Prisoner education and prisoner’s multi?scalarity of identity negotiated from penitentiary discourse

Abstract

The growing interest in identity and language, coupled with increased interest in the relation between identity, language and education, has resulted in a rich amount of work that has informed education, identity and language. To keep abreast of the developments in identity research, the authors propose the research on prisoners’ identity changing from structuralism on identity as a set of generically inherent characteristics to social constructionist perspectives on identity as fluid and emerging in interaction. From the social constructionist perspective on identity, the prisoner’s multi-scalarity of identity is identified through the negotiation from penitentiary discourse indicating that the prisoners inhabit various identities in accordance with the discourses and discursive varieties that they are using, which requires us to alter the lens of seeing prisoners as having a single and stable identity of “Prisoner”. Prisoners’ fluid identity transformed from the legally fixed “prisoner” to the socially acceptable “people”, between which there is prisoners’ multi-scalarity of fluid identity, plays an important role in prisoners’ rehabilitation and socialisation. The successful identity transformation from “prisoner” to “people” means the efficient rehabilitating process of the prison for prisoners. The process of identity circulation has pedagogical implications for prisoner education.