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Prison higher education in Massachusetts: An exploratory cultural analysis
Abstract
The focus of this inquiry is upon higher education programs that offer post-secondary educational opportunities to men and women incarcerated in correctional facilities operated by the Massachusetts Department of Correction. The inquiry is exploratory, and both descriptive and theoretical. Its purpose was to generate a preliminary "social facts" description of prison higher education and a theoretical lens capable of guiding an examination of higher education as a mechanism for status reformation among prisoners. Because cultural analyses seek to make explicit social structures that make meaning possible, the inquiry design incorporates both deductive and empirical methods. Prison higher education was defined as a special case in the more general expansion of higher education. Higher education was viewed as a system of contexts that reproduce a stratified society by regulating the social value of participation. The efficacy of prison higher education as a status transformation mechanism was seen to be delimited its location within this system of contexts. The directors of six (6) prison higher education programs in Massachusetts participated in the empirical component of this inquiry by completing a questionnaire that sought information about personal backgrounds, program characteristics, and perceptions regarding the intersection of higher education and incarceration. The empirical findings were reported in Appendix A and comprise a preliminary description of prison higher education in Massachusetts. That description facilitated continuation of the theoretical discussion regarding the concept of prison higher education. It was concluded that higher education's historical pattern of expansion through the creation of educational forms and contexts that roughly mirror social expectations about participants lends strong support to the proposition that it became possible to educate prisoners precisely because some of those forms and contexts are no longer wholly in conflict with social expectations of what it means to be a prisoner. Support was also gained for the tentative propositions that prison higher education in Massachusetts is an element of mass education, that it may be evolving into an educational specialized context within mass education, that participation in programs of prison higher education is not likely to result in credible status transformations within or beyond the structure of confinement.
Subject Area
Higher education|Criminology|Educational sociology
Recommended Citation
Jones, Raymond L, "Prison higher education in Massachusetts: An exploratory cultural analysis" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9233077.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9233077