Jail Pedagogy: Liberatory Education Inside A California Juvenile Detention Facility

Abstract

Approximately 2 million juveniles are arrested each year. Half are sentenced to serve terms of incarceration. Although many scholars have written about teaching in detention facilities, few directly address how prisoners are being taught. This research explores the experiences, teaching philosophy, and practices of correctional educators. To learn what is taking place within these classrooms, I interviewed and observed instructors in 3 male juvenile detention facilities in California over the course of 15 months. Semistructured qualitative interviews looked in depth at their teaching techniques, finding that these teachers adopted a humanistic and liberatory approach to teaching behind the walls of juvenile detention facilities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank all the teachers who volunteered to participate in this study. Thank you for sharing your insights and experiences. I also thank my advisors, Kyra Green, Denise Segura, Victor Rios, D. Emily Hicks, John Sutton, Sheldon Zhang, and Xuan Santos. Without your feedback and constant guidance, I would not have finished this article. I also thank Angie Henao, Amada Armenta, and Rachel Sarabia who provided me with valuable suggestions and insights. Finally, thank you to the editors and blind reviewers at JESPAR.

Notes

¹The terms instructor, teacher, and educator are used interchangeably throughout the article.

² Detention facilities, juvenile detention facilities, juvenile justice facilities, and institutions of confinement will be referred to interchangeably throughout the article.

³A neo-freirian teaching approach is an approach to teaching that rejects banking education and acknowledges that schools can be sites of resistance (Darder, 2002).

⁴The terms correctional officer and correctional guard are used interchangeably throughout the article.

⁵To protect the privacy of participants, the name of the city has been changed.