Educating Adults in Prison

Educating adults in prison

8303

Educating adults in prison

Eleanor Parkinson, University of Leicester

This paper will discuss the role of the Department of Adult Education at Leicester University in the education programme of six penal establishments in the East Midlands region. It will, by inference, be commenting on the education which is provided in those establishments and the attitudes of the Home Office to the education of those in custody. Claims will not be made, however, about any specific establishment outside the area covered by the University project.

Very little research has so far taken place in the world of prison education and as a consequence many of the conclusions reached in this paper are light on grounded theory and heavily experiential. Questions will be posed about the objectives of an education service for those in custody and for those involved in the custodial process, and in posing those questions, some of the inconsistencies which have hitherto characterised Home office thinking about prison education may be highlighted.

In the geographical area covered by the University project it would seem particularly pertinent to ask the following questions:

1. What are the official objectives of education in prisons and are Education Officers and prison teachers sufficiently aware of them?

2. What role should outside educational agencies, such as university departments of adult education play in the prison education system, and are they in danger of colluding with a system of incarceration which is ineffective, inadequate and inhumane?

3. If the answer to the last question is ‘yes’, and many involved in the project have thought it is, are there any advantages to the inmate student which could compensate for this difficult ethical position? Can education help to rehabilitate, is it an entertaining time-filler, does it open up new intellectual horizons?

On the assumption that many colleagues in departments of adult education will have only a scanty knowledge of prison life and the part formal education plays in that, brief mention will be made of custodial arrangements in this country and the way education has come to play a part in these. An attempt to describe something of the history of the project at Leicester will follow and the paper will end with some tentative comments and evaluations.

Custodial arrangements.

Reference will be made only to adult male establishments. Women's prisons, catering for only about 3% of the prison population, were not included in the project and establishments for young offenders, because of their special needs, have played only a peripheral role.

For adults there are three types of establishments at present:

1. Local

2. Training

3. Dispersal

1.Local prisons are generally our ‘human dustbins. They are Victorian in architecture with all the resulting strains on drains and over-crowding in cells which were meant for one would-be penitent convict.

All local prisons are closed, obsolete and operate under mechanistic regimes. Part of the reason for this is because their primary function is to serve the courts and to process newly convicted prisoners through to their appropriate establishments. They also serve as places of detention for some prisoners who are serving short sentences (under 18 months). Local prisons detain over 40% of the prison population on a daily basis.

2.Training prisons have been recently criticised because they are unable to train, although this is beyond the brief of this paper. Such establishments house convicted prisoners who have been categorised according to their security risk. Hence training prisons exist for 4 types of inmates:

i) Category A prisoners - those who are deemed highly dangerous and a security risk

ii) Category B prisoners - those for whom escape should be made very difficult

iii) Category C prisoners - those deemed to be without the ability or resources to escape

iv) Category D prisoners - those who can be reasonably trusted in open conditions.

3.Dispersal prisons are perimeter secure establishments which contain the 1% of the prison population considered too dangerous to be confined together in one establishment.

The aims and objectives of prison regimes, whether overt or implicit, impinge to a considerable degree upon the education department of a prison, and there is no doubt that the prison service has had great difficulties in deciding what the formal objectives of imprisonment should be.

Rightly or wrongly, a good proportion of the general public would put the protection of society and its individual members very high on the list of priorities, and for most of us who have been steeped in a tradition of nineteenth century philosophy, punishment and deterrence may come next. Character reform, another nineteenth century concept, reincarnated in the training and treatment philosophy, is yet another objective to which at least lip-service is paid.

Since the publication of the May Report in 1979, the emphasis has shifted somewhat. In addition to the requirements mentioned above, prisons should now aim to:

i) create an environment which could assist inmates to respond and contribute to society as positively as possible,

ii) preserve and promote an inmate’s self-respect,

iii) minimise the harmful effects of removal from normal life, and

iv) prepare (and assist) an inmate for discharge.

In other words, the philosophy of ‘positive custody’ embodied in the May Report was an acceptance of the fact that whilst there was little a prison might do to train or educate an offender to become a law-abiding citizen, it was possible to create a regime which would help a prisoner attain or regain positive attitudes towards himself and towards the society to which he will eventually return.

