered ongoing barriers to participation due to the lack of personal attention and resources for assisting students to learn skills and engage with material (Bagaric et al., 2017; Huerta et al., 2023; Palomino & Ragsdale, 2015). Yet, qualitative research on the experience of incarcerated students also demonstrates the way individuals have navigated these challenges through processes of mutual aid—tutoring one another, sharing textbooks and materials, and challenging each other to gain mastery of the material through individual perseverance (Lindahl, 2016; Palomino & Ragsdale, 2015)—processes that we interpret as forms of epistemic resistance.

For those who have the necessary credentials and are able to access in-person college programs, consistent institutional barriers may continue to restrict their epistemic agency. These barriers include institutional lockdowns that cancel programs for days to months at a time, institutional transfers of participating college students, and technical issues with accessing classroom spaces (Huerta et al., 2023; Mukamal et al., 2015; A. Weaver et al., 2020). Moreover, censorship and lack of access to research materials and internet-based information have created significant challenges for teachers and students in prison environments (Bagaric et al., 2017), making original research nearly impossible and ethically complex. Lack of access to these epistemic resources limits the agency of the incarcerated people who are excluded from learning from these materials and contributing to research. In our professional experience in these contexts, we have noted that teachers and staff of in-prison college programs have often responded by engaging in small acts of resistance through daily workarounds—for example, delivering class materials by hand to students in their cells during lockdowns and pushing back against censorship of relevant academic materials. Some incarcerated students and teachers have even successfully advocated for access to prison archives to engage in original historical research (M. Jones, 2016).

Finally, incarcerated college students have also resisted restrictions on their epistemic agency that arise in their relationships to faculty in these programs (Ginsburg, 2019). The gap in privilege between faculty and students, exacerbated by the conditions of intellectual isolation and resource deprivation incarcerated students face, can lead to problematic interpersonal power dynamics in teacher/student relations (Castro et al., 2016; Scott, 2013). These power inequities have led to calls for coalitional resistance, such as teachers adopting an orientation that forgoes traditional teacher/student hierarchies and instead emphasizes “mutual exchange and problem solving in such a way that new coalitions can form” (Scott, 2013, p. 27). The potential for troubled power dynamics between teachers and students points to the persistence of subtle forms of epistemic exclusion in the prison context, even for those who do access college programming.

Advocating for Access to On-Campus Programs

Outside of the prison context, formerly incarcerated people and allies also have worked to expand access to on-campus college programs. Much of this resistance has focused on exclusion caused by formal mechanisms such as mandatory criminal background checkboxes on college applications (“the Box”), while also pointing to the limitations of a narrow focus on these formal mechanisms and the need to look beyond them in order to foster more robust inclusion (Phoenix & Steib, 2021; Ward, 2021).

While some individuals with conviction histories apply to and enroll in undergraduate and graduate programs, many have been excluded due to the Box and prohibitions on receiving federal or state financial aid. ⁴ A majority of institutions require undergraduate applicants to respond to questions about criminal background (Center for Community Alternatives, 2020; Scott-Clayton, 2017), with sexual offenses being perceived as particularly negative by college and university administrators (Rubenstein et al., 2019). Research has shown that in addition to those rejected due to histories of arrest or conviction, many prospective students have been excluded indirectly through application attrition (being deterred by the Box from applying or completing the application process), exclusions that disproportionately impacted Black applicants (Center for Community Alternatives, 2015; Custer, 2018a; Wilcox & Taylor, 2023). The Box, thus, has functioned as a formal mechanism of exclusion through which people with arrest and/or conviction histories are prevented both directly and indirectly from full participation in our epistemic institutions, restricting their agency as knowers.

Those defending forced disclosure practices within admissions have tended to focus on concerns about safety (American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers [AACRAO], 2019). These appeals to safety have been challenged as both not grounded in evidence (Custer, 2016) and rooted in racial biases that objectify students with conviction histories as risks to be managed (Corbett & Wall, 2022; Dizon et al., 2022; Huerta & Britton, 2022). Moreover, formerly incarcerated scholars have identified the epistemic and emotional labor demanded by forced disclosure processes in college admissions and highlighted the forms of resistance they have undertaken (M. Jones, 2019; McTier, 2022; Murillo, 2021). For example, M. Jones (2019) describes how formerly incarcerated applicants may use both dissembling and disclosure to resist the “epistemic violence” caused by forced disclosure policies (p. 488). She envisions an alternative system within which formerly incarcerated people are valued for the unique epistemic position they occupy and the intellectual contributions that they can make to collective efforts to make a better world. Her work exemplifies growing attention to the epistemic harms that emerge through forced disclosure processes that do not amount to outright exclusion but nonetheless threaten the epistemic agency of formerly incarcerated people seeking access to higher education.

