The Use of Education for Prisoners to Reduce Reoffending Research Papers (original) (raw)

Shining new light on early American prison literature—from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to its later works of autobiography, exposé, and imaginative literature—Reading Prisoners tells the literary history of early prison writing alongside the history of crime writing in the “long” eighteenth century, the decline of public punishment, the rise of the early American penitentiary, and the early history of prison education and literacy instruction in the nation's first penitentiaries.

Looking first at colonial America—an era often said to devalue jailhouse literacy—Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era launched the literate prisoner into public prominence. Moreover, gallows confessions and criminal narratives published between 1700 and 1740, she shows, were crucial “literacy events” that sparked widespread public fascination with the reading habits of the condemned, consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening. By century’s end, narratives by condemned criminals helped public audiences in the "free world" navigate the perils and promises of expanded literacy.

Schorb then takes us off the scaffold and inside the private world of a the first penitentiaries—Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison and New York’s Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. She unveils the long and contentious struggle over the value of prisoner education that ultimately led to sporadic efforts to supply prisoners with books and education. She argues that claims that these early penitentiaries promoted prisoner education and built prison libraries are misleading. Instead, she demonstrates how another core tenet of prison reform—the argument that prisoners were best served by silence and hard labor—often superseded efforts to instill prison libraries or hire moral instructors or teachers to teach inmates reading, and especially writing. A rising body of convict authors vociferously protested such reading and writing bans and testified to their impact of these restrictions in published accounts of their experiences of incarceration.

The staggering rise of mass incarceration in America since the 1970s has brought the issue of prisoner rehabilitation once again to the fore. Reading Prisoners offers vital background to the ongoing, crucial debates over the benefits of prisoner education.

"This is a compelling, groundbreaking analysis of literacy among early American prisoners. Jodi Schorb's careful examination of prisoners' reading and writing practices elucidates their active, collaborative participation in print culture. This is a critical and exciting contribution to the study of prisoners in American literary history."
—Michele Lise Tarter, co-editor Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America

"Reading Prisoners is carefully researched, clearly presented, highly original, and immensely readable. Schorb advances current understandings of the meaning of reading, writing, and the relationship between the two in book history, education, and prisoner literacy studies."
—Jeannine DeLombard, author of In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity