Conference Program

Many penal systems formally present imprisonment as a transitional phase intended to support social inclusion. Yet this narrative often gives rise to re-education discourses that become ends in themselves, reinforcing processes of disculturation, control logics and further imprisonment (Clemmer, 1940; Goffman, 1961; Vianello, 2019). This generates a paradox in which the total institution assumes responsibility for resocialisation through mechanisms of exclusion(Sbraccia, 2021). At the same time, disciplinary measures and systems of rewards and punishments cultivate dynamics of dependency and behavioural governance that limit autonomy and agency among incarcerated people(Foucault, 1975; Gallo & Ruggiero, 1989; Melossi & Pavarini, 1977; Rostaing, 2014).

This paradox unfolds within a broader European climate shaped by penal populism (Pratt, 2007), characterised by the politicisation of crime, the appeal to public insecurity and the consolidation of punitive common sense. In such a context, carceral expansion and security-driven priorities tend to marginalise educational initiatives or frame them instrumentally within risk-management logics. Prison education thus appears as a fragile and contested practice, negotiated within institutional arrangements that privilege discipline over emancipation.

Against this backdrop, academic institutions operating in prisons can open alternative spaces for learning, participation and identity construction, challenging—albeit partially—the isolating and control-oriented nature of the carceral environment (Borghini & Pastore, 2020; Pastore, 2018). In Italy, the consolidated experience of the Prison University Campus supports continuity in university studies, whereas in Spain the UNED provides distance tutoring and academic support through the Programa de Estudios Universitarios en Centros Penitenciarios (PEUCP)(Viedma Rojas, 2019, p. 201) (Viedma Rojas 2017).

This paper focuses specifically on the cursos de verano en centros penitenciarios promoted within the Spanish prison system. Unlike standard distance-learning provision, these summer courses create temporary face-to-face academic encounters inside prison walls, bringing incarcerated and external students together in shared educational practices. In doing so, they make visible—and partially unsettle—the symbolic boundary between “inside” and “outside,” offering a concrete setting in which to observe relational dynamics and processes of social inclusion (Borghini, 2020).

At the same time, these encounters remain embedded within institutional temporalities and security constraints that shape participation and interaction. The cursos de verano thus exemplify prison education as a transformative yet contradictory arena, where dialogical pedagogies unfold within the structural limits of confinement.

The analysis draws on a ten-month qualitative study conducted between 2024 and 2025, adopting an ethnographic orientation. Fieldwork included participant observation during two summer courses held in Spanish penitentiaries, complemented by informal interviews with educational staff and with both incarcerated and external students. Attention was paid to classroom interactions, narrative self-representations and institutional framing, in order to explore how educational encounters are negotiated in practice.

Viewed through this lens, the cursos de verano offer insight into the emergence of hybrid subjectivities: incarcerated participants may temporarily inhabit academic roles that exceed prisonised identities, while external students confront and rework their assumptions about imprisonment. Rather than dissolving asymmetries, these encounters reveal the ambivalent and relational character of prison education within contemporary punitive contexts.

In recent years, several national contexts have witnessed a weakening of the rehabilitative function of prison and a rise in penal populism, which has gradually led to the marginalisation of prison education. Carceral spaces are commonly understood as disciplinary spaces (Foucault, 1975), where incarcerated individuals are subjected to processes of identity degradation (Goffman, 1961) and prisonization (Clemmer, 1940), through which they may gradually lose their previous defining traits and internalise the identity of “the prisoner”. However, prison education can transform carceral settings into “porous institutions” (Ellis, 2021), allowing alternative perspectives to contaminate prison culture and enabling incarcerated individuals to reconstruct their sense of self and reinterpret their detention experiences. In this sense, prison education sits at the intersection of disciplinary control and democratic aspirations, operating within carceral logics while partially interrupting their totalising effects.

Prison education creates counter-hegemonic spaces, enabling incarcerated individuals to expand their horizons and cultivate alternative identities and critical self-perceptions (Acocella & Pastore, 2020; Borghini & Pastore, 2024). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a high-security prison in Tuscany between 2023 and 2024, this paper examines the impact of participating in higher education programs on family bonds, particularly those of children of school age. Data collected through 10 in-depth interviews with detainees and ethnographic field observation show that attending university enables incarcerated persons to reflect on their lives and acquire a deeper understanding of themselves, rediscovering the importance of education for themselves and their children. University spaces within the prison appear to function as sites of re-subjectification, generating hybrid forms of identities that intersect the roles of inmate, student, father and educator. Prison education can therefore restore symbolic legitimacy to incarcerated fathers, whose roles as educators and parents gain renewed strength through pursuing a university degree. Incarcerated individuals can see themselves as competent figures, capable of guiding and supporting their children throughout their educational paths and offering advice when needed. Prison education, therefore, can help to bridge the gap between fathers and children and reconceptualise the connections between the prison system, the education system, and the families involved (Cataldi & Cataldi, 2024). From this perspective, prison education can be seen as a key element in challenging the logics of penitentiary spaces and opening micro-spaces of democracy within them, where not only the right to study is upheld, but also the right to develop fully as human beings.

