Education in Prison

Studying Through Distance Learning

Emma Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409409939
• eBook ISBN: 9781317145776
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The role of education in prisons, prisoners' decisions regarding education, the impact of prison culture on either encouraging or discouraging such activities, and the potential consequences of education for prisoners' reentry into society all have important implications. This extended analysis of prisoner education represents a unique contribution to an under-researched field, whilst also making important and original connections between research on education in prison and the literature on adult learning in the community. Through offering crucial insights into the varied motivations and disincentives that inform prisoners' decisions to study in prison (whether it be through distance learning or prison-based classes), the reader is also able to consider factors that inform decisions to engage in a broader range of positive and constructive activities whilst in prison. These research findings provide insight into how prison culture and prison policies may impact upon rehabilitative endeavour and suggest ways in which prisons may seek to encourage constructive and/ or rehabilitative activities amongst their inhabitants if desired. Based on interviews and questionnaires completed by British adult prisoners studying through distance learning, this qualitative study offers a valuable complement and counterpart to prison education studies that focus on measuring recidivism rates. The learner-centred approach used yields a nuanced and complex understanding of the varied ways in which education in prison actually operates and is experienced, and considers the consequences of this for the students' lives. As such, the findings offer further insight into important evidence resulting from recidivism studies reviewed within the book, whilst contributing to the reemerging interest in studies of prison life and prison culture that are based on prisoner interviews.

Chapter 1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315578859-1

It is estimated that each year up to 4,000 British prisoners study through distance learning.¹ These students study a wide variety of subjects at a broad range of academic levels. They work independently on their correspondence courses within their prison, communicating with tutors at external educational institutions via the post. Yet despite their pursuits, these prisoner-students do not simply represent an academic elite who came into prison with numerous educational qualifications and strong employment histories. Although this can be said of some of the distance learners, many are more typical of the prison population as a whole. Stories of entering prison with no qualifications, of truancy and expulsion from school when younger, and of having struggled with literacy and numeracy, are common.

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¹ Although exact figures are not known, this estimate has been provided by the Prisoners’ Education Trust, a charity which offers grants for distance learning (Schuller 2009, see also Pike 2011). Pat Jones, former Director of the Prisoners' Education Trust, estimates that the figure could actually be somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 students studying each year through distance learning (personal communication, 20 September 2011). For contextual purposes, at the end of September 2011 the prison population of England and Wales stood at approximately 87,500, having reached 80,000 for the first time in 2006 (Berman 2011), with the Scottish prison population at approximately 8,500 (Scottish Prison Service 2011).

This book will examine the diverse motivations of those undertaking distance learning in prison, and will do so with a view to the students’ educational backgrounds and personal histories. I will consider such questions as what influences a student's decision to study in prison, and through distance learning in particular, if they had previously disliked formal education. The book will go on to explore the experiences of the students once their studies begin, including the benefits that the students report, the difficulties that they encounter, and the impact of their studies on their sense of self. While exploring how the students’ courses interact with and shape their time in prison, the book will also consider the potential impact of their educational activities on their post-release lives. Throughout, the focus will be on the students’ own voices, on their own accounts of their educational experiences and future goals.

Prison-based distance learning has been the subject of only limited academic research (for notable exceptions, see: Worth 1996, Maguire and Honess 1997, Pike 2009). This dearth of research is perhaps not surprising given that distance learning constitutes a subset of prison education provision, and prison education itself has been described as an under-researched field (Mills 2002), although it is one that continues to grow. Yet the extensive and varied educational experiences that distance learning in prison can entail, and the unique benefits and challenges that such a form of learning can present, are worthy of specific attention within this field, particularly given distance learning's primacy in offering prisoners the chance to extend their studies beyond the more basic level of education offered in the typical prison classroom.

However, it will also emerge that the experiences of distance learners in prison have relevance to more than just this specialised set of learners. Because many of the distance learners have studied within their prison education departments as well as through distance learning, this allows for a point of comparison with, and an exploration of, classroom-based learning in prison while at the same time offering insight into how classroom-based studies may lead to an interest in continuing education through distance learning. This study therefore contributes to the growing body of research on adult education in prison in general, and specifically to that aspect of the literature that examines educational experiences from the perspectives of the students themselves.

An exploration of distance learning also provides a unique entry point into the world of the prison and what sociologists have referred to as ‘inmate society’ (see, for example, Clemmer [1940] 1958, Sykes 1958). Because distance learning takes place largely within prison cells rather than in the dedicated classrooms of a prison education department, the students’ undertakings are particularly prone to the influence of prison-wide policies, the actions of staff, managers, and other prisoners, and the more general culture that pervades a particular prison or wing of a prison. Questions can be asked regarding whether the students find prisons to be encouraging or discouraging of their constructive and potentially rehabilitative pursuits. In exploring these issues, larger questions about what prisons are for, and what they are designed to achieve, can be addressed. Because many of the students who took part in this study are actively engaged in a variety of prison activities, some of which inspired their education and some of which grew out of their education, the book will further examine how the students may in turn influence their surrounding prison environment.

