Opponents of prison college funding frame incarcerated students as undeserving outsiders.

Evidence

Consider the position of New York State Senator Greg Ball who launched an online petition titled, “Hell No to Attica University,” arguing “in a world of finite resources, where we are struggling to find funding for education for our kids, the last thing New York State should be funding is college tuition for convicts” (Lennon, 2015, p. 9). … Ball’s retort is a coded argument that “convicts” are not “our kids” and are thus unworthy of the same funding opportunities as what he later called “our hardworking New Yorkers” (Lennon, 2015, p. 9), but this ideological debate is inseparable from the prison-classroom, and the frank reality is that college classes are not always welcome in jails and prisons. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 398

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘coded argument’ that some lives deserve public investment and others do not echoes how education funding debates in general divide deserving from undeserving recipients. — connects to: American prison higher education expanded then collapsed with federal Pell Grant policy shifts. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 397; Prisoner demands directly produced successful college programs behind bars — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 152

Broader Connections

• Prisoner demands directly produced successful college programs behind bars #corroborates (0.70) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 152