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Higher Education In An Era Of Mass Incarceration: Possibility Under Constraint, Erin L. Castro, Michael Brawn, Daniel E. Graves, Orlando Mayorga, Johnny Page, Andra Slater
Higher Education In An Era Of Mass Incarceration: Possibility Under Constraint, Erin L. Castro, Michael Brawn, Daniel E. Graves, Orlando Mayorga, Johnny Page, Andra Slater
Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs
In this essay, we explore the purposes of higher education in prison during an era of mass incarceration and contend that the potential of postsecondary educational opportunity in carceral spaces is undermined by a single-minded focus on reducing recidivism. Among the over 2.2 million individuals behind bars in the United States, only 6 percent have access to formal postsecondary educational opportunities, and as a result, most incarcerated students are not on an educational pathway likely to result in academic degree attainment. We must move beyond a recidivist paradigm not because certificate-based and vocational training is not valuable, but because it …