I recently heard someone in a new-ish prison ed program state that before their program, the facility they are serving had had no education programs or offerings. “Well,” they said, “there was some GED and technical programs, but no four year degrees.” I didn’t listen any further because I couldn’t bear to hear someone casually erase the work of years, maybe decades, of ABE/GED instructors, vocational/technical instructors, administrators, coordinators, peer tutors and mentors, IT coordinators, lab assistants, volunteers, volunteer coordinators, corrections administrators and staff, development and fundraising people – everyone it takes to keep educational programs running in prisons.
Four year degrees have been largely missing in prison education programming for the last 30 years, for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons has been the lack of Pell funding. With the return of Pell, the field is exploding with a wave of new interest, in a rush to offer degrees to incarcerated students. While this is an incredibly welcome thing, especially for people who have long been denied access to education, community colleges, some universities, and innumerable volunteer, community, and faith-based organizations have been delivering education programs – without Pell – for close to 30 years.
The return of Pell brings with it potential for an enormous shift in the field of higher ed in prison – its culture, its priorities, its nature - and we stand at the edge of possibility, of rapid growth and change. Higher ed in prison has existed on the edges of education, voc/tech, ABE/GED, sociology, and criminology for three decades and before. It intersects with corrections, law enforcement, crime, and punishment, and is one end of the school to prison pipeline. In some states, education is largely unavailable, and in states where it is available, programs face incredible logistical challenges as they navigate bureaucratic hurdles, culture clashes, and conflicts that arise at the intersections of large governmental systems.
We have welcomed practitioners from all areas: education (all levels), corrections, community-based organizations, creative and arts organizations, reentry, criminal legal and justice reform, abolition, restorative justice, faith based communities, the list is incredibly long and varied. That has been our strength – that we have had the space and generosity to welcome and appreciate such a diversity of voices, experience, gifts, backgrounds, and perspectives. This conscious effort to hold a space that welcomes so many has been largely an instinctive communal effort, held together by a loose network of relationships, knowledge-sharing, and a few more formal structures.
I want us to keep that space and that generosity, but it is not a given that we will, or that we can. The culture of academia, especially prevalent in four year universities, is rife with competition, exploitation, appropriation, and exclusion. While these traits certainly exist within our field already, an unbalanced influx of these cultural elements could strengthen their toxicity, to the detriment of our practice, our community, and, ultimately, our students.
We don’t have a governing body, and I’m not arguing we should, but that means we may not have shared agreements about why we do this work, where we want to grow, how we want to grow, and who we want to be - collectively. At the moment, it is up to us – as individuals – to make the choices that will help grow our field in a creative, caring, and life-affirming direction. To move in that direction, we have to make individual choices to understand and acknowledge who has led this work, where it has been nurtured and by whom, what those people hoped and dreamed for, and how we grow and expand their vision.
Any commitment to liberatory practice requires that we actively work against competition, exploitation, appropriate, and exclusion - for ourselves and others. I know that is a hard task because they are the oxygen of all academia, so normalized that even recognizing them can be a challenge. Refusing to engage with them is even more difficult, and can have hard consequences. But this is our work, to recognize and name the currents that move and shape us, and choose whether we want to exist in those shapes.
As our field expands and changes, becomes more complex and fluid, we have an opening to practice being fractal – small as large, large as small – and examining our own relationship to change. How we are as individuals creates and shapes our personal experience, even as it contributes to our communal experience. It is my prayer that we move into this next phase together, as generous, curious, and loving beings, committed to learning and growing together.