Good Prison Press
carolina bracken, 14 June 2012
In light of the Coalition’s renewed efforts to increase work in prison, the theme of yesterday’s CECJS conference (Centre for Education in the Criminal Justice System), ‘Evidence Informing Practice’, seemed particularly opportune. Practitioners, academic experts and policymakers as well as, perhaps most importantly, former prisoner learners, all concurred that offender learning in practice must be driven by evidence; and this evidence must be drawn from both research and first-hand professional and personal experience. Yet despite the wealth of expertise and ubiquitous energy, the day was marred by a pervasive paradox; the knowledge is there, the will is there, yet much of this evidence is still patently failing to inform practice.
The importance of evidence-based practice was not disputed, although the definition of ‘evidence’ within criminal justice is inherently ambiguous. The philosophy proposed by Professor Terje Manger met a warm murmur of approval: in achieving knowledge-based practice in prison education, three strands of expertise – research-based knowledge, experience-based practice and the voice of prisoners and ex-prisoners – should be drawn together and each given equal weight. For instance, those with experience of high churn prisons could testify as to the inevitable disruption caused to prison education, yet there was little if any known academic evidence of this effect. (Conversely, however, successful schemes in Australia and Norway were not blighted by problems of churn.) It is only by combining and comparing these different perspectives that a comprehensive evidential picture can be built.
However, it was clear that the problem is not an evidential deficit. The debate revealed two major stumbling blocks. Firstly, although many practitioners within the field understand the importance of effective prison education, they are straightjacketed by a series of seemingly immutable systemic hurdles. To take one of a plethora of examples, many prisons pay more to workers than students. Particularly given that many offenders feel more comfortable walking into a prison than into a university – for want of familiarity, not lack of intellect – this disincentive is often fatal. Despite the passion and dedication of individuals, this ethos has yet to infiltrate the prison system itself.
Secondly, it is difficult to persuade the press, blamed for pushing up the prison population, that prison education should be promoted. People want less crime, but, paralysed by a conception of prison as a purely penal institution, are reluctant to fund prisoners’ education. With an ill-informed and unsympathetic public body, employers are less likely to engage with this ostensibly risky group.
Prison education should be easy to sell. The message is simple: refocusing the prison system around offender learning will provide prisoners with the tools to achieve true lifestyle change. Moreover, the most compelling advocates of prison education are those who have been through the system themselves. BIS and the Ministry of Justice should utilise their persuasive eloquence and expertise to bring the public on board; the achievements of the Open Book learners, properly publicised, could alone be sufficient to convey the potential benefits of educating those in prison.
There needs to be a concerted effort to portray prison education as an indispensable branch of transformative learning, not an unjustified extravagance, divorced from the mainstream. As with the Norwegian model, in which prisoners have a right to education, the penal element of imprisonment should be clearly contained to the fact of incarceration itself. We have the evidence that prison education works, but without a cultural shift both within the prison service and among the general public, its influence on practice will continue to be frustrated.