Abstract
I spent many years before my incarcerations as a popular educator for left-wing trade unions and social movements in South Africa. I took my role as a critical pedagogue of the Freirian stripe quite seriously. However, after five years of working as a twenty cent an hour teacher’s aide in various federal and California state correctional facilities I’d lowered my pedagogical horizons to helping people pass their GED math test. 1 I had rigorously studied the mock exams, designed a plethora of practice tests, and tirelessly drilled the motivated and the not so motivated on the wonders of simultaneous linear equations and the Pythagorean theorem. While in free life my workshop plans overflowed with learner activity and critiques of neoliberalism, the watchful eye of prison authorities and my own paranoias had reduced my creativity pragmatic questions: applying the formulas for areas and volumes to construction jobs or relating probability to the crap games that regularly dotted the yard. Then opportunity came knocking in the strangest of places: the ultra-repressive, racially-charged yards of High Desert State Prison. Through a convergence of coincidence, luck and my own initiative, I found the space to dialog about the vagaries and interpretations of globalization and political economy, momentarily transforming our militarily structured classroom into a space of selfactivity and dialog.
Highlights
Located in far northeastern California, the economy of this former mining and logging town of 13,000 (2000 census) revolves around three prisons: a medium and low security facility known as CCC, a minimum security camp which supplies fire fighters to the state forestry services, and High Desert a modern high and medium security penitentiary
While I spent some time on one of the Level Four yards, the education experience I write about took place on a Level Three, medium security site that housed roughly nine hundred people
Two aspects of the culture of High Desert and the California state prison system are crucial to the context of my educational intervention
Summary
I spent many years before my incarcerations as a popular educator for left-wing trade unions and social movements in South Africa. Opportunity came knocking in the strangest of places: the ultra-repressive, racially-charged yards of High Desert State Prison. In this article I will describe a set of workshops on the global economic crisis in 2008 that I ran in the at High Desert State Prison in California. I will begin by providing some background about the prison as well as outlining the education program at High Desert. As Stephen Richards has pointed out, the voices of outside experts often drown out those of people who have experienced incarceration. While there is a host of useful and at times brilliant writings on prison education, many of which foreground the voice of the incarcerated (Davidson 1995; Trounstine 2001; Lamb 2003, 2007; Walker 2004; Tregea and Larmour 2009, Hartnett 2011), precious few “convict educators” have had the opportunity to speak. Practice our own forms of critical pedagogy under circumstances even far more constrained and at time dangerous than those faced by teachers who come from the street
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