The Ban the Box/Beyond the Box campaign, often led by formerly incarcerated people, is an example of a collective effort seeking to reform these exclusionary policies and practices (Phoenix & Steib, 2021). In response to this movement, the Common Application stopped asking students for criminal background information (Jaschik, 2018) and, as of 2023, seven states had enacted laws to ban the box on college applications (U.S. Department of Education, 2023). Yet, most states have not taken this kind of legislative action, and institutions using the Common Application can still opt in to include these questions. Critical advocates have also pointed to the way Ban the Box efforts have at times been deracialized, arguing that color-evasive responses that fail to center the racial disparities that exist within the carceral system are insufficient to yield equitable outcomes in higher education (R. M. Johnson et al., 2021). Resistance efforts continue to push for expanding epistemic inclusion in on-campus college programs in ways that go beyond the removal of the Box, which we turn to in the next section.

Working to Foster Equity and Inclusion for System-Involved Students on College Campuses

In addition to efforts to resist epistemic exclusion in prison contexts and increase access to campus-based higher education for currently and formerly incarcerated people, advocates have also worked to foster greater equity and inclusion for those students who do gain access to campuses. Scholars have identified barriers that restrict formerly incarcerated students from full participation in higher education after they gain admission (Brower et al., 2021; Huerta & Britton, 2022; Institute for Justice and Opportunity, 2020; McTier, 2022; Murillo, 2021; Rubenstein et al., 2019). For example, in one focus group study from California, formerly incarcerated students across California’s public higher education system were asked about the barriers and opportunities they encountered on campus (Murillo, 2021). The students shared that support services within higher education institutions attuned to their specific needs were inconsistently available and often depended on the students themselves for creation and sustenance. Another study found that formerly incarcerated graduate students encountered barriers in relation to navigating disclosure of their records and demands to prove their worthiness to others (McTier, 2022). These barriers restrict formerly incarcerated students’ opportunities to access an equitable and inclusive education, limiting their epistemic agency.

Recent scholarship also points to ways that formerly incarcerated students have resisted these barriers individually and collectively. At an individual level, scholars have highlighted the assets that formerly incarcerated students bring to campus and use to navigate these barriers (Corbett & Wall, 2022; Giraldo et al., 2017; Halkovic & Greene, 2015; Hernandez et al., 2022; M. Jones, 2019; McTier, 2022; Murillo, 2021). For example, Hernandez et al. (2022) found that formerly incarcerated Latinx students used their “hustle”—resilient life skills acquired pre-college—to “seek academic and financial resources, create academic networks, and make personal connections with institutional agents to overcome various personal and institutional barriers” (p. 1394). In another study using participatory action research, system-involved students demonstrated a variety of “gifts” ranging from “deconstructing stigma” and “teaching the university” to having “intimate knowledge of how systems work on the ground” and “bridging relationships between the academy and underserved communities” (Halkovic & Greene, 2015, p. 759). System-involved students thus exhibit strengths in resisting exclusionary forces such as stigma on campus, bringing intellectual (among other) benefits to their college communities.

In addition to these individual-level strengths, formerly incarcerated students have also worked collectively to organize formal and informal means of supporting one another in navigating barriers in higher education (Murillo, 2021). California is one state where collective organizing by formerly incarcerated people has yielded results. In 2014, the California State University (CSU) chancellor pledged support to expand Project Rebound, a student retention center for convicted people founded at San Francisco State University in 1967, to 14 CSU campuses. The Underground Scholars Initiative, a similar organization founded by formerly incarcerated students on the University of California (UC), Berkeley campus in 2013, has since expanded to all nine UC campuses. And in 2021, the state passed a law allocating $10 million in support each year to the Rising Scholars Network, which provides support services to formerly incarcerated students at 50 community colleges across the state (Forschen, 2021). Through these initiatives spanning the higher education system, formerly incarcerated students have engaged in collective resistance to epistemic (and other forms of) exclusion in higher education through active recruitment, creation of safe spaces, and peer-mentoring, among other strategies.

