Cons and pros: prison education through the eyes of the prison educated^*

* Guest Editors’ note: Transcribed from typed and handwritten papers sent by the authors, this article was written entirely by incarcerated authors. It has been minimally edited for clarity and conformity to the journal’s style. The minimal citations highlight the lack of access to academic resources in prison.

ABSTRACT

While much has been written within academic journals about prisoners, rarely is there anything written by prisoners. In this essay, we, a group of prisoners who are earning or have earned college degrees while incarcerated in Texas, address the purpose, merits, and pitfalls of prison education and reform. Written as a response to the essays appearing in this special issue, we discuss our experiences of being othered as inmates, the impact of societal bias against us, our perspectives on prison education, and our own ideas for reforming prisons and making them more humane.

KEYWORDS:

• prison
• prisoner writing
• prison reform
• prison education
• carcerality

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our friends and families for supporting us in our education and incarceration. We thank the great teachers at Lee College and especially Adam Key, our debate coach, for providing us with the opportunity to express ourselves.

Notes

* Guest Editors’ note: Transcribed from typed and handwritten papers sent by the authors, this article was written entirely by incarcerated authors. It has been minimally edited for clarity and conformity to the journal’s style. The minimal citations highlight the lack of access to academic resources in prison.

1 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 14.

2 Erin L. Castro and Michael Brawn, “Critiquing Critical Pedagogies inside the Prison Classroom: A Dialogue between Student and Teacher,” Harvard Educational Review 87, no. 1 (2017): 100.

3 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 73.

4 Ibid., 76.

5 Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 314.

6 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2016), 8.

7 Ibid.

8 Leland J. Carver and Laura M. Harrison, “Democracy and the Challenges of Correctional Education,” The Journal of Correctional Education 67, no. 1 (2016): 11.

9 Dana Tofig, “Education and Training Opportunities in America’s Prisons,” NCES Blog, January 11, 2017, https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/2017/01/11/default.

10 Texas Department of Criminal Justice, FY 2016 Texas Department of Criminal Justice Statistical Report (Huntsville: Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 2016), 1, https://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/documents/Statistical_Report_FY2016.pdf.

11 Craig Haney, Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006), 134.