Politics and Lasagna: Political Education in prisons – a qualitative empirical approach

• In Event: Juvenile Justice 4. Novel Approaches in Juvenile Justice

Abstract

Whereas political education was largely dethematised in the German discourse - especially in prisons - a few years ago, the discipline is currently experiencing a renaissance. Today prisons are increasingly being considered as a field of action for political education. The qualitative study presented dealt with the interactions between total institutions and political education.
Within an exploratory field stay in a juvenile detention center in Germany, various forms of data were collected, including group discussions, participant observations, files, photos and workshop discussions. Data was analysed according to the Grounded Theory Methodology of Strauß and Corbin (1996) and, building on this, with the situation analysis of Clarke (2008).
The results indicate that the young people are interested in politics and follow the (prevailing) media discourse. They also have political concerns that are largely oriented towards the inadequate provision of their (basic) needs - here, among others, the right to (sufficient, clean) food, the right to privacy, to human and physical closeness. Young people are able to articulate these concerns as genuine political concerns. At the same time, the institutional and (inter-)personnel design of the coercive context of juvenile detention as a total institution offers little room for political education oriented towards the development of maturity and critical faculties. Instead, various institutionalised strategies of prevention can be reconstructed for the context of prisons.
The results should be discussed in the light of a critical and hegemonic analysis, which also asks why these conditions are exactly like this and not different. The results of the study contribute to the discourse on the inpatient and closed placement of young people and the design of these as places of education as well as to the self-image of the profession of political education.

Author

• Lisa Katharina Tölle, Universität Siegen