Education behind bars

The same year, I volunteered as a General Educational Development (GED) maths tutor at a prison in Maryland for adult, male students.

Similar to my experience in the courthouse, my work in the prison was fraught with stereotypes about the kind of person who was found behind bars.

During my basic training, I received the message that the individuals I would be working with were to be feared. No jewelry was to be worn in case it could be used as a weapon; no pulled-back hair, because it would be easy to grab in an attack. Don’t make eye contact for too long, or else you may be the subject of unsolicited flirtation.

Of course, it is important to understand the risks involved in any work. However, I was sceptical that the students I would be working with were as vicious as the training made them out to be. After all, my experience in the courthouse taught me not to judge a book by its cover.

Widespread stereotypes might lead one to believe that incarcerated individuals are disrespectful, unintelligent and unmotivated, amongst other unfavourable descriptors. Yet, my experience as their tutor suggested otherwise.

Overall, my students were respectful, curious, and hard-working. That said, they did not immediately trust me at the beginning of the semester. I suspect they feared I would leave them behind on their journey or get scared away by my surroundings.

By the end of the semester, however, seven out of nine of my students passed their GED exams and were one step closer to the life they wanted to live upon release.  

I was incredibly proud.

Yet, one consideration perplexed me. Did teaching behind bars help individuals upon release, or did it make prison look like a more attractive place to a society already plagued by over-incarceration?  

I still do not have an answer to this question. However, I feared that if the prison were to appear too ‘reformative’, judges and juries may be driven to over-incarcerate, when, in fact, incarceration may not be an effective solution for every individual or crime. For instance, some individuals may benefit from increased social support or treatment that does not require incapacitation.

That’s when it dawned on me: the treatment programs I witnessed being put into place at the courthouse (pre-trial) were not necessarily continued beyond sentencing. Even if they were, they had the potential to be counteracted by the negative effects of incarceration – for, the harms that take place behind bars are no secret.

For this reason, I realised that the work I was doing was even more important that I initially thought. In order to stop the cycle of criminalisation, it was imperative that incarcerated individuals were given the opportunity to 1) take their minds off their environment with some degree of ‘normalcy’ and 2) add to their toolbox for life post-release.  

There are many reasons for over-incarceration – including racial bias and three strike rules – yet, by pursuing educational possibilities behind bars, I can only hope that my students came out in better shape than they went in.

Katelyn Owens is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Kent, studying the impact of gentrification on the sexual geographies of King’s Cross in London and Pigalle in Paris.