RiUscire (Rete Universitaria SocioCulturale per l'Istruzione e il Recupero in Carcere) 2014-1-IT02-KA204-003517. Partners: Università per Stranieri di Siena (coordinator); Université Paris VII Diderot; Otto-Friedrich Universität-Bamberg; Fundação Fernando Pessoa-Universidade Fernando Pessoa; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Istituto Superiore di Studi Penitenziari (ISSP), Rome

Benucci, Antonella

Birello, Marilisa

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Antonella Benucci, Marilisa BirelloImmigrants and prison: good practicesin Europe¹Abstract: Within the RiUscire project an important section was devoted to thecollection and analysis of good practices that may support the linguistic and so-cial integration of a particular group of adult migrants: those in the prison sys-tems of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and Portugal. The collection of these prac-tices is necessary and pivotal to start a shared action at a European level. Bestpractices were surveyed through analysis grids that ensure respect for diversityand the right to rehabilitative actions thanks to linguistic and communicativecompetences as well as professional development.Résumé : Un volet important du projet RiUscire a été consacré à la collecte et à l’a-nalyse des bonnes pratiques susceptibles de soutenir l’intégration linguistique et so-ciale d’un groupe particulier de migrants adultes, incarcérés en Espagne, en Italie,en France, en Allemagne et au Portugal. Le recueil de ces pratiques est nécessaire etessentiel pour lancer une action commune au niveau européen. Les bonnes pra-tiques ont été examinées à l’aide de grilles d’analyse qui garantissent le respectde la diversité et le droit à des mesures de réinsertion grâce à des compétences lin-guistiques et de communication, ainsi qu’au développement professionnel.1 IntroductionRiUscire² intends to take advantage of the multi/plurilingual and intercultural di-mension of the prison context to turn it into a place of resources, empowerment This article is the result of a collaborative effort: Antonella Benucci wrote sections 1 and 4,and Marilisa Birello wrote sections 2 and 3. RiUscire (Rete Universitaria SocioCulturale per l’Istruzione e il Recupero in Carcere) 2014-1-IT02-KA204-003517. Partners: Università per Stranieri di Siena (coordinator); Université Paris VII Diderot;Otto-Friedrich Universität-Bamberg; Fundação Fernando Pessoa–Universidade Fernando Pessoa;Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Istituto Superiore di Studi Penitenziari (ISSP), Rome.Antonella Benucci, Università per Stranieri di Siena, Italy, E-mail: benucci@unistrasi.itMarilisa Birello (corresponding author), Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, Spain,E-mail: marilisa.birello@uab.catDOI 10.1515/9783110477498-051, © 2017 Antonella Benucci, Marilisa Birello, published by DeGruyter.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.and rehabilitation through integrated training courses addressed to foreign pris-oners, prison staff and teachers working in prison. The goals of the project are:– to promote and utilize the plurilingualism and cultural diversity inherent inprison contexts;– to promote the education of inmates through intercultural communicationand the improvement of linguistic-cultural competencies and linguistic-professional abilities;– to motivate educational action and personal development/improvement;– to provide operators and teachers with tools for better understanding theprocesses of communication with foreign inmates.The recognition of what is being done in European prisons aims to identify goodpractices and their typology and to propose a model for better promoting adulteducation in the prison context through intercultural communication, develop-ing the linguistic-cultural and linguistic-professional skills of detainees for socialand occupational reintegration. Finally, we ask ourselves whether and how apractice can be considered a model if it is reused in other socio-linguistic andsocio-cultural contexts.2 Good practices: a definitionThe terminology referring to good examples is varied and controversial: some-times best practice is used, other times good practice, or also learning practice.We prefer to use good practice because we do not want to consider only thoseareas of learning and we believe that best is limiting in that it does not leaveroom for improvement, which instead is our ultimate goal.By “good practices” we mean the best examples of practice in the fields ofpersonal and professional development, education and instruction, approaches,instruments, and use of technology, etc., used to advance the conditions and re-insertion of inmates. These practices must also be easily transferable to othersimilar situations with similar goals.In the penitentiary context, a broad variety of courses are organized, but notall of them can be considered as good practices. Good practices are educational,pedagogical and treatment actions or activities that, in the socio-educationalpenitentiary context, allow the actors to achieve the expected results.