Prison Education Reduces Recidivism by Over 40 Percent. Why Aren’t We Funding More of It?

[sibelian]

9. In fact, that's the only acceptable evidence of the deal being closed

...from OUR perspective, i.e. clearly we're seeing criminals abandoning the criminal "identity", so they must be getting their side of the "bargain".

From the ex-con's perspective it's a completely different matter - we don't get to know what counts to him as external evidence of his acceptability to society without his telling us. Having a job, being a father, being a trusted employee, all sorts of symbolic processes which are replacements for crime are meaningful to us but for him it might well be much simpler things like people taking him seriously in conversations, people feeling sorry for him for the bad things that have happened to him, people telling him the truth, people believing him when he tells the truth, people helping him, people being grateful for his help. We who have never been caged take so many of these things for granted. Ex-cons still live in a box when they're released from prison, and if the things he thinks should close the deal remain outside his box...

The absence of normal social interaction is incredibly damaging to the human psyche. It's much more dangerous than people realise. It doesn't matter how intelligent the pariah is, or how strong-willed, or how skilled they are at managing their own responses, internally and externally, to the failure of society to feed back on their behaviour in wholesome ways, if he is cast out the damage is still done.

A lot of the time the things that we will tell such a man he should value are things that yield gains for us if he values them at our demand, success, financial security, friends, a family... These are things that we want.

If he has had a life where these structures have been damaged or their value delegitimised he will have his own ideas about what constitutes good feedback from the rest of us on his worth and it will very often be entirely ordinary things he can see that other people get that elude him in one way or another, and we often don't notice or explicitly don't care whether or not he gets them. If he's had a damaging family background (which is incredibly common in convicts) then his understanding of his worth very often going to be supported by incredibly basic things like having some faith that the people around him won't want to beat him up or steal things from him. That's some steps below being a father or having a job.

We need to be careful in closing the deal, he has to believe us when we tell him he's become "one of us", so we have to be telling the truth.

Education doesn't do that. All it does is provide a hoop for him to jump through that makes it likely that we'll end up considering him acceptable. This will not be lost on him. It's us telling him what feedback he should anticipate and accept as positive, which in and of itself doesn't close the deal.

That being said, I can't think of any better way of approaching the shift in dynamic necessary to provide the space for him to change. It's about managing the environment so that certain outcomes are more likely. If we set a test for him, which I think is the real reason we're doing the education thing, several things happen (which you will, of course, already know, but I want to set them out as much for clarifying my own thoughts as anything else, please forgive the brain dump of obvious ideas...):

1. We give him a chance to be believed. Not to pass the test or to be better educated, but something much more primal - we construct a process in which he can behave as if he wants to be accepted and we can believe that he does, i.e. trust. I think that's actually much more important than the education itself. The knowledge gained becomes the overtly signified reward for his allowing us to test him and make judgements of his worth, but the real reward is us believing that he wants to change which is a step towards closing the deal.

2. It sets up a relationship where he is subordinate to an authority figure and this relationship isn't poisonous. As I'm sure you'll already know, many convicts have terrible mechanisms for dealing with the concept of authority, and it's typically because of appallingly abusive authority figures in their past. If subordination has cost them rather than yielded gains for them or social structures in which they have found themselves previously, the concept of authority itself is damaged. This isn't normal in ordinary human society and providing them with a mechanism whereby they can re-map their reactions to the concept not only symbolises their reconnection to society but also provides an arena within which they can consider their self-worth openly and safely. Where self worth is connected to employment, family or other kinds of personal development these structures usually include material consequences for the convict, sometimes very serious consequences, as do the social systems within a prison, where everything is all about "respect" and violence is common. In an educational environment, you can fail and the only real consequence is that you failed... and then the authority figure can help which, again, is a step towards closing the deal.

3. He will find himself in a place where he is allowed not to know things. This is really important! Loads of these guys grow up in environments where the emphasis on personal status is unbelievably intense. His actions become divorced from his status (unless his fellow convicts sneer at his efforts...). The student is not less than the teacher.

Etc, etc, blah blah. You knew all that. EVERYBODY already knows ALL of that.

Anyhow, I'm strongly behind the idea that the knowledge gained through education of the incarcerated is clearly of value but in conjunction with the personal processes through which it is gained it acquires far more value.

The thing that amazes me about arguments against education for convicts is that they seem to stem from astonishingly cartoonish ideas about what convicts actually are. Everyone wants them to be moustache-twirling evil types that tie damsels to railtracks.

The opposition to education for convicts stems from idiotic bloody-minded resentment. It's typically extremely self-absorbed and rests on grubby, slithering "how-come-he-gets-STUFF-and-not-me" or "we're REWARDING him for being EVIL" type thinking.

I support education for the incarcerated wholeheartedly. I also acknowledge the reasoning behind arguments against it, but I think the reasoning is incomplete and also mistaking the goal of such education for simple, woolly liberal "concern".

It's true that only the convict can change himself, but it's also true that it's not just him that might prevent this. Sealing him into the "box of shame" and then just kicking him out at the end of his sentence is pretty much guaranteed to set him up for further trouble, and, if nothing else, we will end up paying the price for that with him, again.

To me and you and everyone else on this board all these things are, of course, incredibly obvious, sorry if I'm making you read too much. I guess I saw your response as an opportunity to put it all out there...