Campus Review Vol 30. Issue 06 | Page 18

industry & research campusreview.com.au School of hard knocks Education in jails impacted by pandemic. Lukas Carey interviewed by Wade Zaglas Dr Lukas Carey, a long-time educator, trainer, coach and research academic at Edith Cowan University, recently published an article on how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting incarcerated learners, entitled ‘Education While Imprisoned During the COVID-19 Outbreak, the Forgotten Frontier’. While Carey conceded that not all educational facilities or programs in jails had their prisoners’ education disrupted due to COVID-19 restrictions, many inmates are angry about it, saying it perpetuates the stereotype that prisoners are irredeemable and not worthy of a full education. The research academic was able to ask detainees what they thought about the current state of education amid COVID-19. The responses were varied, poignant and underscored just how much more work needs to be done in this field. “The officers won’t even let us use the computers. They have locked down the library for everyone, and that’s where the computers are. It is really shit and makes the guys trying to learn really angry. They just don’t care,” one detainee said. Another said: “My father comes home soon, we are counting down the days, but he recently started an excavator course he paid for from his prison savings. He won’t be able to finish this course, can’t get a refund, and is feeling very depressed that he can’t get things done.” Campus Review interviewed Carey, whose special research interests include criminology and convict criminology, to discuss the issues affecting the largely forgotten learners behind bars. CR: Getting an education in prison is seen as one of the few benefits of being incarcerated. But how important is this education of prisoners for societies, families and other groups? LC: That’s a question with many levels. The first is the benefit to the incarcerated person. Being in a position where the person has a focus, a place to direct their energies, a place to come away with the idea of bettering themselves during that experience, is important. That benefit then links to the person’s family, because if someone’s been incarcerated for a period of time, and they do nothing to better themselves, and they come back to society, their family and the community without having improved their skills, they may fall back into the unemployment cycle, the poverty cycle, and potentially even a crime cycle. Education provides options for people’s families; it provides options to people as providers for families, as supporters for families. It also gives the individuals I’ve spoken to an opportunity to reconnect with their own kids, with their own adult kids, and to reconnect with employers, because they’re able to come and tell a story that while they were involved in one of the most negative periods of their life, they were able to develop a set of skills and turn their mistake into a positive. As I continue to travel along speaking to people, that is something I know that the kids look for in parents, that families look for in their own family members, and employers and society look for in people. What did you think or feel when you looked at some of the comments from the prisoners that you collected as part of your project? Did you feel anger, failure, disappointment? Probably all of the above and then some. I speak to a lot of men and women that are either currently incarcerated or recently released, and the discussions I had with the guys whose comments I used were strong, and they did bring forward some anger. But on the flip side, they also brought forward some ideas that some people are suffering on the outside just as much as the guys are on the inside. Some people in the community tend to project that life inside is extraordinarily different, but the reality suggests that incarcerated people experience a lot of the same things that people on the outside do, just under more of 16