At the End of the Pipeline: The Importance of Literacy Education Behind Bars

• In Event: School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Push-Out and Mass Incarceration

Abstract

This presenter, a college professor who has taught writing courses at a maximum security prison for over 15 years, raises issues that have arisen out of her work with incarcerated adults serving life sentences. She focuses on the themes and patterns that emerge for the creative writing of 15 men, ages 18-55, serving life, 12 of whom were incarcerated while still juveniles.
Using a teacher-research approach (Cochran-Smith, and Lytle, 2009), the author collected data from a creative writing class for adult offenders at a maximum-security prison. She was the primary teacher for the course and had access to them for three hours per week for 16 weeks. Data sources include:
• Field notes and critical memos from 16 creative writing sessions
• 5 creative writing assignments from each incarcerated writer
• videotaped readings by incarcerated writers
• Focused Interviews with 10 incarcerated writers
• Focused Interviews with correctional facility personnel, including the warden, associate warden and the education director
Observational and written data were analyzed by coding themes across interviews and conducting a content analysis of the written works of the incarcerated writers. The analysis yielded patterns of content, including idealization of childhood memories, longing for romantic relationships, anger with carceral practices and realignment of self-narrative. Interviews with both incarcerated writers and Department of Corrections personnel yielded several themes across interviews and between categories of subjects including the role of literacy as both a corrective and a release, the relationship between recidivism and education and general issues of freedom of expression.

According to correctional officials the writers participating in the creative writing program were 80% less likely to engage in behavior warranting reprimand in the cellblocks. The presenter will offer evidence that this population is motivated to learn by a desire to understand the circumstances of their lives and to explain their previous life choices. Through interactive examination of representative student work, participants in the symposium will discover evidence that the pedagogy of creative writing, with its emphasis on identity construction and narration, seems to provide opportunities for self-reflection as well as powerful clues to where the life courses of these incarcerated students might have been altered (Author, 2019).

Through successful literacy learning experiences, most incarcerated learners are able to readjust their sense of themselves as writers and readers with literate lives. They readjust their stance within the context of the prison, begin to seek advanced degrees (Yagelski, 2000) and several have initiated contact with victims or their victims’ families through the Restorative Justice program at the prison. In some ways these incarcerated students attempt to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories. Finally, recent research reveals (Bard Prison Initiative, 2007) that the more education an inmate has upon release, the less likely he or she is to reoffend.

Author

• Deborah A. Appleman, Carleton College