Revising Existing Epistemic Resources Through Contributions to Scholarship

Beyond gaining access to epistemic resources through college participation, another component of participation in shared knowledge making practices is the opportunity to contribute to the revision of existing epistemic resources, which occurs in part through formal research that aims to add to our shared knowledge and understanding within higher education. There is a long history of incarcerated people being exploited as research subjects (Lerner, 2007). At the same time, due to restrictions on access throughout the educational pipeline for currently and formerly incarcerated people, their rates of participation in the types of graduate programs that prepare students to conduct their own formal research remain extremely low (Oakford et al., 2019). For example, incarcerated people are less likely to have completed an Associate’s, Bachelor’s, or graduate degree than nonincarcerated people, and many more incarcerated people wish to enroll in these types of postsecondary programs than have enrolled (Oakford et al., 2019). The exclusions behind these trends become apparent when observing the resistance of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who have pushed back against access constraints.

Most in-prison college programs offer courses that do not lead to a degree or at best Associate’s degrees, with less than 14% of programs in a nationwide directory offering Bachelor’s degrees (Gaskill et al., 2023). Advanced degrees that require and facilitate original knowledge production are exceedingly rare and are hampered by limited access to library materials, internet resources, and the capacity to gather original data—as described previously. Under these conditions, a variety of forms of resistance have arisen. Academic journals featuring the writing of incarcerated people have been developed, such as the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons established in 1988. In some prison-based programs, students and faculty have worked together creatively to facilitate students’ engagement in research (e.g., Ginsburg, 2019; M. Jones, 2016). Other scholars have conducted participatory action research with incarcerated collaborators (e.g., Fine et al., 2001). At San Quentin State Prison in California, incarcerated students at Mount Tamalpais College worked collaboratively to host the first academic conference held inside a prison in 2018, bringing scholars and incarcerated students together in shared inquiry (Rothenberg, 2018). Yet, opportunities to engage in and inform research while incarcerated remain scarce. Formerly incarcerated individuals who seek access to graduate-level programs encounter the same barriers to admission based on their conviction histories and the requirements of forced disclosure described previously. Their exclusion from graduate programs limits their agency to contribute directly to revision of epistemic resources through engagement in research, and their absence from classrooms and research teams further restricts the access of faculty and students without experiences of incarceration from the opportunity to learn from those with first-hand experiences.

Together these barriers limit the opportunities for people with experiences of incarceration to contribute as researchers to our shared understandings of carceral systems, as well as all other areas of scholarship. Within fields like criminology and penology, the value of inclusion of people with direct experience of incarceration is particularly apparent. Over 20 years ago, Richards and Ross (2001) described the importance of including system-involved people in the discipline of criminology. They introduced the term “convict criminology” to refer to a social movement and emerging field of study led by formerly incarcerated people who have become academic faculty (Richards & Ross, 2001, pp. 180–181). Further resistance has challenged the relative privilege of formerly incarcerated White men to access academic careers and revise epistemic resources, pointing to the importance of intersectional understandings of epistemic exclusion (Cox & Malkin, 2023). As those who identify as convict criminologists and other formerly incarcerated scholars pursue academic degrees and careers, their scholarship pushes back against prevailing narratives derived from the carceral system and contributes to knowledge formation built by people with direct experience with the system.

Across the contexts we have reviewed here, we find varieties of evidence of epistemic resistance emerging in the interactions between the carceral and higher education systems. System-involved people, and their allies, have asserted their agency as knowers and pushed back against barriers to exclude them from or marginalize their contributions within knowledge making practices. We interpret this resistance as evidence of pervasive and persistent exclusion that we identify in our account of epistemic carcerality. In the next section, we return to the account of epistemic carcerality and further explicate its contours in light of this evidence.

Conceptual and Theoretical Elements of Epistemic Carcerality

We understand the varieties of epistemic exclusion or other epistemic harms that arise for system-involved people in higher education (and beyond), including those identified through our review of five areas of epistemic resistance in the previous section, as manifestations of epistemic carcerality. Each individual example of epistemic exclusion or harm is concerning. Moreover, taken together, the range of examples highlighted above provide evidence of the pervasive and persistent nature of the harms of epistemic carcerality and illustrate some of the ways that epistemic carcerality functions within and beyond carceral institutions. Recall that our definition of epistemic carcerality has three key elements: (1) It is a form of oppression that restricts system-involved people from using and contributing to shared epistemic resources; (2) it operates in pervasive and persistent ways; and (3) it harms both system-involved people and all members of society individually and collectively. In this section, we explore each of these elements and then close with a discussion of the theoretical point that one mechanism through which carcerality sustains itself is this pervasive and persistent epistemic exclusion of system-involved people.

