Prison and Incarceration Research

This working paper emerges from my experiences partnering with Exchange for Change (E4C), a nonprofit that facilitates writing courses in South Florida prisons and that seeks to provide “vision and understanding on both sides of the fence.” The nonprofit’s name comes from teaching paired “outside” college courses and “inside” E4C courses. Through this setup, outside and inside students exchange letters weekly throughout the term, with exchange partners taking on pseudonyms to ensure anonymity (a requirement of the Florida Department of Corrections).

As a facilitator, I observed consistent patterns emerge from the exchanges. First, despite the many indignities and (sometimes literal) constraints they endured in prison, inside students often expressed more freedom to write for intrinsically motivated reasons than outside students did. Second, inside students often took on informal mentorship roles for outside students, many of whom detailed struggles with imposter syndrome, as well as exhausting course loads and work schedules. This phenomenon subverts expectations many people might have about who would vouchsafe the human dignity of whom in such exchanges.

This paper seeks to wrestle with the implications of these patterns. I hope this project will also become the opening anecdote of an emerging book project, the working argument of which is: Formal education in the U.S. reflects a punitive meritocracy that harms virtually everyone, even those who are ostensibly succeeding in it. Following this argument, the book will explore how educators, students, and other stakeholders can envision and work toward a more equitable and humane purpose for education.