Conference Program

Higher Education in Prison (HEP) represents a complex and contested terrain within the broader field of prison education. Located at the intersection of carceral logics, academic cultures and transformative pedagogies, it operates as a site where competing institutional rationalities, educational purposes and subjectivities are continuously negotiated (Key&May, 2019; Sperolini, 2023). This presentation argues that the prison classroom – as both a physical and symbolic space – offers a particularly productive lens through which to examine these tensions and the possibilities they open up.

This paper presents preliminary findings from a qualitative case study of a Higher Education programme at HMP Pentonville, in London, in which twelve incarcerated students study criminology alongside prison officers over a twelve-week course (Darke&Aresti, 2016). This pedagogical arrangement – where the power relations structuring carceral life are brought directly into the educational space – makes Pentonville a particularly generative site for exploring how institution, education and identity are negotiated in practice. The data was generated through focus groups, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation with prisoner-students, participating officers, prison educators and academic teaching staff.

The prison classroom at HMP Pentonville emerges from the data not as a neutral container for learning, but as a deeply contested space where carceral hierarchies, pedagogical intentions and learner subjectivities collide and are actively reworked. The physical and relational dimensions of the classroom – its layout, its boundaries, the choreography of bodies and roles within it – are shown to be far from incidental or insignificant. They reflect and reproduce broader institutional rationalities whilst simultaneously being appropriated, suspended and reimagined by those who inhabit them.

Preliminary findings point to three interrelated dynamics. First, the co-presence of prisoner-students and prison-officer-students generates a productive yet uncomfortable disruption of institutional roles, creating moments in which the usual script of carceral life is suspended, however partially and temporarily. Second, prisoner-students articulate nuanced processes of identity negotiation, drawing on their positioning as learners and critical thinkers to rehearse forms of subjectivity that exceed the prisonised categories usually available to them. Third, the study of (critical) criminology – as a discipline concerned with power, punishment and social justice – introduces an additional layer of reflexivity, inviting all participants to examine the very institutional arrangements within which they are embedded.

Together, these dynamics illuminate the classroom as a liminal space: one in which the boundaries between institutional subjects are made temporarily permeable. Yet the paper is equally attentive to the structural limits of this liminality: the ways in which carceral logics continuously hover over and infiltrate the educational space, constraining the transformative possibilities of critical pedagogy through the perpetual negotiation of institutional control, access and permission.