Keywords
Practitioner, Prison Education, Collage
Abstract
The transformative powers of college-in-prison programs are known, but students get the grave of continued incarceration—even if we are fully rehabilitated. For the college-in-prison student who spends years in classes, degrees and parole denials are synonymous, especially for those of us who have committed violent off enses. We are educated but not redeemed in the eyes of the system. My classmates and I are the degrees behind the denials, the students behind the degrees, the prisoners behind the students, the human beings behind the prisoners who are the reason higher education in prison is praised for being transformative. Yet we are often denied the ability to realize our own transformation. We learn, we earn degrees, we change ourselves and our community, but we still have more time and more torture ahead. Prison is torture: an intense suff ering, an excruciating pain—distorting mind, body, soul, at all times, in all spaces. What follows is a look into our classroom for the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) course “Experiments in Survival: On Livability and its Im/Possibilities.”
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25771/c4sc-5964
Included in
Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Education Commons, Public Policy Commons, Sociology Commons