22 Empowering Students to Self-Advocate

The hierarchical structure of the prison environment can make it difficult for students to know when and how to self-advocate. Students often become used to people telling them what to do and when to do it, and there are security protocols that also make accessing the things that they need difficult. This ranges from large to very small things. If a student loses a pen, for instance, they can’t just get another one. (Even borrowing a pen might violate a DOC policy.)

At the same time, there are habits and behaviors that can be encouraged and reinforced in the classroom that will build students’ understanding of self-advocacy and lifelong learning.

• As of Spring 2023, all E100 students have dictionaries included with their course materials. If students don’t know a term, ask one of them to look it up and share it with the class. Reinforce that there is no shame in looking things up. It can be illuminating for some students who presume that smart people simply “know stuff” to discover that learning is a lifelong process. Instructors should model that much of education is about accessing the tools at their disposal.
• Reinforce early and often that students need to communicate their needs, as well as problems that they are having, whether they do this through the instructor or through the tutor.
• Encourage self-reflection to think through learning processes and help students articulate areas of struggle. Writing about their struggles may be easier for some students.
• Cultivate a spirit of open communication in the classroom. Set ground rules about what open communication means in your learning community. Some students will want to complain without posing solutions. It’s best to frame these conversations like peer review–we want the criticisms to be constructive and actionable.
• Ask students about the resources they have available. Some students, particularly those who have been at an institution for a while, have a clear sense of resources, groups, and activities at the prison and will encourage other students to get involved. For less experienced students, hearing about these resources in the classroom might encourage them to pursue their use.

Depending on the institution, some students may have the ability to continue engaging with others beyond formal classrooms in their educational pursuits.

• Lifers. Inc started as an alumni club when life-sentenced students who had taken post-secondary education in SCI-Graterford came together to form a community of support for each other. It has now evolved into an organization with the “primary mission of the organization is to secure legislative action to retroactively offer parole review to any inmate sentenced to a term of life imprisonment in a Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PDOC) facility.”  Of course, organizing like this within the prison is something that must be done with the blessing of security, education, and/or activity staff, often with a DOC staff member or an outside volunteer as a mentor.
• Justice Education Series: This website contains webinar series on the topic of justice education by the Petey Greene Program. To date, 72% of the presenters have been system-impacted people.

• American Prison Newspapers is an Open Access collection of newspapers housed under JSTOR. This webinar, “Teaching with American Prison Newspapers,” provides some guidance about using the collection for educational purposes.

• The Prison Journalism Project mentors incarcerated folks in journalism and invites them to contribute writings for publication online. In Summer 2021, they launched PJP J-School, a correspondence-based journalism course tailored for prison writers with a cohort of 15 students around the country.  The website also contains a glossary of prison jargon.

• The Journal of Higher Education in Prison by the Alliance of Higher Education in Prison. The latest call for submission provides a list of references about teaching and learning in prison higher education.