Some Humanists Should Not Go to Prison


SOME HUMANISTS SHOULD NOT GO TO PRISON

The title Why All Humanists Should Go to Prison   is ambiguous and ironic, a good match for the argument Alex Tipei made in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 2018.  Tipei is a liberal idealist who wishes to convince academics that "humanists can at once help reimagine the prison as a space of reform and reaffirm the humanities as a relevant mode of learning."  Her argument is provocative.  It reminds us that outmates can learn a great deal  from volunteering to teach inmates, can learn what the art of teaching might be in the panoptical confines of a jail or prison.  Nevertheless, Tipei fails to specify which humanists are fit to have face-to-face conversations with inmates.

 We know that a substantial number of humanists have difficulty in communicating their expertise to outmates in public settings. Ought we not have  second and third thoughts about how effectively they might communicate with incarcerated adult women and men,  how effectively they might teach  traumatized or nihilistic juveniles.  How many privileged humanists  have the compassion, juice, humility, and patience that is a prerequisite for intervening in the lives of the imprisoned?  It is reasonable to guess that few of them have these qualities, and they  ought never darken a prison door, unless they have committed acts that warrant their being inmates.  Tipei's vision is blurred by the thick smoke of good intentions.

Tipei fails to account for diversity in how prisons, especially for-profit prisons, are administered and for the fact that the American criminal justice system is predicated on desires to punish rather than desires  to rehabilitate. It is merely romantic (and truly safe) to associate volunteering to teach in a jail with the debatable "reimagining" that colors the humanities. Volunteering entails risks, including the risk of empathizing with inmates as one struggles to help them enhance their minds.

 Tipei lucked out in being able to teach "a master's level theory and methods course" in Indiana Women's Prison.  A more typical scenario entails teaching basics in writing, reading comprehension, science, mathematics, and social studies (the five sections of the HiSet Exam inmates have to pass in order to obtain high school equivalency) and reassuring  inmates that their minds must not be wasted.  Thus, there is a greater need to cultivate hope and mastery in the fundamentals of learning than to invest energy in academic theorizing.  Praxis matters.  There is a greater need to say to imprisoned students  "I refuse to allow you to fail yourself." There are exceptions, of course, especially in federal prisons that house many of our nation's intellectuals.

Tipei's pondering "questions concerning technology and pedagogy" is valuable at a time when fit humanists should apply the pedagogy of the oppressed to reduce the damage effected by American systems of criminal injustice. But I must emphasize that only fit humanists who can employ the habits of the heart with brutal honesty  and absence of bad faith should "go to prison."  The other humanists should remain in college and university classrooms and help entitlement-afflicted outmates to have epiphanies about their unspoken status as inmates of a different kind, about their reluctance to acknowledge that their nation is an existential prison, a space of panoptical confinement.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            September 25, 2018

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