All the Wiser: Dialogic Space, Destigmatization, and Teacher-Activist Recruitment

• NCJ Number: 245880
• Journal: Prison Journal Volume: 93 Issue: 2 Dated: June 2013 Pages: 163-188
• Author(s): Norman Conti; Linda Morrison; Katherine Pantaleo
• Date Published: June 2013
• Length: 26 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article examines instructor training for The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an organization that brings outside college students into prison, joining incarcerated men and women who become inside students for an undergraduate course.

Abstract

This article examines instructor training for The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an organization that brings outside college students into prison, joining incarcerated men and women who become inside students for an undergraduate course. Ethnographic data revealed a purposeful stigma reversal for a group of men serving life sentences and a concomitant shift in moral career for instructor trainees. Through structured encounters with these men, trainees come to see, speak, and behave in ways that subvert conventional understandings of the stigma imposed on those in prison. The alteration of self and perspective experienced during the training drives participants to incorporate this activist ethos into their own teaching. Abstract published by arrangement with Sage.