The Role of Incarcerated People in Creating Prison Higher Education

• In Event: Roundtable: Critical Perspectives on Teaching

Abstract

Often prison higher education is presented as a measure produced and maintained exclusively from and by external agents relegating incarcerated people as passive unilateral recipients of rehabilitative programming. In this discussion we draw from qualitative interviews with formally incarcerated students to detail how the higher education process was influenced and maintained from within. Ultimately, we suggest that those on the inside play a critical and central role in the creation and evolution of prison higher education.

Authors

• Jordan Nowotny, Fairleigh Dickinson University

• Amy Shlosberg, Fairleigh Dickinson University