Beyond education: An exploration of one-on-one volunteer–student relationships within a prisoner-focused distance learning organization

Nonprofit and voluntary sector organizations increasingly provide essential services to the criminal justice system, particularly in the realms of prisoner reentry and community corrections. The nonprofit sector also often takes on an important role in the provision of programming within prisons, offering tools for education, self-improvement or simply human connection. This study explores the work of Auxilia, a French volunteer-based organization providing distance learning via letter-writing to incarcerated students. Through interviews with volunteer teachers and incarcerated students, it examines the qualities of the volunteer–student relationship, outlining the ways in which volunteers and incarcerated students engage with learning and each other. Leveraging Bourdieu and Passeron’s analysis of the mechanisms of power and control found in the ‘pedagogic action’, the study highlights the ways in which Auxilia's loosely structured, flexible approach to education can circumvent some of the ‘symbolic violence’ of traditional education by creating a pedagogic relationship centered around facilitating learners’ individual interests and curiosity. By analyzing volunteer–student relationships through the lens of Tomczak and Thompsons’ concept of inclusionary control, the study also demonstrates the important role of loosely structured, volunteer-based organizations in filling in the gaps left in carceral institutions in crisis. Centered around a fundamentally outdated mode of instruction – physical correspondence – this paper demonstrates the potential value and contradictions of volunteer-based distance learning in forming prosocial, empathetic, broadly equitable relationships which provide moral and psychological support, intellectual aspirations and contact with the outside world.