Prison education once enabled transformative self-creation even against the regime

Evidence

With no available means of organizing his quest for knowledge, he proceeded to read a dictionary, copying each word in his own hand. By the time he could immerse himself in reading, he noted, “months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.” Then, according to Malcolm, prisoners who demonstrated an unusual interest in reading were assumed to have embarked upon a journey of self-rehabilitation and were frequently allowed special privileges—such as checking out more than the maximum number of books. Even so, in order to pursue this self-education, Malcolm had to work against the prison regime—he often read on his cell floor, long after lights-out, by the glow of the corridor light, taking care to return to bed each hour for the two minutes during which the guard marched past his cell. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 146

Categorization

• XREF: Malcolm’s copying-the-dictionary story parallels Davis’s claim that prisoners can turn incarceration into transformative experience. — connects to: Carceral power is naturalized by borrowing the rationality of curing and educating — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 462; The prison was conceived as an apparatus for transforming human beings — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 506; Freirean world-reading pedagogy becomes ethically fraught inside prisons — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 406

Related

• The prison was conceived as an apparatus for transforming human beings (similarity 0.79)