Higher Education in Prison

Abstract

Critical pedagogy advances a belief that everyone should have access to liberatory education even outside institutions of higher education, which then can democratize unequal social relations. This chapter describes the Community Education Project (CEP), and the current discourse on incarceration in the United States that shapes how participants in CEP and those around them can imagine incarcerated people as students. It presents a case for treating incarcerated people as a special population, and discusses the individual challenges in applying critical pedagogy in prison. The chapter illustrates complex meanings of the category student in carceral spaces and suggests ways in which educators can facilitate the creation of a hybrid identity incarcerated student. It argues that this identity creates temporary, yet persistent, disruption of the systems of power that both prevent these people from accessing education and also normalizes education in prison as a means of further control of this population.