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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
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