Abstract
Emma Hughes presents an excellent contribution to research in the area of prison education with her recent book. Her clear thesis is founded upon a solid methodological approach that examines prisoner motivations and barriers to pursuing a college education through distance learning, as well as an exploration of the effects for prisoners who pursue such an endeavor. In particular, there are two areas that significantly enhance the contribution and quality of this book.
First, Hughes avoids a narrow focus on the question: does prison education reduce recidivism? The preponderance of research on prison education tends to overemphasize this area by exploring the post-release successes and failures of prisoners who completed educational programs during their imprisonment. Certainly, as the author suggests, these are important questions that deserve investigation. But these quasi-experimental approaches that compare prisoners who completed education programs to those who did not leave many questions unexplored. Hughes poses such questions and attempts to provide insight into these relatively unexplored areas. She asks questions relating to the motivations of these prisoners and asks whether or not the process of earning an education while incarcerated (specifically, a college education via distance learning) can help change a prisoner’s sense of self. Specifically, she explores how earning a college education may help transform their social identity from a “prisoner” to a “student,” and as a result, how this change may, in part, produce the decreased chances of recidivism often discovered in these former studies.
It is unsurprising that Hughes chose to use a grounded theoretical approach in an attempt to identify explanatory themes within her data. After all, there really is no established theory that offers an explanation for what Hughes is exploring. While Hughes has not presented enough data to confirm the theoretical ideas that she presents relating to the transformation of the self, she has clearly provided a springboard for further analysis in these important areas. Her theoretical ideas may be the beginning of the construction of such a theory. Subsequent research could explore these areas in further detail and in additional settings, in attempts to confirm or deny the empirical ideas that she poses.
Second, the methodological approach that Hughes utilized is clearly consistent with and appropriate for this type of exploration. The use of semi-structured and in-depth interviews of prisoners who have been or are involved in distance learning college courses allowed her to place her analytical emphasis on the voices and narratives that were provided by the “prisoner-students.” Throughout the book, we hear these voices clearly. Within these narratives, we learn of the issues that motivate and dissuade prisoners to pursue an education during incarceration and how they may come to think of themselves as students rather than simply prisoners. With this qualitative approach, Hughes first explores how and why prisoners become interested in pursuing a college education via distance learning. Then, she turns her analysis to exploring the consequences of this decision.
The author discovers a variety of variables that “push” prisoners into these educational pursuits, as well as numerous factors that “pull” prisoners from these pursuits. Through an examination of their life histories, she shows how personal and past experiences with education set the stage for some prisoners to pursue an education during imprisonment while others, due to their past negative educational experiences, are pulled away. As one might expect, prisoners with more successful past educational experiences tended to be more interested in pursuing a college education through distance learning.
Hughes’ data also show how a prison environment that supports prisoner educational pursuits can have an important effect on pushing prisoners into education. In particular, prison staff members and prisoners who reinforce these pursuits are shown to be an important theme in explaining prisoner motivations. She also shows, however, that while the prison environment can provide a push for some prisoners, for others, it can stymie their motivations. A supportive environment can lead prisoners toward education, but an environment comprised of prisoners with “anti-education” attitudes and less than supportive staff members results in the opposite effect.
For those prisoners with more substantial educational experiences, the limited educational opportunities available within the prison environment were also shown to provide an important motivator. The more educated prisoner simply has no other alternatives and, as such, is pushed into distance learning due to the prison education department’s limited offerings. At the same time, these limited offerings also emerged as a “pull” from education for the less fortunate prisoners who cannot afford to pursue a college education via distance learning. Problems with drug addiction and fear of failing in their educational attempts, among other personal characteristics, also appeared in her data as important factors pulling prisoners away from education.
Once pushed into education, her data showed positive impacts for both the prisoner and the prison community. For the individual prisoner, educational pursuits helped them deal with the difficulties of imprisonment and helped them develop self-confidence, direction, hope, and a sense of accomplishment. The prison community benefited from a “ripple effect” (p. 175) when these prisoners became tutors, contributed to the prison magazine, and encouraged other prisoners to pursue an education. But this newly-developed student identity was fragile, and without reinforcement from prison staff, family, friends, and/or other supportive organizations, the student identity could dissolve.
While Hughes poses and begins to answer important questions associated with the growing body of research on the process of prison education, there are a few limitations in her analysis that she clearly notes. Her data is limited to 47 interviews of incarcerated men and women serving time in Great Britain and, as such, is somewhat limited in generalizability. Whether or not these same themes would emerge in the examination of American prisoners, for instance, cannot be confirmed. Ultimately, Hughes provides a subjective examination of these prisoners’ motivations, experiences, and consequences related to pursuing distance learning while incarcerated. Her approach offers guidance for further research and the development of a theory to explain and predict aspects of the process of pursuing an education while in prison. Her data show that such a theory will not be able to rely on a simple categorization of motivational factors and educational effects, because such motivations and consequences were shown to be very diverse and individualized from prisoner to prisoner and prison to prison.
By building upon Hughes’ research, we may develop a broad explanation of this process so that, ultimately, we can recommend prison education policy designed to develop a prison environment that supports and nurtures educational motivations. If Hughes’ ideas are correct, we should be able to translate such findings into policies designed to transform the social identity for some inmates from “prisoner” to “student,” which, in turn, could produce the reduction in recidivism that is so often identified in quasi-experimental studies which attempt to determine if prison education programs work.