Agency, Ambivalent Empathies, and Vulnerability: An Exploration of Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative and Bard’s Prison Initiative

Abstract

This thesis investigates instructor and student experiences in two higher education in prison programs, Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative and Bard’s Prison Teaching Initiative. For the first two chapters, I draw on semi-structured interviews with current and former instructors at PTI and participant-observation from PTI’s training and course planning meetings. For the last chapter, I conduct a close-reading of the film College Behind Bars as an archive of student-prisoner experience. In the first chapter, I explore common narratives from PTI instructors which attribute empowerment and agency as results of PTI classwork. I break these down into three categories: agency within the classroom, agency through critical thinking, and agency through trauma-informed education. In the next chapter, I explore instructor narratives who differ from these common ones in the ways that they connect with students and also admit to a failure to empathise with their students. Finally, I highlight the perspectives of students in College Behind Bars to emphasize the precariousness of higher education in prison and the ways that students use their classes to escape prisonization, find redemption, and to navigate the difficulties of carceral citizenship. Overall, I argue that higher education in prison, at these two sites, as sites which empower students through connection and acceptance.