Whatever the guiding philosophy, it has always been envisaged that education should play a part. Its role in the early days of the prison service was far clearer than it is now - although its provision in adult establishments was patchy. Mid-Victorian penal philosophy contained the conviction that education in the form of reading and writing, scriptural and moral instruction and industrial training offered the best chances of instilling respect for the law. The provision of education in penal institutions, particularly for young offenders, developed from the discovery that criminals were generally under-educated. Inevitably, success rates, measured in the number of ex-offenders not convicted for two years after release, were to illustrate that the causal link which prison reformers had forged between criminology and the lack of education was far too simple. The repressive penal measures of the later Victorian period were to dampen these enthusiasms for educational advances. The Departmental Committee of 1895 proposed that prisons were to punish and to deter and it was on the basis of these two principles that the prison service moved into the 20th century. This uneasy alliance of punishment, deterrence, treatment and reform have posed problems for educationalists in prisons which have remained stubbornly intransigent throughout this century.

Education departments now have a full-time Education officer, and some full- and part-time staff, who are LEA employees seconded to the Home office. Education takes its place as one of a number of prison departments covering industry, administration, psychology, probation and medical services. Since 1964, Prison Rules have laid down that every person able to profit by education should have the chance to do so. Rule 30, for example, states that programmes of evening education classes shall be arranged at every prison (and that) reasonable facilities shall be afforded to prisoners, who wish to do so, to improve their education by correspondence courses or private study or to practice handicrafts in their spare time.

In theory then, prisons are now able to provide remedial, vocational, recreational and academic education for inmates, and the Home Office claims that the expansion of these four categories has placed adult education in prisons in the forefront of adult education provision in the country as a whole.

However, a remarkably small portion of the overall prison budget is set aside for education - something less than 3%. This is despite the fact that Mark Carlisle, the Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1981, stated his belief that appropriate educational opportunities were one of the best founded hopes of rehabilitating offenders and in the same year, Lord Belstead as Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Home Office conceded that prison education had a vital role to play in crime prevention.

In short, prison education in 1983 is in a state of flux and uncertainty. It is demoralised by the financial restrictions of recent years, yet hopeful of future improvements. Above all, educationalists are confused. At one and the same time, education is to be a central feature in an ill-defined ‘positive regime’, directed towards a hazy concept of personal development, client-centred and purposeful in the face of constant criticism. In some way, education is to bring about good lives (prison rules), develop social conscience (May Report), rehabilitate (the Education Minister), and be an agent of crime prevention (Home office Under-Secretary of State).

Into this somewhat confusing situation the Department of Adult Education at Leicester University trod, some would argue, unwarily. The project was established in 1978 with part DES and part Home Office funding. The present organiser took up the post with two years of the project left to run and, at that stage it would be only fair to say that the Department did not really know if it had any role to play in prisons. Indeed, the mismatch between university extra-mural provision and prison educational needs was very obvious to both sides. Prison staff were very guarded. One of the aims of the project was to collate information about attitudes to education in penal establishments which could be presented as a report to the Home Office, and at a time when the prison service had its own particular problems and grievances, the dangers of ‘stirring up hornets’ nests' by ill-advised questions was all too apparent. Prisons, after all, had been for many years, in the business of concealing information. They were not very good at giving it away.

On the other side, certain Departmental colleagues were cautious. Three major doubts were expressed:

1. The standard of work would be too basic to merit the Department’s involvement.

2. In the best tradition, the essentially liberalising experience of adult education could not flourish in the repressive prison environment.

3. The Department was in danger of becoming a consenting part of a system of incarceration of which many colleagues were deeply critical.

In the days when programme expansion was encouraged, it was relatively easy to make up a large prison programme using tutors with a very wide range of attitudes to prison teaching. Their objectives ranged from some very basic attempts at behaviour modification by ‘knocking some sense into their silly heads’, through to the nondirective approach which had as its aim simply to ‘help men do their bird’. If there was no consensus of views about what the project was attempting in prisons, comfort was at least taken from the fact that it seemed there was a similar lack of agreement amongst Education Officers and in the establishments we visited.

