Deficits to Assets: Re-imagining a strength-based model of prison education

This is the first event in the "Blue-Sky Thinking" seminar series, which aims to stimulate new connections and collaborations between researchers and practitioners in Criminal Justice.

In a change from well-known deficit narratives where people in prison are seen in relation to what they can’t do, this seminar will explore how we might rethink education/ employment/ training in relation to prisoners’ strengths - including those adopted through navigating the streets, criminal spaces, everyday prison life, and other sites of exclusion. Could prisoners’ attributes and skills be valued, supported, and built upon in order to facilitate a shift towards a strengths-based model of prison education and how might this look in a post COVID era?

Our panellists for this event are Dr Cormac Behan and David Kendall. This seminar will be chaired by Dr Anita Wilson & Dr Dave Maguire.

Dr Cormac Behan

Dr Cormac Behan teaches criminology at the School of Languages, Law and Social Sciences, Technological University Dublin, Ireland. Previously, he worked at the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Sheffield. From 1997 to 2011, Cormac taught politics and history in Irish prisons. He has researched widely on education in prison and in 2021, Education in Prison: A literature review (2021) was published by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning. He was one of the founder members of the Journal of Prison Education and Re-entry and he currently serves as Lead Editor. He is the Chairperson of the European Prison Education Association.

David Kendall

David Kendall has worked alongside people in prison (and their families), rough sleepers, and young people in care on a wide range of creative projects. He is a facilitator for Safe Ground’s Fathers Inside and Man Up programmes, both of which work with men in prison.

In 2020 he was named one of The Big Issue’s 100 Changemakers, for Penned Up – an arts and literature festival organised with, and for, people in prison. Penned Up events are a space for honest and open discussions, and both audience and speakers rise to this. Over the last eight festivals in three prisons guests have included Tony Adams, Levi Roots, Alex Wheatle, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Shaun Attwood, George the Poet, Kimberley Chambers, and Kit de Waal.

‘You can’t fix people. People fix themselves but the arts give us the chance to look at our lives critically, and also see lives unlike our own.’

https://pennedup.org.uk/

Chairs: Dr Anita Wilson & Dr Dave Maguire

Dr Anita Wilson

Dr Anita Wilson is a prison ethnographer of many years standing. She has undertaken research with prisoners and staff across the UK, Europe and North America. She is a previous Chairperson of the European Prison Education Association, International Representative of the Correctional Education Association (USA) and has held a Spencer/NAE post-doctoral Fellowship (USA) studying transatlantic comparisons of prison education. Her publications span policy and academia, together with practical application of her research through the implementation of national specialist training programs for prison staff. Her current interests include aspects of carceral geography, investigating barriers to prisoners’ successful reintegration, and the professional development of prison teachers. Despite numerous attempts to retire, she is currently a Senior Research Associate with the Centre for Education in Criminal Justice, UCL.

Dr David Maguire

Dr David Maguire has researched and managed projects for excluded groups across sectors that include housing, education, prison and the wider criminal justice system. In 2016 he was awarded D.Phil. (PhD) from the University of Oxford for research focusing on the interplay between masculinity, education, (un)employment, crime and imprisonment. After holding Lectureship positions in Criminal Justice, Criminology and Sociology, David took up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCL’s Institute of Education that explored post prison transitions into employment and education. He has written and published on prison masculinities, and is the author of British Society of Criminology book prize winning Male, Failed, Jailed : Masculinities and "Revolving-Door" Imprisonment in the UK. He is currently the Director for the Prison Reform Trust's Building Futures project, a five-year programme for prisoners who are serving or have served 10 or more years in prison.