To begin, epistemic carcerality directly impacts system-involved people by limiting their epistemic agency, which refers to the ability to participate meaningfully in knowledge practices within a community of knowers. This first feature of our account of epistemic carcerality incorporates insights from Dotson’s work on epistemic oppression, in which she clarifies that epistemic oppression involves exclusion that restricts particular knowers’ abilities both to use shared epistemic resources and to revise those shared resources (Dotson, 2012, 2014). Epistemic carcerality, then, as a form of oppression, restricts the agency of system-involved people by excluding them from using and contributing to shared epistemic resources. ⁵

Considering the use of resources, specifically, epistemic carcerality restricts system-involved people from participating fully in epistemic communities in two primary ways: first, through direct exclusion from accessing those communities and the shared resources available to their members, and second, through the creation of barriers that do not amount to outright exclusion but nevertheless limit access to epistemic resources and undermine full and authentic participation in epistemic communities. As evidenced in the previous section, during incarceration these kinds of restrictions include being unable to access college programming or facing barriers to full participation such as inadequate library resources and academic support. In the community, ongoing restrictions identified in our review of resistance include exclusions from financial aid and college admissions, as well as stigma and discriminatory practices system-involved individuals may encounter in classrooms and in seeking access to campus resources.

Epistemic carcerality further excludes system-involved people from contributing to the revision of shared epistemic resources. Examples of barriers to revision of shared resources may also stem from exclusion from college programs during and after incarceration, particularly at the graduate level where contribution to research and knowledge creation become central. These restrictions limit system-involved people from accessing and contributing to the revision of a wide array of epistemic resources shared in particular epistemic communities (e.g., classrooms, educational institutions) and society writ large.

Finally, as features of a form of oppression, the restrictions on individuals’ epistemic agency that arise through these exclusions are unjust. While much more could be said on this point, we briefly offer two considerations. First, recall that carcerality emerges through intersecting systems of oppression and that carceral systems exhibit racial and economic bias, among other forms of bias, that lead to disproportionate harms against Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color in the United States, particularly those who live in low-income communities, have disabilities, and/or identify as LGBTQ+. The epistemic exclusions that emerge through carcerality, thus, are grounded in unjust, oppressive systems. Second, exclusion from participation in epistemic communities is not a formal component of sentencing in the United States. It is an indirect consequence of conviction (and/or incarceration) that falls disproportionately on members of communities who already experience the highest degrees of criminalization within the carceral state. Because of its discriminatory nature, we propose that the exclusions of epistemic carcerality do not only limit individual agency, but they do so wrongly, and thus are unjust.

With the second feature of epistemic carcerality, we propose that the restrictions on epistemic agency that emerge through carcerality occur both across social and institutional contexts (they are pervasive) and over individuals’ lifetimes (they are persistent). Dotson (2012, 2014) speaks to the pervasiveness and persistence of epistemic oppression. Here, we offer a distinction between and further elaboration of these two characterizations of epistemic oppression as it manifests through carcerality. Considering the pervasiveness of epistemic carcerality, the previous section identified a variety of kinds of restrictions on epistemic agency that confront system-involved people in higher education contexts. We take those exclusions as evidence of epistemic carcerality as we are defining it here manifesting in our college and university systems. Beyond higher education, scholars have begun to identify some of the ways that epistemic injustices emerge in carceral contexts both pre- and post-conviction. Examples explored have included injustices in the context of false confessions secured by law enforcement (Lackey, 2020; Medina, 2021), healthcare and life-and-death situations in jails (Medina, 2021), responses to grievances filed by incarcerated people (Medina, 2021), and silencing of activist speech of incarcerated people during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hanan, 2021). People with convictions may also find their epistemic agency constrained as they seek to access employment, housing, and public services, contribute to public discourse, and participate in other forms of civic engagement including voting (Kirk & Wakefield, 2018). We interpret these as examples of epistemic carcerality that are pervasive, that is, they arise across a range of institutions. The pervasiveness of the harmful effects of epistemic carcerality is rooted in the way that carcerality defines people in part by their relationship to the carceral state, restricting their agency writ large and as epistemic agents in particular by limiting their ability to participate in a broad spectrum of knowledge practices.

