The rhetoric of re-entry education: persuasive definition, agency, and voice in prison discourse

ABSTRACT

The Second Chance Act of 2007 provided funding for an array of re-entry education programs aimed at helping prisoners succeed after their release. The debate team at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta (USP–Atlanta) discussed re-entry education in a debate held in April 2017. Inspired by their arguments, this essay explores the rhetorical dimensions of re-entry education by way of the critical concepts of persuasive definition, agency, and voice. The speeches of the USP–Atlanta debaters and this essay complicate the notion of re-entry education by illuminating its rhetorical entailments.

KEYWORDS:

• re-entry education
• prison debate
• persuasive definition
• agency
• voice

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dwight Newbould for his support of the USP–Atlanta debate team. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers, the editors, and the editorial staff for their insights and efforts.

Notes

1 Second Chance Act of 2007, H.R. Rep. No. 110–140, at 2n3 (2007).

2 George W. Bush, “Remarks on Signing the Second Chance Act of 2007,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 44, no. 17 (2008): 503.

3 “Helping Them Stay Home; Tackling Reoffending,” The Economist, November 23, 2013, 33.

4 David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8. Garland updates and elaborates the concept of “the decline of rehabilitative ideal” from Francis A. Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).

5 Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 124.

6 Michelle S. Phelps, “Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs,” Law & Society Review 45, no. 1 (2011): 35.

7 Stephen John Hartnett, “The Annihilating Public Policies of the Prison–Industrial Complex; Or, Crime, Violence, and Punishment in an Age of Neoliberalism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 3 (2008): 491–533; Stephen John Hartnett, Jennifer K. Wood, and Bryan J. McCann, “Turning Silence into Speech and Action: Prison Activism and the Pedagogy of Empowered Citizenship,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2011): 331–52; PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 402–20.

8 PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex,” 407.

9 Ibid.

10 PCARE, “PCARE @10: Reflecting on a Decade of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education, While Looking Ahead to New Challenges and Opportunities,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 302.

11 Jeralyn Faris, “Serving Time by Coming Home: Communicating Hope through a Reentry Court,” in Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism, ed. Stephen John Hartnett, Eleanor Novek, and Jennifer K. Wood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 104.

12 Nikki H. Nichols, “Life After Incarceration: Exploring Identity in Reentry Programs for Women,” in Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism, ed. Stephen John Hartnett, Eleanor Novek, and Jennifer K. Wood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 124–25.

13 Jonny Amasa-Annang and Gina Scutelnicu, “How Promising Is the Second Chance Act in Reducing Recidivism among Male Ex-Offenders in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi?” Journal of Public Management & Social Policy 23, no. 2 (2016): 22–32.

14 Hartnett, “Annihilating Public Policies of the Prison–Industrial Complex,” 501 original emphasis.

15 Ibid.

16 See, for example, Lizbet Simmons, The Prison School: Educational Inequality and School Discipline in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Berkley: University of California Press, 2017); Anthony J. Nocell, Priya Parmar, and David Stovall, From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline (New York: Peter Lang, 2014); Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt, The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

17 Douglas Walton, “Persuasive Definitions and Public Policy Arguments,” Argumentation & Advocacy 37, no. 3 (2001): 117.

18 Walton, “Persuasive Definitions and Public Policy Arguments”; David Zarefsky, “Presidential Rhetoric and the Power of Definition,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2004): 607–19; “Strategic Maneuvering through Persuasive Definitions: Implications for Dialectic and Rhetoric,” Argumentation 20, no. 4 (2006): 399–416.

19 Walton, “Persuasive Definitions and Public Policy Arguments,” 120–21.

20 “Second Chance Act Grant Program,” National Reentry Resource Center, March 4, 2018, https://csgjusticecenter.org/nrrc/projects/second-chance-act/.

21 Second Chance Act of 2007, H.R. Rep. No. 110–140, at 2–3 (2007).

22 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), xv.

23 Second Chance Act of 2007, H.R. Rep. No. 110–140, at 3 (2007).

24 Dilip Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” Southern Communication Journal 58, no. 4 (1993): 263.

25 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 170.

26 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 473.

27 Kenneth Burke, “(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 809–38.

28 Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizens,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 101.

29 Ibid., 118.

30 Ibid., 120.

31 Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 183.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., original emphasis.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 180.

36 Ibid.

37 PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex,” 408.

38 Captured Words/Free Thoughts: Writing and Art from America’s Prisons, http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/CLAS/Departments/communication/Research/Pages/Captured-Words-Free-Thoughts.aspx.

39 PCARE, “PCARE@10,” 8.

40 See Beth Schwartzepfel, “Inmate Debate,” Brown Alumni Magazine, January/February 2012, http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/content/view/3056/32/; Natasha Haverty, “After Half a Century, Inmates Resurrect the Norfolk Prison Debating Society,” NPR’s Morning Edition, December 27, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/12/27/506314053/after-half-a-century-inmates-resurrect-the-norfolk-prison-debating-society.

41 American Prison Writing Archive, http://apw.dhinitiative.org/.

42 Barbara A. Biesecker, “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 124.

43 Charles E. Morris III, “Archival Queer,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 147.

44 Jodi Schorb, Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 100.

45 Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4.

46 See George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings (London: Methuen, 1953).

47 Schorb, Reading Prisoners, 116.

48 Quoted in Hillary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 39.

49 James Mease, Observations on the Penitentiary System (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1828). In his argument, Mease cites an 1827 ACS report on the cost-per-person for colonization.

50 Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 21, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/. While Cole’s article concerns how white people respond to stories about violence in Africa, I see a clear connection to prison populations in that prisoners and foreign peoples are mostly invisible to Americans except for highly mediated encounters.

51 This is the same Clifford Baptiste referred to by Pierre Parsee.