Aiming and Promising, and Recognising the Contradictions and Problems

Abstract

The global prison population continues to grow, and only a relatively small proportion of the world’s incarcerated people have access to or undertake formal education (Gottschalk, 2006, pp. 1, 181; Kilgore, 2015, p. 18). Delivering education in prisons not only presents logistical and technical challenges, but is also a sensitive and culturally charged issue for governments and communities. Governments seeking to deliver a ‘tough on crime’ or ‘law and order’ political agenda with policies that drive up the rates of incarceration may also find that a concomitant or complementary action to their approach is cutting off prisoners’ access to education. The punitive impulses that drive the era of mass incarceration can also drive the restriction of education to people in prison and further drive the cutting of funds to education programs (Stern, 2014). Spending tax payer money on the education of prisons is well described as an emotional issue (Behan, 2021). Pointing to the discernible connections between anti-recidivism and education (see for example Esperian 2010; Ellison et al., 2017; Battams et al., 2021) may not be enough to dispel community concern or neutralise political discourse regarding criticism of using public money to educate prisoners. Certain measures, such as the cutting of the Pell Funding in the mid-1990s, are well documented instances of the reduction of resources for prisoner education, with the associated outcome of restricting education to a large population of people from minorities (Lillis, 1994; Slater, 1995).