Young people are often incarcerated in penitentiaries worldwide. Incarceration is not expected to hinder their access to quality education. This article, guided by Marxist theory, examines the practicality of educational rights at five young prisoners' facilities in Malawi. The study used a descriptive phenomenological qualitative research design to engage the voic-es of 52 incarcerated and released young people in semi-structured interviews to ascertain if prisoners'quality education was a reality or mere pipedream at young prisoners'facilities. The findings show a disparity between correctional education policies and the actual reality. Due to the inadequacy of resources and the negativity of the prison environment, the facilities failed to provide quality, appealing and motivating education to the already educationally disenchanted incarcerated young people, resulting in low enrolment rates. It was, therefore, concluded that education was still a pipe dream at young prisoners' centres in Malawi.
New correctional educators must learn to teach in an unfamiliar correctional en-vironment. In this convergent mixed-methods study, experienced correctional educators in Alberta, Canada reflected on their first 6 months teaching in adult correctional institutions. Teachers initially struggled to do something familiar (teach) in an unfamiliar place, perceiv-ing prisons as non-conducive to education. Seeing the absence of a purpose-built community, they built one or attached to existing non-educational communities. New educators invoked strategies such as engaging in mutual support, connecting with non-education professionals, asking others to demystify institutional culture, and practicing reflexivity. When reflecting on useful training and orientation activities, participants favoured community and relationship building. The teachers' actions are framed using the concept of communities of practice, and a substantive theory of learning to teach in correctional environments is proposed. Finally, recommendations are provided to help ensure that new teachers are supported and prepared as they enter correctional education.
With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, many individuals want to know about the vast rise in women?? incarceration rates; particularly concerning, the increase of mothers in prison. For many mothers, the only source of hope and motivation they have while involved in the criminal justice system is the connection with their children. This article demonstrates that educational programs focusing on parenting can help incarcerated mothers renew their parental role upon release from prison. The target audience for this article includes, but is not limited to, correctional facility administrators, family counselors, educators, and anyone with an interest in parenting after prison. This article can also serve as a platform to advocate for quality parenting classes for incarcerated mothers..
This research was inspired by allegations of censorship of college curricula in an Illinois state penitentiary. This example highlights the confusion and controversy that may ensue when disagreements arise over what students in prison-based college programs are permitted to read and learn. Following this, my research considers these relevant questions: First, do many programs and prisons encounter disagreements over certain instructional materials? Next, to what extent are these rooted in clashing institutional values and priorities? And finally, what can be done to quell controversy, reduce confusion, and strengthen relationships between colleges and prisons? To shed light on these questions, I surveyed over forty practitioners from Higher Education in Prison (HEP) programs based in state penitentiaries across the United States. In particular, I asked about security clearance protocols for instructional materials, as well as institution-specific restrictions on modality and content. I report and discuss the findings and implications of this survey in the analysis that follows. As such, the intended audience for this report includes stakeholders in both academia and corrections, and others interested in strengthening relations between colleges and prisons that partner to educate incarcerated students.
This article examines the relationship between education and rehabilitation within the prison context. It begins by exploring the concept of rehabilitation, examining if prison rehabilitation is possible or if it is what Pat Carlen describes as a "penal imaginary". Drawing on this idea, it considers how rehabilitation may act as a way of legitimising imprisonment and whether rehabilitation is in fact damaging and criminogenic. It then moves to explore other models of rehabilitation and imprisonment that may offer a more person-centred approach. Section two of the article begins by discussing understandings of adult education. It examines conflicting interpretations of education, settling on an understanding that is underpinned by principles of freedom. It then moves to explore how adult education is practised and understood within the prison context. Finally, this article analyses the relationship between prison education and prison rehabilitation, considering what kinds of education and rehabilitation may be conducive to supporting the holistic development of the person in prison.
Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher who served 5 years in prison for a series of bank robberies committed in his youth. He died in August 2020, aged just 68, a professor celebrated in the highest ranks of continental philosophy. Stiegler subsequently published over 30 books, at the core of which is the series tellingly gathered under the title 'Time and Technics'. His essay, 'How I became a Philosopher', convinced me he, and it, should be on every prison philosophy course. In this article I outline why, as a convict criminologist, I feel an affinity with Stiegler's project.
