The Rhetoric of Resistance to Prison Education

How the "War on Crime" Became the "War on Criminals"

Adam Key

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000538502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the discourse and rhetoric that resists and opposes postsecondary prison education. Positioning prison college programs as the best method to truly reduce recidivism, the book shows how the public – and by extension politicians – remain largely opposed to public funding for these programs, and how prisoners face internal resistance from their fellow inmates when pursuing higher education.

Utilizing methods including critical rhetorical history, media analysis, and autoethnography, the author explores and critiques the discourses which inhibit prison education. Cultural discourses, echoed through media portrayal of prisoners, produce criminals as both subhuman and always-already a threat to the public. This book highlights the history of rhetorical opposition to prison education; closely analyzes how convictism, prejudicial and discriminatory bias against prisoners, blocks education access and feeds the prison-industrial-complex an ever-recycled supply of free prison labor; and discusses the implications of prison education for understanding and contesting cultural discourses of criminality.

This book will be an important reference for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates in the fields of Rhetoric, Criminal justice, and Sociology, as well as Media and Communication studies more generally, Politics, and Education studies.

1 The Prison Classroom

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189947-1

2020. A year that will live in infamy. As historians record the tragic events of this tumultuous time, two specific occurrences are likely to dominate the discussion: the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and the worldwide demonstrations that followed. As hundreds of thousands died in overcrowded ICUs and cities burned with the righteous indignation of protesters incensed by yet another person of color slain by those who had sworn to protect and serve, two other events emerged in response that were seemingly less remarkable when compared to the grand scale of international pandemics and protests. On March 29, as COVID began to surge and the United States went into lockdown, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued Executive Order GA 13, prohibiting the release of any person currently in jail or prison with either a previous conviction or current arrest for a violent crime.¹ On June 3, eight days after Floyd’s murder, conservative media personality Candace Owens tweeted a video where she claimed Floyd was neither a hero nor martyr because of his criminal record.²

These two seemingly unrelated events brought into sharp focus a largely taken-for-granted systemic bias within the United States that is the focus of this book: we hate people who break the law. Far from simply a stigma, this outright hatred, which I call convictism, is evident within the consequences of Abbott’s executive order: he wanted them to die. Social distancing is physically impossible in prison. Inmates are housed two at a time in cells the size of a small walk-in closet, separated only by bars which would allow air and the virus to easily travel from person to person. While Texas regrettably remains a proponent of the death penalty, most prisoners are sentenced to a number of years, not to die. And die they did, as infections and deaths surged within Texas prisons after Abbott made their release impossible. Even after release, their criminal history becomes a permanent record that, in the eyes of people like Owens, means they cannot be martyrs even when they are wrongfully executed by a corrupt system simply for the color of their skin.

Where does this near-universal hatred of prisoners and criminals originate? More importantly, why is it still tolerated? If you were to tell the average American that there is a group in this country that is not allowed to vote, not allowed to live in many places, and not allowed to work in certain jobs, you would no doubt see expressions of shock and disgust. However, as soon as you tell them you are speaking about former prisoners, their face will instantly transform from expressing surprise to contempt. You’ll likely be met with some variation of “they deserve it” or “if you do the crime, you do the time.” I remember candidly a conversation I had with my mother while I was teaching in prison. She loved to brag to her friends at church about the good works I was doing by helping inmates but had a markedly different response when they could come closer to home. During the conversation, she mentioned that a family friend who ran a pest control business was trying to hire new employees, so I suggested he hire some of my program’s alumni that had been recently released. She responded matter-of-factly that he certainly couldn’t hire them. After all, they had to go into people’s homes. I remember staring at her blankly for a moment before saying something to the effect of “You really don’t believe in what I do, do you?” For my mother and so many others, prisoners were great if they were a pet project for a volunteer or professional to try to reform, but they should be kept far away from her and other’s houses.

The American public’s tolerance of mistreatment regrettably does not end with forced exclusion from their communities after release. If you ask any middle schooler, they’ll proudly tell you that Abraham Lincoln ended slavery with the Civil War. What they won’t tell you, because their classes don’t teach them, is that slavery is still alive and well within the United States. As Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow³ and Ava Duvernay’s documentary The 13th⁴ brilliantly illuminate, there is an exception to the 13th Amendment that still permits slavery as punishment for a crime. While some states pay inmates a few cents per hour, many like Texas where I used to teach pay them nothing. I spent eight years teaching over 1,000 enslaved men in the so-called land of the free.

It’s also crucial to realize that this bias is not limited to one side of the political aisle. While conservatives have traditionally been in the “tough on crime” camp, liberals are often no better despite their claims to support prison abolition as well as prisoner and former prisoner rights. A prime example of this behavior is in the infamous case of the Stanford rapist, Brock Turner. After being found guilty of three felonies, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced him to six months, rather than the six years recommended by the prosecution, because a longer sentence would “have a severe impact on” Turner.⁵ The national outrage was immediate. Both liberals and conservatives took to Twitter to express their anger at the lenient sentence. Persky was soon recalled by the voters of California, the first judge in the state to be removed since 1977.⁶ Turner’s sentencing became the impetus for revisions to the law which added a mandatory minimum sentence for sexual assault on an unconscious person. The law’s passage was largely driven by progressives in one of the country’s bluest states, a group that ostensibly supports the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences.⁷ Under the right circumstances, even groups committed to abolishing prisons will push for harsher sentences.