³ According Regarding European prisons, see among others Hawley, Murphy & Souto-Otero (2013), PuyRoca and Aliaga (2007), Benucci (2015).372 Antonella Benucci, Marilisa Birelloto Banelytė, Sternadel and Brožaitis, they constitute desirable models for allEuropean countries and a starting point for the development of new sharedgood practice:The aim of the identification and sharing of good practices is to capture evidence on theeffectiveness of a practice, to improve its visibility and dissemination so that it becomeseasily accessible and reusable by all informed stakeholders: decision-makers, socioeco-nomic partners, NGOs, academia, media, and civil society at large, and facilitates learningfrom others. It is expected that the sharing of good practices will inspire further change and“better practice”. (Banelytė, Sternadel, and Brožaitis 2015: 5)In RiUscire good practice is defined by educational as well as pedagogical activ-ity, action or treatments (projects, guidelines, educational material, internshipsor work experience etc.) that allow the agents to set actions to reach the plannedresults in the specific socio-educational context of a prison.This paper provides some general reflections of the most common prisonpractices in the five European Countries of the project (Italy, Germany, France,Portugal and Spain); the context of the study is limited to a sample from thedata collected in different prisons.3 Methodology and instrumentsThe analysis of good practices in RiUscire was based on 10 general criteria select-ed according to the most frequent research in this field (Benucci and Cortés 2014;Benucci 2015):1. effectiveness (results on target with the objectives of the project and suitableconcerning the direct and indirect effects on the final recipients in relation toprofessional reintegration);2. efficiency (positive balance between the resources used for the realizationand the results obtained);3. coherence (inner and outer coherence, that is adult education and EU recom-mendations);4. reproducibility (in new, similar or different contexts from the situation inwhich it was originally realized);5. level of involvement and satisfaction (supports the technical, cultural andhuman resources of the reference target, evokes positive attitudes amongthe participants);6. innovation (new and creative solutions for the project/process; it encouragesthe active participation of the beneficiaries and other subjects; it involves so-cial agents, from without the penitentiary context);Immigrants and prison: good practices in Europe 3737. accessibility (practicality in the organization and participation);8. added value (produces changes in the penitentiary and social context, e.g.reducing the rate of second offenses committed, improving the competencesof teachers and penitentiary staff);9. institutional recognition (if the practice is recognized, respected or promotedat institutional level);10. sustainability (founded on existing resources or able to create new ones,ability to carry on producing effects well over the duration of the project).We are aware that the parameters used for measuring the results of a practice areoften subjective and not standardized.Obviously this initial analysis is inherently superficial, and can only give anorientation and overview of our work. Instead, the criterion of innovation offerssufficient proof of reliability because it allows us to highlight those practices andcountries which stand out among the others for their originality.Keeping in mind the above-mentioned elements, we created a form contain-ing the best combination of the elements observed during our investigations. Inparticular, the form includes a series of sections with different levels of both de-scriptive and analytic data. For each practice identified by the internal and exter-nal collaborators of the project, a form is completed, following these sections:country and practice number; concise description of the project (title, program-matic context, sector, contact person, budget); description of the material/speci-fications of the projects (aims, description, contextualization, innovative as-pects); informative data about the project (practice) participants; contactinformation; availability of good practices material; description of the RiUsciredata base.The completed forms were then sent to 16 referees from different countries,external to the project but with solid competences in the following fields: com-munication, language didactics, evaluation of project and didactic/operational/scientific material. The referees were asked to evaluate each practice based onthe description given on each form (and when possible, examining the practiceitself) and invited to award a score from 1 to 5 (low to high) for each of the 10criteria. To be considered “good”, a practice needed to have a minimum scoreof 3.374 Antonella Benucci, Marilisa Birello4 Data and conclusionsAs we are writing this paper 120 good practices have been collected (still in pro-gress), of which ten