: There have recently been a series of prominent projects in the UK that aim to bring philosophy into the heart of prison education. The aim of this paper is to consider a possible rationale for this pedagogical development. A distinction is drawn between a content and a sensibility approach to teaching philosophy, where the latter is primarily concerned not with teaching a particular subject matter but rather with developing a certain kind of critical expertise. It is argued that the sensibility conception of teaching philosophy dovetails with an influential account of the epistemic aim of education in terms of the cultivation of intellectual character, in the specific sense of developing the intellectual virtues that constitute one’s intel lectual character (i.e., virtuous intellectual character). The significance of this point for prison education is illustrated by considering how the use of a pedagogical approach in prison education known as CoPI (‘Community of Philosophical Inquiry’) can be construed as teaching philosophy on the sensibility model just outlined. With this in mind, it is argued that the value of teaching philosophy in prisons primarily relates to how it provides a particularly fundamental kind of education, one that is both finally and instrumentally valuable. These points are illustrated throughout by considering a particular case study involving a recent philosophy in prisons project that employed the CoPI methodology.
This article does three things. First, it asks a new question about transformative education, namely 'what is the role of power and trust in the decision of whether to transform one's meaning scheme in the face of new information or whether to simply reject the new information?' Secondly, it develops a five-stage model which elaborates on the role of this decision in transformative learning.1 Finally, it uses grounded-theory and the five-stage model to argue that power and trust play an important role in facilitating transformative learning.
I argue in this article that people in prison make excellent philosophers, for reasons related to what they are deprived of. I also suggest that great novels constitute, or at the very least, introduce us to, philosophy. Some of the deepest questions about human life can be addressed by fusing philosophical thinking with empirical research in prisons. Prisoners talk with depth and insight about what it is to feel human, what matters most in human experience, and the importance of the 'vibrations of fellow feeling'.
The call for social reintegration of prisoners, in many cases, does not work or has been abandoned, leaving the question of inclusivity regarding the imprisoned an open chal-lenge in contemporary societies. My study provides a critical analysis of a model defined as an educational system of social reintegration, which aspires to be an alternative to imprisonment in Brazil and worldwide by proposing a reduction in the recidivism rate at a lower cost. I dis-cuss the possibilities of social reintegration and the educational conceptions and practices that can emerge from it, though a document analysis and ethnography of two model units. Starting from an already-existing model, I argue that, even in an extremely difficult context, it is possi-ble to build a proposal for social reintegration that goes beyond mere bureaucratic marketing. This can improve the prospects of imprisoned people's re-entry into society, despite the per-sistence of stigmatisation and other difficulties attending their return to a society affected by high unemployment rates.
In his book, Acting Out, philosopher Bernard Stiegler confesses that the question once posed to him by Marianne Alphant - namely, 'How does one become a philosopher in the intimacy and secret of one's life?'threw him 'into an embarrassing position', mainly because Stiegler became a philosopher in the intimacy of his prison cell. There is no question that from Socrates to Antonio Gramsci, there have been philosophers who have suffered shorter or longer periods of imprisonment, but this was mainly because of their philosophy - their individuated way of being and thinking. In Bernard Stiegler's case, it appears that the terms are reversed - in other words, the philosopher emerges as the philosopher he is because of and through imprisonment. This reversal is taken provisionally here, since this paper problematises the very notions of philosophical writing, philosophical acting, and origin, repositioning thus the question of writing, authorship, technology and individuation - namely, the central notions of Bernard Stiegler's philosophy.
Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy there is a well-entrenched tendency to think in transactional terms. The academy has something of value that it aims to pass on or transmit to its clients. Usually, this transaction takes place within the confines of the university, in the form of transmission of valuable skills or knowledge passed from faculty to students. Public philosophy, construed within this transactional mindset, then consists in passing on something valuable from inside the academy to the outside. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of taking philosophy into prisons, and we argue that making the case for public philosophy in general, and philosophy in prisons in particular, in these transactional terms risks obscuring what we take to be a distinctive and valuable outcome of public philosophy. Importantly, it risks obscuring what those who participate in a particular kind of public philosophy - including the professional philosophers - experience as valuable about the activity: its transformational potential.