At the same time, prison education is often shaped by rehabilitative and managerial rhetorics, where university participation is often framed as a marker of compliance or risk management. This ambivalence reveals the contradictory context in which education operates within prisons, positioned between governance and democratic aspiration. Within this negotiated space, adopting the role of student and engaging in knowledge production can facilitate significant processes of change, enabling incarcerated fathers to envision identities beyond those defined by incarceration.

This contribution draws on the specific experience of teaching the subject Sociology of Law and Deviance within the Sociology degree programme at the University of Federico II in Naples, Department of Social Sciences, in the high-security wing of the Secondigliano penitentiary in Naples. The course, by its very nature and purpose, aims to examine, illustrate, and reflect on the relationship between law and society, focusing on the interplay between norms and violations, with particular attention to criminal transgressions and all that this entails, within the theoretical framework of the socio-legal definition of criminality itself. Similarly, the course focuses on the analysis and implications of the broad concept of deviance, understood as the opposition to social prescriptions, and on the related issues of recognition and the formation of subjectivities. Introducing these issues in a penitentiary context, addressing students typically sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for serious crimes, brings about certain specificities. In a way, criminal phenomena, alongside elements of legality, emerge both as the subject and as the context of the teaching. Furthermore, when engaging with individuals who are experientially distinct, certain social dynamics, such as those related to judicial assessment and penal execution, emerge in the dialectic between normative principles and practice, where the law as outlined in theory and on paper meets the law as experienced in reality. Here, the tension may appear precisely between the experiential aspect and the specialist knowledge (with potential comparisons, whether implicit or explicit, sometimes even contentious). An additional point of interest is how those being addressed perceive the subject (and, in some ways, themselves as student-prisoners) and how they expect and wish it to be approached (as well as how they themselves express their views on the matter). In this regard, the way in which the subject is discussed “openly” in relation to phenomena that inherently tend to be concealed or disguised, on the one hand, and how it is addressed “theoretically”, or even somewhat “abstractly”, on the other hand, seems significant, given that within the broader context of the educational relationship, these phenomena manifest as “materiality” (even to the extent that, underlying it and in its subsequent consequences, they may form the very basis for the choice of the educational path offered). Finally, the involvement of such students in specific projects (e.g., in the field of restorative justice) offers, in a certain sense, perspectives framed in terms of “research”.

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.

Over the past twenty-five years, access to university education in prisons has played an increasingly significant role in the Italian educational landscape, with 43 universities having established Prison University Centers (PUP). These spaces function as frontier zones, suspended between “inside” and “outside,” where disciplinary logics, security requirements, and educational practices oriented toward democratic participation, critical consciousness, and social justice meet—and often clash. This coexistence is marked by structural tensions: on the one hand, the tendency of the prison institution to frame education within categories such as treatment, re-education, or rewards; on the other, the potential to generate transformative processes that transcend the security-disciplinary paradigm, opening up spaces for agency and resistance.

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study conducted as part of the “Prison Project” at the University of Milan, one of the largest university-prison partnership programs in Italy, involving approximately 140 incarcerated students and 150 tutors. Through a questionnaire and two focus groups, the study explores the motivations, challenges, practices, and perspectives of the tutors, highlighting how initial curiosity about the prison context often evolves into a more conscious civic and political commitment. The tutoring experience thus appears as a process of co-evolution: not merely educational support, but a space for the construction of shared knowledge, critical reflection, and mutual transformation between students at liberty and those in confinement.

In light of the theoretical frameworks of Freire (2011) and hooks (1998), tutoring emerges as an educational practice capable of generating hybrid subjectivities through imagination and the implementation of alternative logics to those of the security state, which, inevitably, continue to exert pressure, imposing forms of negotiation. The research also shows how the university, through the active involvement of student tutors, can redefine its public role, opening channels of participation and social responsibility that transcend traditional institutional boundaries.

The university in prison thus emerges as a dynamic and far-from-neutral space, marked by contradictions and tensions yet capable of fostering democratic processes, critical learning, and mutual transformation. It serves as a social laboratory where new forms of democratic citizenship, social relations, and knowledge production are explored, helping to rethink the public role of the university and its responsibilities toward socially marginalized groups.