Caught Somewhere Between ...

Abstract

Conversations about education in prison should begin with some understanding of the actual lived experience of being in prison. I refuse to create in myself, or promote in others, the idea that learning in prison sets me free without acknowledging the extent to which being educated in prison also helps me understand the extent to which I am free. Prison education has the potential to be life changing, but it presents some challenges for the incarcerated because it is a very distinctive experience. Education is consciousness raising, and consciousness  in prison is consciousness  of prison and  all of its attendant injustices. What it means to learn in prison is to be constantly engaged in an interrogation of the spaces you occupy, an interrogation that has a complicated relationship to freedom but, approximately, what it means is that in your every experience you are caught somewhere between love and hate.