Service learning has evolved as a primary experience-based curriculum for undergraduate students. But much of what universities put forward as service learning is not a genuine engagement with community partners to help advance meaningful social change to address social problems. In this paper, we outline our preliminary attempt to do just that-what we call The Bridge Model. The discussion that follows occurs in the context of a semester-long project between undergraduate students at a Midwestern University (MU) and incarcerated participants from the university's prison education program. First, we briefly situate the partnership in terms of its theoretical background in experiential learning and focus on critical service learning. Second, we explain the nature of our collaboration in terms of its aims and framework. Third, we position our Bridge model as a helpful alternative on a continuum with another prominent form of alliance-the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Fourth, we provide project samples that typify our model. Fifth, we outline the value of our approach to service learning using data derived from student reflection papers and lay out some of the challenges we faced in the project's implementation. Finally, we contemplate the road ahead.
There has been a growing recognition of the value of education in facilitating desistance from offending. Yet, despite a determined push to “widen access” universities continue to be an unwelcoming place for those with a criminal record. To better understand the role of higher education in raising aspiration towards desistance, this paper draws on findings from a study in Swansea, Wales. Adopting a Pictorial Narrative approach the findings suggest that, whilst the participants identified potential benefits of attaining a higher education, those aspirations were outweighed by a distrust of the “institution” and a fear that the stigmatisation experienced through the “criminal identity” would be hard to avoid and may morph into the “criminal/student identity”, thus leaving students vulnerable to judgement and exclusion. This paper makes recommendations about how higher education might be remodeled to support those who wish to desist and in doing so, truly “widen participation” to all.
The transient population of county jails pose unique challenges for program imple-mentation and maintenance. This past year, the spread of COVID-19 substantially increased such challenges, particularly since most correctional institutions are opposed to using Inter-net-based technologies, such as Zoom, in the secure part of their institution. Although college programming is rare in most jails, Inside-Out type classes, which allow college students to take a credited course alongside the incarcerated in a correctional setting, is a great way to provide a missed opportunity for purposeful intervention for the incarcerated, while providing a unique experiential learning opportunity for traditional undergraduate students. Based on an Inside-Out class conducted during the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, this paper examines the challenges of providing such instruction during a statewide shutdown, with pre-liminary data suggesting that despite a change in instruction mid-semester due to COVID-19, innovative technological methods can be utilized to maintain program integrity if correctional administrators are amenable to its implementation. Even though inside/outside students could not remain in the same classroom for the entire semester, as the original program was intended, both groups of students still benefited from a modified pedagogical model. Implications suggest that such methods could be utilized to maintain the integrity of correctional-based program-ming (post COVID) when the physical presence of faculty is prohibited or hindered.
In 2019, The Open University (henceforth, The OU), based in Milton Keynes in the UK, celebrated its 50th anniversary. Since 1971 it has pioneered the delivery of Higher Education in prisons and other secure settings. Some 50 years on, in 2021 there is much to celebrate and still more to learn. In this article we briefly review the establishment of the OU in 1969 and explore how it has maintained access to higher education in the prison system. It draws from a collection of essays and reflections on prison learning experiences developed by OU academics and former and continuing OU students in prison (Earle & Mehigan, 2019). We begin by outlining the unique features of the OU and the circumstances of its establishment in the post-war period in the UK. We then present an account of its work with students in prison in the UK (and elsewhere) and conclude with some critical reflections on the place and prospects of higher education in an expanding Higher Education sector and an escalating preference for carceral punishment in the UK. No country on Earth can match the penal preferences of the United States, but the UK's habit of slipstreaming behind its massive carceral bulk tends to obscure the fact that the UK punishes more people with imprisonment, and with longer sentences, than any other Western European state. It also manages to exceed the United States in rates of racial disproportionality in its carceral population (Phillips, 2013). Despite these outlier features in incarceration, a silver lining to the carceral cloud can be found in The OU's pioneering work with imprisoned men and women.
