When prisoners dare to become scholars: prison education as resistance

ABSTRACT

As an introduction to this special issue on prison education, this article seeks to radically reframe how academic literature addresses and understands the carceral classroom. The primary lens through which prison education is evaluated is as a means of reducing recidivism. In this rhetorical autoethnography, we write back against that assertion, arguing that prison education is far more than a tool for crime reduction. Using a series of autoethnographic glimpses, we offer a view inside the classroom behind bars and demonstrate that prison education is a means of resistance. By choosing to attend classes, prisoners defy gendered norms of hegemonic masculinity in order to resist the societal norm that prisoner lives do not matter.

KEYWORDS:

• prison education
• masculinity
• resistance
• autoethnography

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the contributors and peer reviewers, especially Savannah Ganster, Christopher Beasley, Jeremy Coffman, and Jim Dimock, for their contributions to this special issue. Key would like to thank the hundreds of incarcerated men who have honored him by being his students, with special recognition to the Huntsville Unit debate team. May would like to thank Jess Havens for her continual support.

Notes

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2 Michael Middleton et al., Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ (Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, 2015).

3 Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111; Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 274–89.

4 Nathan Crick, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), 33.

5 Middleton et al., Participatory Critical Rhetoric, 19.

6 Diversi and Moreira, Betweener Talk, 209.

7 Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe, Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014), 19.

8 Lois M. Davis et al., Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education: A Meta-Analysis of Programs that Provide Education to Incarcerated Adults (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2013).

9 Carla Cesaroni and Shahid Alvi, “Masculinity and Resistance in Adolescent Carceral Settings,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 52, no. 3 (2010): 304.

10 Claudio Moreira and Marcelo Diversi, “Missing Bodies: Troubling the Colonial Landscape of American Academia,” Text and Performance Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2011): 229–48.

11 Paul Ekman, “Darwin, Deception, and Facial Expression,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1000, no. 1 (2003): 205–21.

12 Bronwyn Davies, “The Discursive Production of the Male/Female Dualism in School Settings,” Oxford Review of Education 15, no. 3 (1989): 229.

13 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 100.

14 Claudio Moreira, “(Un) Safe! Fighting the Po-Lice in Quasi-Educational Spaces of Bathrooms: A Betweener's Reflection on the Researcher's Body in Three Intercalated Acts,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 11, no. 2 (2011): 146.

15 Dana M. Britton, “Cat Fights and Gang Fights: Preference for Work in a Male-Dominated Organization,” Sociological Quarterly 40, no. 3 (1999): 455–74; At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as Gendered Organization (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

16 Anna Curtis, “‘You Have to Cut It Off at the Knee’: Dangerous Masculinity and Security inside a Men's Prison,” Men and Masculinities 17, no. 2 (2014): 4.

17 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 40.

18 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (London: Routledge, 2004), 156.

19 Laurel P. Richmond and Corey W. Johnson, “‘It's a Race War’: Race and Leisure Experiences in California State Prison,” Journal of Leisure Research 41, no. 4 (2009): 569.

20 Charles Schwaebe, “Learning to Pass: Sex Offenders’ Strategies for Establishing a Viable Identity in the Prison General Population,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 49, no. 6 (2005): 615.

21 Michael Santos, About Prison (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004), 100.

22 James B. Jacobs, “Race Relations and the Prisoner Subculture,” Crime and Justice 1 (1979): 24.

23 Scott D. Camp et al., “The Influence of Prisons on Inmate Misconduct: A Multilevel Investigation,” Justice Quarterly 20, no. 3 (2003): 501–33; Beth M. Huebner, “Administrative Determinants of Inmate Violence: A Multilevel Analysis,” Journal of Criminal Justice 31, no. 2 (2003): 107–17; Rebecca Trammell, Enforcing the Convict Code: Violence and Prison Culture (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012); Timothy Black, When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers on and off the Streets (New York: Vintage, 2010); Craig Hemmens and James W. Marquart, “Friend or Foe? Race, Age, and Inmate Perceptions of Inmate–Staff Relations,” Journal of Criminal Justice 28, no. 4 (2000): 297–312.

24 Curtis, “‘You Have to Cut It Off at the Knee,’” 4.

25 Ibid.

26 Nick de Viggiani, “Trying to Be Something You Are Not: Masculine Performances within a Prison Setting,” Men and Masculinities 15, no. 3 (2012): 271–91.

27 Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), xv.

28 Teresa A. Miller, “Sex & Surveillance: Gender, Privacy & the Sexualization of Power in Prison,” George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal (CRLJ) 10 (2000): 4.

29 Jenny Phillips, “Cultural Construction of Manhood in Prison,” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 2, no. 1 (2001): 13.

30 M. Nandi, “Re/Constructing Black Masculinity in Prison,” The Journal of Men's Studies 11, no. 1 (2002): 91–107.

31 Curtis, “‘You Have to Cut It Off at the Knee,’” 3.

32 Don Sabo, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London, eds., “Introduction: Gender and the Politics of Punishment,” in Prison Masculinities (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 5.

33 Cesaroni and Alvi, “Masculinity and Resistance in Adolescent Carceral Settings,” 308.

34 Terry A. Kupers, “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 61, no. 6 (2005): 716.

35 Curtis, “‘You Have to Cut It Off at the Knee.’”

36 hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.”

37 Yvonne Jewkes, “Men behind Bars ‘Doing’ Masculinity as an Adaptation to Imprisonment,” Men and Masculinities 8, no. 1 (2005): 46 original emphasis.

38 Harry Brod, “Pornography and the Alienation of Male Sexuality,” Social Theory and Practice 14, no. 3 (1988): 269.

39 Rachel Leffler Oppenheim, “‘Calculating Females’: Incarcerated Women, Correctional Education, and the Struggle for Self-Preservation” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2010).

40 James Haywood Rolling, “Circumventing the Imposed Ceiling: Art Education as Resistance Narrative,” Qualitative Inquiry 17, no. 1 (2011): 99–104; Josef Krasuski, “Education as Resistance: The Polish Experience of Schooling During the War,” Education and the Second World War: Studies in Schooling and Social Change, ed. Roy Lowe (London: Falmer Press, 1992).

41 Kupers, “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison,” 716.

42 James W. Messerschmidt, Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993).

43 Andrew Tolson, The Limits of Masculinity (London: Tavistock, 1977), 43.

44 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).

45 Hans Toch, Men in Crisis: Human Breakdowns in Prison (New Brunswick, NJ: AldineTransaction, 1975).

46 de Viggiani, “Trying to Be Something You Are Not,” 273.

47 Ibid.

48 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New Brunswick, NJ: AldineTransaction, 2007), 14.

49 Phillips, “Cultural Construction of Manhood in Prison,” 14–15.

50 Jewkes, “Men behind Bars ‘Doing’ Masculinity as an Adaptation to Imprisonment,” 57.