Exploring Educational Opportunities for Foreign National Prisoners in Europe

ABSTRACT

To gain insight into the educational opportunities for European foreign national prisoners, an online survey was distributed among educational providers and prison managers (N = 108). The results demonstrate that courses for learning domestic languages are most frequently offered. Other educational courses mostly relate to primary education and psychosocial courses. Based on the online survey, four organizations are investigated in depth to gain more information about how they work. We conducted 12 semi-structured individual and one group interview with professionals and prisoners. The results of the hybrid thematic analysis showed that different models exist to organize education for FNPs. The findings make contribution to the development of European pilot projects that provide distance education to FNPs offered by their home country.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign national prisoners
• educational participation
• Europe
• FORINER project

Acknowledgements

This research is part of the FORINER project that started in January 2016 and has been co-funded by the European Commission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Dorien Brosens http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4321-5450

Liesbeth De Donder http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4999-5902

An-Sofie Smetcoren http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4581-4898

Sarah Dury http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0743-0364

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Commission: [Grant Number 2015-3067/001-001].