Prison Education – a Northern European wicked policy problem?

‘Wicked policy problems’ are defined as complex, not fully understood by policy makers, highly resistant to change and seemingly immune to any evidence likely to bring about change for the better. Policy, in the case of prison education, is not necessarily driven by what works and is often not evidenced-based. It is increasingly positioned by political expediency and the signalling of politicians’ ‘toughness on crime’. In this chapter I look at three distinctly different prison education systems in Northern Europe; in England, Germany and Norway. I examine the extent to which discourses associated with both the marketisation of education and penal populism have influenced the construction and facilitation of prison education in all three countries. Finally, I argue that, to varying degrees, the reconstruction of prison ‘education’ into low-cost job skills training contributes to the domination of policies that speak more to public moral panic and the need to cut the economic costs of welfare than to the rehabilitation of prisoners