Therefore, as much as this book is about distance learning in prison, it is also a book about educational life histories, broader rehabilitative undertakings within the prison environment, possibilities for personal transformation through education, the influence of others on such pursuits, and the influence of the students on those around them. Through the findings there are implications for how educational and related activities in prison might be encouraged, if so desired.

Distance Learning in the Context of Prisoner Education Provision

Distance learning provides an opportunity for prisoners to advance their education, via correspondence, beyond the basic skills instruction in literacy, numeracy and other key skills that is currently the focus of prison education departments in England and Wales (HM Prison Service 2000a: Prison Service Order 4205, Ministry of Justice 2010c: Prison Service Instruction 33/2010). For prisoners who have already achieved educational qualifications up to Level 2, including GCSEs,² distance learning remains the most viable option, and in many cases the only option, for continuing formal academic education (A. Wilson 2010). Although this form of study often requires the students to secure their own funding, with exceptions for some university courses as will be explained below, students may seek out this mode of study when they have completed the courses on offer within their prison but still have long sentences left to serve, when they come into prison having already having earned such qualifications, or when they wish to pursue a specialist subject. However, before exploring students’ decisions to undertake distance learning in prison, a subject that is the focus of much of this book and the following chapter in particular, it is helpful to examine the broader context of prison educational provision.

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² A GCSE is a General Certificate of Secondary Education. Students typically take GCSE exams in a range of subjects at the age of sixteen, thereby marking the end of compulsory education. A grade of A* to C on a GCSE exam is equivalent to Level 2 in the National Qualifications Framework.

According to the American criminologist Edwin Sutherland, the origins of prison education programmes can be traced to the religious instruction provided for prisoners by visiting priests and preachers during medieval times (Sutherland and Cressey 1955). The modern prison began to emerge between the mid eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries across Europe and North America and imprisonment became the primary means of punishment for serious criminals (Morgan 2002). Prison reformers of the late 1700s, such as the widely influential British Quaker, John Howard, envisioned prisons as places where offenders could find penitence in part through religious study and reflection. Indeed, Sutherland argues that ‘the development of secular educational work in prisons resulted directly from the effort to teach prisoners to read the Bible and the tracts’ (Sutherland and Cressey 1955: 530).

Nevertheless, not all were supportive of these educational developments. Sutherland notes that the early 1820s saw resistance to prisoner education by some prison officials, both in Britain and the United States (US), on the grounds that teaching prisoners to write might lead to crimes of forgery. Echoes of such concerns are still heard today in objections that education in prison might simply result in criminals better able to avoid detection. Despite such reservations, educational provision continued to develop in a piecemeal fashion through the nineteenth century. Then in 1908, England and Wales saw the introduction of formalised prisoner education (House of Commons 2005). The Open University (OU), the UK's largest distance learning-based university, opened in 1969 and made its university courses available to learners in prison. In fact, post-secondary educational opportunities for prisoners were expanding in Britain as well as North America during the mid twentieth century (Gehring 1997, Duguid 2000a). As education provision moved away from its roots in religious instruction, it also, depending on the location, grew to incorporate vocational and life skills education within its remit.

Yet, the history of prison education is one of fluctuations and shifts rather than a straightforward tale of gradual expansion. The nature, level, and goals of the education provided at any given time or locale are subject to the influence of prevailing views on the causes of crime as well as attitudes regarding the desirability and viability of rehabilitation of offenders as a goal of the penal system (as opposed to a focus on retribution/punishment, incapacitation or deterrence). Equally, budgetary concerns, specific institutional contexts, the views of individual education programme providers, trends within adult education more generally, as well as broader social and political factors within and beyond the criminal justice system, influence the nature of educational provision in prisons (see, for example: Forster 1998, Bayliss 2003, Gehring 1997 regarding the US, and Duguid 2000a regarding Europe and North America). Illustrative of such shifts, the college programmes that had been expanding in US prisons during the mid twentieth century began to collapse with the move away from rehabilitation as a primary goal of the country's correctional systems. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act passed by the US Congress made prisoners ineligible for federal grants available to assist students with their college tuition, a political move associated with the ‘tough on crime’ stance that was sweeping the country at the time (Batiuk 1997, Gehring 1997, Ubah and Robinson, Jr. 2003). The loss of these funds resulted in the closure of most in-prison college programmes, sometimes to be replaced by programmes staffed by volunteer college instructors or supported by external universities.³

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³ For examples of such programmes see the Prison University Project associated with San Quentin prison in California (http://www.prisonuniversityproject.org/), the college programme at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York (Fine et al. 2001), and the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program through which college instructors across the US take ‘outside’ college students into prisons to share classes with ‘inside’ students from the prison (http://www.insideoutcenter.org/).

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the research for this book was undertaken, prisoner educ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Motivations for Education in Prison
• 3 Disincentives for Education in Prison
• 4 Experiences of Education: Coping with Prison and Changes in Self-perception
• 5 Experiences of Education: The Role of ‘Others’, Prison-based Challenges and Building a Culture of Learning
• 6 Future Course of Action
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index