About ten years ago, I was discussing with my Dad his time as Chief Education Officer at a top security prison. He had taken up the post just before the Open University was formed (late 1960s), their degree courses in prisons were introduced, and Dad was delighted to be an explorer in this uncharted territory.
He explained that the prison teaching staff were “… working without precedents. It was one great big experiment. The Home Office was quite generous with supplies such as books and civilian support staff. Somehow rooms were found. The tutors worked with a combination of instinct and experience. There was no link between the various prisons, so there was no uniformity. Many tutors came down from the local further education college and became involved with a far higher level of education than their day jobs; so when it came to their future career considerations, they had an advantage.”
“I remember our first degree-success,” he continued. He [the offender] was summoned to attend the daily get-together of the Governor and senior civilian and officer representatives. They sat on one side of the table and our new graduate sat solo on the other side, so spic-and-span that it hurt, speaking only when spoken to, accepting the various congratulations quietly with a poker face. He was quite successful in giving the opinion that he was far better than anyone else there.”
While not the intended purpose of the OU courses, Dad
remembers this feeling of superiority as commonplace. Offenders liked to be
associated with degrees. They felt that in some way they were one-up on the
system, particularly on the prison officers, and they were delighted. They
weren’t interested in what their fellow offenders thought.
In addition to one-upmanship, offenders pursued their education at all levels for various reasons, as Dad listed: “To get away from the organized routine; to learn to read and write; to talk to women [e.g. tutors] again. Lifers were the most ambitious; they were in no hurry and prison was a daily stagnation. The OU was their excuse for managing to cope daily with anything and everything. I suppose it was their last chance to do something positive with their lives – a last-chance saloon – quite a responsibility.”
As for their chosen subjects, “Lifers would choose difficult topics, the harder the better,” he said. “Nuclear physics was too tangible. They tended to prefer semi-political subjects with an anti-authority tinge.”
My mother had also taught at the same prison and interjected, “Not all the lifers were fundamentally bad. Some shouldn’t have been there [a top-security prison].”
Perhaps then, educating some lifers is a form of redress after a too-harsh punishment: i.e. education is a mitigating means that leads to a less unjust end. But the same argument doesn’t apply to an offender who deserves a life term. So why educate them?
Dad’s response to this question was to repeat his earlier train of thought: “It was all one big experiment. It hadn’t been done before and had to be tried sometime … The Lord invented horses to put money on.”
Did he mean that a societal value of or justification for educating lifers was satisfying the inherent human need to increase our own knowledge for knowledge’s sake? In this case the new knowledge would include (1) how to educate offenders (including lifers) to degree level and (2) what the outcomes would be. In other words, the (dubious) means of educating lifers justified the end result of increasing societal knowledge.
Fifty years later and OU degrees for prisoners including lifers is no longer an experiment. It’s known how to do it and what the outcomes are. Today we need a different justification, one with a tangible, positive outcome that benefits society as a whole, not just the lifers or our body of knowledge.
On the other hand, do we need to justify educating a fellow human being, any human being, even one who has erred horribly? Isn’t education a human right? And if education helps a lifer cope with his or her permanent incarceration, aren’t we as compassionate humans – Christians, some of us – morally compelled to provide that education? While the justification of educating lifers might be uncertain, so is the justification of withholding that education: a justice stalemate, if you will.
While we might not be able to justify either educating or not educating lifers, and have to rely on the compassionate human being mantra, then we’ll just have to make the best of a ‘bad’ job and engineer a positive societal outcome of such an education. One example would be the analysis of lifers’ world views, assumptions and arguments in their essays and any class discussions or tutorials, which could lead to a better understanding of their personal histories and psychology. This could then inform systemic crime prevention initiatives, prison reform, welfare programmes, children’s education and activities, and initiatives by religious institutions.
In other words, the societal value of educating lifers might not be the rehabilitation of these offenders, but the prevention of crimes by potential future offenders.
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