Building bridges through education

Sergio Grossi. I have studied the APAC (Association for the Protection and Assistance of the Convicted) system in Brazil a lot. In these prisons there are no armed security staff. They are community-based prisons, co-managed by volunteers and the prisoners themselves. The prisoners are involved in the running and organisation of prison life. The idea is to create an educational community with them and not for them, and where volunteers and prisoners can create close relationships. It is not just the staff that can accompany prisoners to a life without crime but also the prisoners themselves. We are not used to thinking of prisoners as an integral part of education, but they have great educational power that should not be underestimated. Since they themselves have committed crimes, they understand what other prisoners have been through, what their difficulties are, and thus have a greater capacity to influence them in a positive way.

The APAC system also places great importance on the involvement and education of the outside community. The traditional prison tends to destroy social relationships with the outside world and build relationships only between prisoners. But prison is about broader citizenship. If the broader community does not stop stigmatising prisoners, and does not provide jobs or opportunities, then prisoners will become more likely to reoffend. Crime will be their only friend on the outside. We have to stop saying that the outside community cannot understand. They just don’t know what’s going on inside the prison. We need to work with them, get them more involved, show them the programmes that work. Together, with the prisoners, they can build an educational space for the prisoners and for the society outside. For this to happen, it is important that prisons are not isolated from the community.

To build constructive relationships, it is necessary to keep the facility on a human scale. In big prison complexes, relationships can be superficial. For this reason, the capacity in APAC prisons are not more than 200 people.

SG. I think we have a very strict view of what education is in our prison system and in society in general. When we talk about education we think of a school. This is really problematic because school is not the only form of education. We have to put education in a broader, more informal framework and not limit it to just one form. In the APAC system, for example, it is interesting to note that there is not a separate space dedicated to education. The whole space is considered an educational space. In the prison of Grendon, the first therapeutic community in the UK, prisoners do therapy almost every day where they address their emotions and try to understand their behaviour. One of the prisoners told me that this was the first time he had learned how his emotions worked and why he had committed these crimes. Normally this is not part of a formal education programme.

When you put education in this broader context, all staff have an educational role to play, whether they know it or not. But in traditional prisons we don’t see staff as having educational roles, but rather security roles. We train and select staff specifically for security and punishment, for restraining people who cause problems of violence. We promote the pedagogy of violence and mistrust.

I believe we should select the staff based on their motivation to do educational work and train them accordingly for the role of social educator. In facilities for juvenile offenders in Rio de Janeiro, which have been placed under the supervision of the Minister of Education, some of the security staff have a PhD in education or philosophy. I think this is an initiative with a lot of potential.

I am not saying that security is not important, but it could be external to the facility. In Uruguay, for example, they have set up prisons where the armed security staff is placed outside the prison. They are not in direct contact with the prisoners. Inside the facility, you can find trained educational staff, such as psychologists, sociologists and other people with different skills. I think this is very important as it connects prisons with institutions that were traditionally more accessible outside.

SG. Education is central when rethinking prison. Education can, for example, create a space for people on the outside to understand what prison is like. But the academic sector does not reflect enough on the role of education in prison. The difficulty of thinking of prison as an educational space will persist if academia does not generate new ideas and reflections on this subject, if it does not offer space to understand the reasons for imprisonment and the forms it takes. It is important to not naturalise punishment as part of our society. We need to investigate other theoretical perspectives, other possibilities and try to build new projects. There are many interesting projects in the global south. In Europe and North America, we don’t know about these projects, but they could give us new ideas.

Prisoners also have a fundamental part to play in this reflection. Enabling them to take part in educational programmes, to improve their symbolic position, to talk about their experience using academic language, is essential to challenge the hegemonic discourse on prison. In the APAC system, many prisoners have started to go to university and think critically about what imprisonment is. From this, a broader social movement can emerge, linking the inside with the outside, and influencing community members, including those who are not experts in the field. A movement is needed to reflect on what is done inside prisons, what can be done to improve prison conditions, what is considered educative or not, until we totally change what we consider a prison today.