were considered not good. In total we have 108 good prac-tices: 61 had a score between 3 and 3.9 and 47 had a score between 4 and 5.Regarding the scores from 1 to 5 (1 = unsatisfactory, 5 = very good) on eachcriterion, we can affirm that the average never goes below satisfactory (3). Thetwo highest-scoring criteria in the corpus are reproducibility in other contexts(4.16) and the degree of involvement and satisfaction (4.12), while the lowestare institutional recognition (3.46) and degree of innovation (3.58). Innovation isquite strongly present in Italy and Spain, with a variety of practices and encour-agement of such diversity. By contrast, Portugal is among the least innovative,with fewer genuinely re-educational interventions.Here, in order, are the most common activities within the typologies consid-ered:– Job training (35%), with consistent collaboration between prisons and com-panies to facilitate reinsertion of inmates in the world of work, with the pres-ence of specific courses (i.e. online cookery class; sound technician; greenspaces maintenance): most common in Italy, least common in Germany.– Languages/forms of expression (19.2%.), i.e. theatre, dance, photography,radio broadcasting: most common in Germany, absent in Spain.– Social reconstruction (11.7%), to prepare inmates for reinsertion in societyafter prison; activities to improve the psychological and physical health ofinmates: most common in France, absent in Portugal and Spain.– Training for prison personnel and teachers (10.8%), deconstruction of preju-dices and intercultural sensitivity training and analysis and suitability of les-son plans: most common in Italy, present in France and Spain.– Teaching L2 or L1 with a particular focus on reading skills (6.7%): present inGermany and France.– Writing courses (5.8%), especially workshops on journalistic language: pres-ent in Germany and Italy, less so in Spain.– Communication techniques (4.2%), general and intercultural, with particu-lar focus on artistic practices: most common in France.The least common typologies of activities include transversality of learning (inter-disciplinarity and study of various subjects), secondary and post-secondary edu-cation (usually via e-learning), computer courses, reading courses.In order to be able to use these criteria in the evaluation of good practices,one should focus on the intrinsic as well as the extrinsic problems of the conceptImmigrants and prison: good practices in Europe 375itself.When it comes to intrinsic difficulty it is already very clear that the ten cri-teria mentioned are not sufficient to define the concept of good practices andcannot guarantee correct categorization. Extrinsic difficulties especially concernthe differing didactic traditions in the way linguistic and glottodidactic theoriesare spread in the different countries, and the different value attributed to per-formance arts as re-education in the countries considered.Activities in prison are heterogeneous, hardly ever coordinated between in-stitutions, and do not sufficiently allow for positive results in other countries/local contexts. Once a level of first alphabetization or A1 (sometimes A2) hasbeen reached, cultural/linguistic education is no longer of much or widespreadinterest.ReferencesBanelytė, Viltė, Dalibor Sternadel & Haroldas Brožaitis. 2015. Monitoring good practices inthe areas of employement, social affairs and inclusion. Brussels: European Commission.Benucci, Antonella. 2015. Oltre i confini del carcere: buone pratiche per l’italiano L2.Introduzione. In Giulia Bertolotto, Serena Carmignani & Giovanna Sciuti Russi (eds.),Percorsi di ricerca e formazione linguistico-professionale: DEPORT “Oltre i confini delcarcere”, I–III. Siena: Tipografia Senese Editrice.Benucci, Antonella & Diego Cortés Velásquez. 2014. Buone pratiche in intercomprensione:una visione d’insieme. SeLM 1–3. 10–17.Hammerschick, Walter. 2010. Report on e-Learning in European prisons: Concepts,organisation, pedagogical approaches in prison education. LICOS (LearningInfrastructure for Correctional Services). https://ec.europa.eu/epale/sites/epale/files/re-port_on_e-learning_in_european_prisons.pdf (accessed 17 August 2016).Hawley, Jo, Ilona Murphy & Manuel Souto-Otero. 2013. Prison education and training inEurope. http://ec.europa.eu/education/library/study/2013/prison_en.pdf. (accessed 25May 2016).Puy Roca, Òscar & José Miguel Aliaga. 2007. White Paper – Prison Work in Europe.Barcelona: CIRE. http://archivio.transnazionalita.isfol.it/file/White%20Paper%20-%20Prison%20work%20in%20Europe%20-%20CIRE%20-%20EQUAL%20AD%20644.pdf(accessed 17 August 2016).Note: The last article of this section (“L2 education for foreign adults who are D/deaf: the role ofSign Language” by Maria Tagarelli De Monte) can be found as an addendum on page 435.376 Antonella Benucci, Marilisa Birello

Immigrants and prison : good practices in Europe

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Immigrants and prison : good practices in Europe

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