Why Teach in Prison: Co-Constructing the Prison Classroom

Lewen unpacks the ways that prison teaching, through the diffusion of counter-perspectives beyond the prison walls, helps to dissolve three ideological assumptions that sustain mass incarceration: “the concept of ‘Bad People’—the idea that one ‘ends up in prison’ simply as a result of one’s actions, and the notion that there are human beings who ‘deserve to suffer”’ (Lewen 2014, 353, 355). The private world (in the severely limited sense that term can have for a prison inmate) in which he1 may be a devout and observant Christian or Muslim, an aspiring poet or essayist, a conscientious advisor by mail to sons or nephews, bears virtually no relation to the world of the Yard where social groupings are determined largely by race, status often depends on the nature of your crime (murderers rule, sexual offenders are fair game), and survival may require affiliation with a gang, and the consequent obligation to prove your manhood, risking serious injury and the extension of your sentence, by engaging in violence. First-time teachers invariably comment on the vibrant student engagement in prison classes, as well as the intellectual stimulation and exhilaration they experience responding to the multiplicity of challenging questions that may differ from those they hear in their campus classrooms. The co-construction in and of the classroom emanates through both process and substance: processually, through the paying of mutual respect, of circulating authority, of sharing humor, of making space for both anger and comity; and, substantively, through the interactive exploration of ideas that can be uncomfortable and may come to be mutually understandable.