In those early days, the subjects the project offered depended more on pragmatic considerations and the needs of prison management than on students’ choice, and it was certainly true that the University’s contribution was often seen as an apparently free extra facility to be fitted into existing timetables where appropriate. In the first year of the project, courses were offered in:

1. Play-reading and literature appreciation

2. Industrial Sociology

3. Psychology (entitled Understanding Human Behaviour)

4. Current Affairs discussion groups

5. Art and Design.

In practice, it was found that each prison was individual and that its approach to education was consequently determined by a unique combination of staff attitudes and demands, the perspectives and enthusiasm of Education Officers, and environmental considerations. At the local prison, for example, where space was at a premium, recreation and education were provided on a rota basis, classes being accommodated in converted cells or cabins or sometimes even on landings. The role of the local establishment, to service the courts and transport convicted prisoners to other prisons, worked against the development of a consistent programme of adult education classes and tended to foster attitudes in line with the execution of justice rather than the provision of a rehabilitative or even a positive experience. This type of regime imposed obvious limitations on the project's staff. Apart from the difficulties of cramped accommodation, the most significant limitation on educational expansion lay in the fact that the local prison housed a floating and continually changing population, with the result that a class rarely contained the same students from one week to the next. Each session had to be a complete lesson as well as an entertainment in itself, a factor which not only made the planning of courses difficult, if not impossible, but also inhibited course feedback and the assessment of the individual student's progress.

The greatest impact of such a regime, however, has been its impact upon staff and inmate attitudes. In the former case it was often possible to detect a degree of hostility towards education and towards outsiders involved in prison education. Equally difficult to battle against was the apathy such regimes engendered in inmates. Very few inmates took advantage of such education facilities as were available and even fewer used classes for anything more than an escape from their cells. In this situation, new university tutors were often quickly disillusioned or frustrated, the restrictions and negativity surrounding them requiring a great deal of tolerance and insight.

By contrast, at the open prison included in the project, where theoretically education was most relevant to the needs of the pre and post release stages, there was greater freedom to experiment with day and evening provision, although it seemed much of the recent criticism of inertia levelled against open prisons was reflected in its educational policy.

The dispersal prison has obviously been most attractive in terms of facilities and opportunities to work consistently with motivated long-term prisoners. It offered the potential for introducing full-time members of the academic staff to prison classes thereby ensuring the development of both general and specialist courses of a higher academic standard. By this means, it has been possible to foster, in some students at least, more positive attitudes towards themselves and towards the educational process. Above all, it appeared to the project tutors that they could make some contribution to resolving the paradox which is often central to the character of those who find themselves in prison - the uneasy combination of egocentricity of thought and lack of personal esteem. The development of discursive skills, logical argument and critical analysis has been encouraged by tutors as means of increasing moral and ethical awareness which may enable the student to break free from the bounds of self-orientated thinking. At the same time, classes were aimed at increasing the self-confidence of individual members whose moral and cognitive judgements were of value to the progress of the class as a whole.

The Penal Education project has continued since 1981 on a permanent basis. Over these last two years the Home Office has become more lenient about outsiders in prisons, and Governors generally have become more tolerant and sometimes even enthusiastic about the work of the project. The range of courses which the Department of Adult Education is now able to offer in prison is consequently more diverse and much more in tune with the demands of students. Plays are now written and produced as well as just appreciated. The more esoteric subjects of archaeology, history and architecture have become surprisingly popular, and psychology, media studies, criminology, Third World Studies, economics, politics and Trade Union Studies have all become accepted parts of the curriculum. Computer Studies and science courses are planned and management courses for staff have been running on a regular basis for some time. In turn, prison staff have provided invaluable contributions to the Department’s criminology and penology courses and student-inmates have continued to support the project both in terms of their attendance at classes and their written encouragement, sometimes received long after they have left prison.

A dilemma remains for those working on the project which is, perhaps, insoluble. It must appear to some that we are colluding with a penal system which is ineffective both in preventing crime and providing a positive environment for those in custody. At the same time, the involvement of part-time and full-time University staff can make the experience of prison more intellectually stimulating for both short-term students and for the increasing number of long-termers who need to gain the sense of purpose and achievement which adult education can provide.

Reproduced from 1983 Conference Proceedings, pp. 16-21  SCUTREA 1997