In addition to this pervasiveness, epistemic carcerality is also persistent. Dotson (2014) defines epistemic oppression as “persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production” (p. 115). This persistent epistemic exclusion represents an infringement on the epistemic agency of members of the oppressed group (Dotson, 2012, 2014). The two levels of restrictions on epistemic agency—of use and revision of resources—persist over time, as evidenced by the numerous forms of exclusion and restrictions that system-involved people encounter over their life span as they seek to access higher education and contribute to knowledge production. For those who are incarcerated for life, as one example, this persistence is readily apparent, and even those who complete their sentences continue to face formal and informal limitations attached to their convicted status when interfacing with a wide spectrum of societal institutions, including higher education or others involved in knowledge production.

The final feature of our account of epistemic carcerality identifies that the restrictions on agency that emerge through epistemic carcerality cause both individual and collective harms to system-involved people and broader society. First, consider the harms incurred by system-involved people themselves. These restrictions are experienced by individuals who find that their system-involved status is one dimension of their social location that intersects with others to restrict their opportunities for engagement in epistemic practices and undermine their credibility. This happens formally through policies that exclude incarcerated people and people with histories of arrest/conviction from higher education, and informally through barriers to full inclusion examined in the previous section. System-involved individuals who also occupy other marginalized social positions are likely to face greater restrictions. Insofar as college attendance is a form of participation in knowledge practices, these restrictions harm the epistemic agency of system-involved individuals. Beyond these epistemic harms, these restrictions also limit an individual’s ability to experience other advantages that derive from participation in higher education, such as achieving economic self-sufficiency and increasing positive self-regard (Mukamal et al., 2015).

In addition to the impact on each system-involved individual, epistemic carcerality also constrains the epistemic agency of system-involved people as a collective. Collective epistemic agency here refers to the ability to participate in meaning-making practices as a group. While incarcerated, system-involved people face restrictions on their abilities to organize as collectives in order to access and share information, contribute to epistemic life, and receive uptake in broader society. For example, administrative concerns regarding potential security risks stemming from access to information can lead to complete exclusion from internet access, bans of political texts such as those central to the Black and Brown Power movements, and restrictions on group formation and composition among incarcerated people (e.g., Berger, 2014; Mukamal et al., 2015; Weide, 2020). Within higher education, examples of epistemic carcerality’s restrictions on collective agency include the dearth of representation of people with experiences of incarceration among graduate students and faculty conducting research, as well as the hesitation these students may have to reveal and utilize their conviction history given the discrimination they may face as a result. The limits of epistemic participation that each system-involved person experiences individually combine to result in a broader omission of the intellectual contributions of those with first-hand experiences of incarceration from our shared understandings of the carceral state, in addition to the omission of their perspectives from other areas of inquiry. These aggregated omissions result in a set of shared epistemic resources in society that do not reflect the contributions and unique perspectives of system-involved people, which in turn harm system-involved people when other members of society, including staff of carceral institutions and agencies, institutional administrators, and policymakers, lack the resources needed to understand their experiences within the carceral state.

In addition to the individual and collective harms incurred by system-involved people, epistemic carcerality also extends to all members of society. These extensions are multifaceted. First, the same carceral logics that undergird the exclusion of system-involved people from shared epistemic practices also impact people who have not been involved in the carceral system, particularly those who hold marginalized identities. Using Dotson’s (2011) theory of epistemic violence, Ward (2021) examines the ways that carceral logics, including surveillance, control, and punishment, arise in higher education institutions in ways that result in epistemic oppression of Black women. Her analysis shows that Black women have turned to legal action against higher education institutions to resist attempts to undermine their testimony about the harms of carceral logics in these institutions (Ward, 2021). In addition to the moral and social harms that are inflicted through the extension of carceral logics into higher education spaces, these logics also lead to epistemic harms to college community members whose testimony about their experiences with carceral practices in these spaces are silenced or ignored.

The harms of epistemic carcerality also extend to all community members through the diminishment of shared epistemic resources. Both the exclusion of system-involved people from participation in knowledge making practices and the undermining of the intellectual contributions of other community members targeted by carceral logics leave us with impoverished epistemic resources that do not adequately reflect the experiences of these individuals and groups. This impact is perhaps most obvious when considering our collective understanding of carcerality. System-involved people offer perspectives derived precisely from their experience with the carceral state that expand our understanding of the structural conditions and personal experiences that lead to crime and violence, enhancing our ability to work towards public safety. When those most directly impacted by carcerality are excluded from contributing to our shared understanding of the root causes of crime and the functioning of carceral institutions, our collective knowledge and understanding are undermined. The exclusion of these individuals from epistemic practices also arguably diminishes epistemic resources more broadly as our epistemic communities are deprived of their perspectives and potential contributions to all areas of inquiry.