This is not to say, of course, that Turner’s actions were not horrific and that he was undeserving of punishment. He certainly did. Despite his recall, however, the fact remains that what Persky said was correct. A long prison sentence would undoubtedly have a “severe impact” on Turner or anyone else. Instead of calling for prison reform that would mean prison sentences would have a less severe impact, the public decided they were perfectly fine with prison being a barbaric and torturous place so long as Turner spent significant time there.

It is also true that some, but not all, of the public’s outrage stemmed from Turner being one more affluent white man whose privilege shielded him from consequences. Those reasons, however, are tangential to their anger. While the history of the American prison system shows that BIPOC and members of lower economic classes have been unfairly arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced compared to their majority counterparts, the public would have been nearly just as furious had a Black man living below the poverty line had received six months for attempted rape. Furthermore, numerous other works, like those from Michelle Alexander and Bruce Western, address the intersections of incarceration, race, and poverty. Instead of trying to replicate their work, this book seeks to examine a different but related systemic bias.

This is a country that decries rape culture, but still makes jokes about prominent figures “dropping the soap” when they are sentenced to prison. It is a place where professors will argue against the disenfranchisement of felons while they work for universities that ask for applicant’s criminal history along with their admissions materials. It is a nation where 2nd Amendment activists will argue for their God-given right to own military grade assault weapons but think that God made an exception for the formerly incarcerated who want to buy a firearm.

At first glance, it might be easy to assume that people hate criminals because of the crimes they commit. That is, that the public hates crime and therefore criminals for perpetrating them. That would seem to align with the notions of the “War on Crime” and being “tough on crime.” On critical reflection, however, it is apparent that citizens of the United States hate criminals far more than they hate crime itself. The primary evidence of this is that the public remains stalwartly opposed to programs that actually reduce the crime rate because they benefit prisoners, namely postsecondary prison education: It wasn’t always this way, however. In this book, I explore the rhetoric, both political and mediated, which got us to the place where we as a country would rather see prisoners die of a deadly disease than the crime rate fall. Through a critical rhetorical history of the past and the present, I argue that public resistance to postsecondary prison education is the result of convictism, a systemic bias against criminals and prisoners that has developed the “War on Crime” into the “War on Criminals.”

Nothing Works… Or Does It?

The infamous Martinson Report came to the conclusion that “nothing works” in the rehabilitation of criminals.⁸ More recent research has demonstrated the opposite conclusion.⁹ The collective body of knowledge regarding rehabilitation within carceral environments shows that education works as a powerful force “to reduce recidivism by enhancing employability, increasing self-esteem and fostering personal growth.”¹⁰ More recently, a study by the RAND Corporation demonstrating a concrete relationship between postsecondary prison education and recidivism led the Obama administration to implement the Second Chance Pell Grant Program, partially restoring federal financial aid to prison college students.¹¹ Clearly, despite the Martinson Report’s claim, something is working.¹²

In general, the recidivism rate in the United States is extremely high. According to the most recent report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, five of every six people released from state prisons will be arrested within nine years.¹³ More specifically, 68% are arrested within the first three years, 79% by the six-year mark, and by nine years 83% have been arrested at least once. The report also found that those previously incarcerated for property and drug crimes were more likely to recidivate than those convicted of violent offenses. Education, however, demonstrated a significant effect in bringing these numbers down. The RAND study found an average reduction of 48% in the recidivism rate of those people who took part in any type of postsecondary education program while in prison.¹⁴ Other research have shown that the recidivism rate for those who complete an Associate’s degree is 14%, down to 5.6% for those leaving with a Bachelor’s degree, and at 0% for those who earn a master’s degree behind bars.¹⁵ These numbers are, of course, averages. Some programs fare far better in reducing recidivism than this. Lee College’s Huntsville Center, where I was previously employed, has reported a reduction down to a 5% recidivism rate for those who completed their Associate’s degree program.¹⁶

Why does education have such a dramatic effect on reducing the crime rate of those released from prison? To find the answer, one must start with the type of crimes they are committing. According to data compiled by the Prison Policy Institute, only 37.4% of the 1.6 million men¹⁷ and women currently incarcerated in federal, state, and local jails and prisons are serving time for violent crimes,¹⁸ meaning that nearly two-thirds of men and women in prison are behind bars for property or drug crimes.¹⁹ This, however, only captures the image of those incarcerated. When looking into arrests overall, the number is even more telling. According to the most recent data available from the FBI, there are 935,000 violent crimes committed annually compa...