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This critical perspective on prison education is a marked departure from a literature dominated by descriptions of the criminal mind and correctional education strategies to cure it. Davidson's contributors are prisoners or former prisoners who finished their schooling in prison, some taking advanced degrees, or social scientists who taught in prisons but are not professional correctional educators. Conventionally, prison education is about correcting cognitive deficiencies and improving job opportunities. Here the issues are schooling as surveillance, as politics, and as a means to reconstruct a historical consciousness that remembers personal histories. The essays examine prison schools as they originated and developed, identify processes of differentiation and segregation, expose contradictions, and recount occurrences of prison resistance. There are chapters on prison education as critical pedagogy, literacy and higher education, women prisoners and education, and the irony that most prisoners believe in the American Dream while often being victims of socioeconomic inequity.
List of contents
Preface
Possibilities for Critical Pedagogy in a "Total Institution": An Introduction to Critical Perspectives on Prison Education by Howard S. Davidson
The Ironies of Prison Education by Jim Thomas
On Prison Education and Women in Prison: An Interview with Therasa Ann Glaremin by Gay Bell and Therasa Ann Glaremin
Shades of the Prison House: Adult Literacy and the Correctional Ethos by Michael Collins
Freeing Birds, Erasing Images, Burning Lamps: How I Learned to Teach in Prison by Peter Linebaugh
Teaching "Criminology" to "Criminals" by Edward Sbarbaro
Prison Education: A Contextual Analysis by Dante Germanotta
Prison Higher Education and the American Dream: The Case of INSIGHT, INC. by Robert P. Weiss
A Note on Prison Activism and Social Justice by Edward Sbarbaro
Prison, Higher Education, and Reintegration: A Communitarian Critique by Peter Cordella
A Non-traditional Approach to Social and Criminal Justice by Juan A. Rivera
The Santa Cruz Women's Prison Project, 1972-1976 by Karlene Faith
Jailhouse Lawyers Educating Fellow Prisoners by Julian Stone
References
Index
About the author
HOWARD S. DAVIDSON is Assistant Professor of Continuing Education, Continuing Education Division, University of Manitoba, Winnipege He has taught adult basic education in Canadian provincial jails and sociology for Boston University's prison education program. He is the founder and editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prison and author of Just Ask! A Handbook for Instructors of Students Being Treated for Mental Disorders (1993) and Literacy in Context: Reading About Psychology (1992).