This final point—that epistemic carcerality harms all members of society especially by undermining our collective understanding of the carceral state—leads us to a theoretical proposition that motivates our account: one mechanism through which carcerality sustains itself is the pervasive and persistent epistemic exclusion of system-involved people, particularly those who have experienced the persistent and encompassing contact of incarceration. In a review of literature on epistemic injustice, Pohlhaus Jr. refers to Charles Mills’ work on the racial contract, noting that: “just as the racial contract creates two classes, one of persons and the other of sub-persons (Mills, 1997, pp. 16–17), so too does it create two epistemic classes, one of (purportedly ideal) knowers, the other of sub-knowers” (Pohlhaus, 2017, p. 17). It is our view that carcerality reinforces this divide between “knowers” and “sub-knowers” in myriad ways, perhaps most centrally by excluding those who are most impacted by the carceral state from knowledge making practices. These epistemic exclusions—which disproportionately impact people experiencing multiple axes of oppression—in turn reinforce carcerality by collectively excluding and delegitimizing their contributions to political and academic discourse. These exclusions narrow and weaken our collective understandings of how carcerality operates and ripples through the lives of individuals, impacting families, communities, and institutions; in so doing, they hamper our ability to think, imagine, and build beyond it.

Conclusion

System-involved people are knowers and do not cease to be knowers upon arrest, conviction, incarceration, or other carceral contact; this proposition holds regardless of the type of crime(s) for which they were convicted or the severity of the harm(s) those who are not wrongfully convicted may have committed. These individuals’ access to knowledge and ability to contribute to knowledge production arguably add value both to the whole spectrum of academic disciplines and public conversations in which they might participate, and, significantly, to our collective understanding of the carceral state. Thus, we propose that epistemic carcerality is a form of oppression whose harms directly impact system-involved people, perpetuate oppressive systems, and also extend to all members of society by limiting epistemic agency and shared epistemic resources. Our aims in this paper have been to: name a core manifestation of carcerality that contributes to its sustenance; provide preliminary evidence of its existence and significance through a re-examination of extant literature on the intersections of higher education and carceral systems through an epistemic lens; and spur further lines of inquiry.

Within the philosophical study of epistemic injustice, future inquiry could explore what makes epistemic carcerality distinct from other forms of epistemic injustice. Oteng and Thompson (2025), for example, take up this question in response to our work, arguing that epistemic carcerality is a distinct ethical and epistemic harm in that it involves “a unique invalidation of one’s confidence, credibility, and agency as a knower compounded by the circumstances one endures with system-involvement” (p. 1). Further inquiry could include theoretical explorations of how epistemic carcerality operates, is produced and perpetuated, and interrelates with other systems of oppression. It could also include empirical accounts of its manifestations in the lives of individuals and collectives—and their resistance to it—both within higher education contexts and beyond. ⁶

Our proposal of this concept is also a call to action. Higher education institutions are implicated in the harms of epistemic carcerality through the variety of ways that they limit the full participation of system-involved people—through the educational programs they create, who they admit to these programs as students, and how they interact with the students they admit. It is our view that resistance is a shared responsibility of all who live under oppressive systems (Collins, 2017; Medina, 2013). Thus, we propose that higher education institutions and their actors have a duty to recognize this form of injustice and apply this recognition to redressing epistemic injustices arising from their interactions with the carceral system. We also encourage stronger allyship in support of the epistemic resistance of system-involved people.

While we view higher education as centrally involved in epistemic carcerality, we also suggest that it extends beyond higher education in pervasive ways. For scholars, advocates, and practitioners at the nexus of higher education and the carceral system, we propose epistemic carcerality as a valuable concept that names what is at stake in our work by centering epistemic injustice, oppression, and resistance. Beyond this nexus, we recognize that the pursuit of epistemic justice for system-involved people may demand the development of alternative spaces of higher learning outside of existing systems. Ultimately, we hope epistemic carcerality proves useful to those interested in illuminating and resisting the wide spectrum of epistemic harms deriving from carcerality across populations and institutional contexts, and, in so doing, working towards a liberatory future.