Redirecting the teacher's gaze: Teacher education,youth surveillance and the school-to-prison pipeline

This article addresses an apparent contradiction in American teacher education that results in conflicting goals for educators. It asks: How do we prepare teachers to interrogate their inherited professional roles in the surveillance and disciplining of youth? How might teacher education inspire pre-service teachers to care more about youth who belong to populations that have been deemed "undesirable" and expendable? We critically examine the role of teacher education in contributing to the criminalization of certain youth in urban communities and the resulting school-to-prison pipeline crisis that leads too many students from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse.     

Prisons before Modernity: Incarceration in the Medieval Indo-Mediterranean

Over the course of the sixth/twelfth century, a new literary genre entered the Eastern Islamic world: the Persian prison poem (?absiyyāt). Far from being an isolated event, the prison poem was forged when punishment came to be reconfigured as incarceration. This development was reflected in literary texts extending across South Asia, Azerbaijan, and continental Europe. Locating the institution of the prison outside European modernity, this study traces the material grounds for this new literary form and situates this archive globally. Concomitantly with studying the medieval literature of incarceration, it evaluates the Indo-Mediterranean as a discursive rubric for the study of pre-modern literary cultures.     

Alexandria in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century: A Mediterranean Port City and a Mamlūk Prison City

Abstract

While modern scholars, medieval European and anachronistic Arab sources paint a portrait of Mamlūk Alexandria as a bustling and thriving international port, contemporary Arabic writings of the second half of the ninth/fifteenth and the first quarter of the tenth/sixteenth centuries present quite a different image. This article analyses Arabic chronicles to demonstrate that, from the Cairene perspective, Alexandria was a frontier city that was utilised as a jail for banished political prisoners. In contrast to other parts of their realm, investment in Alexandria by the Mamlūk regime was largely limited to fortifying it against seaborne threats; the sultans did little to embellish the city for civilian or religious purposes. Thus, the city was marginalised, politically and socially, even while still maintaining its role as a gateway to Egypt.     

Learning behind bars: Education in prisons

This article is based on the negotiated meanings of ‘teaching’ and learning' in prisons. It is informed by the peripheral experiences of prisoners and the legitimate peripheral participation of their teachers. It was found that teachers and students are interdependent and feel equally marginalized. The positions occupied by teachers make legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) possible though it is restricted within limits imposed by their place of work. The research, based on in-depth interviews of four teachers explores the challenges facing both teachers and their students. Concerns about prisoners' dignity, their human rights, entitlement to education and recognition of their learning difficulties are voiced against a culture of acquiescence and unquestioning obedience demanded by the prison regime outside the education classes.     

High points of learning behind bars: Characteristics of positive correctional education experiences for incarcerated girls

In California incarcerated juveniles are legally mandated to attend school while behind bars. Previous research shows that the quality of education people receive behind bars can increase their educational attainment, improve the probability of other positive life chances, and lowers the likelihood of recidivism. As we interviewed incarcerated girls, they described their corrections-based educational experience as overwhelmingly positive. This paper examines why girls viewed these experiences so positively. Small classrooms, student-teacher relationships and interactions, and meeting the girls’s housing and food needs, each contributed to their positive outlook. Ultimately, being behind bars allowed them to access a more intimate, favorable educational experience.     

“I am in a constant struggle:” The challenges of providing instruction to incarcerated youth in southern California

This paper examines the challenges of mandatory educational instruction in the California correction system. Current scholarship on youth education in incarceration focuses on the challenges faced by youth and teachers. Our study adds to this scholarship by demonstrating that the context of teaching in centers of incarceration, specifically center of incarceration that have adopted a wraparound service strategy, prevents teachers from disentangling their teaching practices from practices of managing and disciplining youth who are in incarceration. Using semi-structured interviews, we interviewed 15 teachers who work in four juvenile detention facilities in Southern California. We found three primary challenges: one, low level of education; two, the emotional labor required of teachers; three, negotiating the interactions with administrators, correctional officers, and other on-site personnel. Thus, our findings demonstrate that the three challenges highlighted macro-institutional barriers which individual teacher and students are able to navigate but are unable to fundamentally change.     

Authorship,Gender, and Institutional Affiliation in Library History:

Library historians can learn a great deal from studying the gender of authorship and institutional affiliation of a scholarly journal. The focus of this study is to examine these two aspects of journal production in library history to see who is producing published research in this field. Twenty-three years of Libraries & Culture were chosen as the target volumes. The study reveals that more men than women published in library history as well as locating which institutions were represented. This type of information is usedful to the library historian engaged in the analysis of published scholarship, and more generally to scholars with an interest in patterns of literature production in fields closely related to the social and behavioral sciences.     

Recreation or rehabilitation? Managing sport for development programs with prison populations

The provision of sport and recreation programs to inmates within the prison system provides a unique context to investigate the role of sport in enacting social change. Three main aims of prison-based sport programs have been identified in research: inmate health and wellbeing, inmate rehabilitation, and inmate management. This paper presents four case studies of sport programs in prisons across Australia. Inmates completed qualitative interviews in order to investigate program outcomes, design, and delivery. Although the participants in the four case studies came from substantially different prison populations (male, female, Indigenous, intellectual disability, general population) and geographic locations, there were key themes across the groups. Outcomes for both inmates and prisons tended to focus on inmate health and wellbeing and inmate management. Sport and recreation programs appeared to have a positive influence on inmates’ health and behaviour; however, the efficacy of rehabilitation efforts through sport remains uncertain.