Captive Study: The Political, Intellectual, and Ideological Dimensions of Prison Education

Abstract

This critical ethnographic study examines how education is conceptualized, organized, and experienced at Riverside Correctional Facility, a medium-security men’s prison in rural Pennsylvania. Specifically, it explores how incarcerated students, university faculty and staff, and the superintendent of the prison understand and articulate the purpose of education within prisons; the institutional policies, practices, relations of power, and discursive formations that shape the administration and delivery of education in prisons; and how incarcerated students and university faculty and staff navigate and interpret their roles and relationships within prison education programs. Drawing on theorizations of antiblackness and carcerality, and critical ethnographic data collection methods of interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this study found that Riverside Correctional Facility’s prison education program functions as a means by which the prison can manage and control incarcerated individuals to maintain institutional order. The study further found that university faculty and staff, as well as non-incarcerated students, are implicated in the reproduction of these carceral logics while simultaneously being objects of surveillance, control, and policing themselves. A central contribution of this study is its provision of empirical evidence of antiblackness in educational settings, particularly within the context of prison education. By documenting how educational programs are shaped by and contribute to broader structures of racialized control, this study advances critical understandings of how antiblackness operates within institutions ostensibly dedicated to learning and rehabilitation