Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism ed. by Stephen J. Hartnett, Eleanor Novek, Jennifer K. Wood (review)

Edited by three of the founding members of the Prison Communication Activism Research and Education (PCARE) collective, this anthology aims to put contemporary scholarly and activist voices together to address the crisis of incarceration. The collection extends PCARE’s long-standing critique of the prison-industrial complex (PIC), but the book’s real intervention is its focus on innovative engaged communication scholarship and pedagogy. The ten essays in this book set examples for and encourage imaginative redirections in education inside and outside of the prison, as well as transitional and community supports, advocacy, and mainstream media. Throughout, authors agree that intervention in popular rhetoric about incarceration and criminality becomes an important platform for affecting the criminal justice system. Essays in the collection are divided into four parts with useful and brief editorial introductions.

Part 1, “Working on the Inside: The Transformative Potential of Prison Education,” features three chapters that envision a justice-focused relationship between education and activism. The first chapter, written by Jonathan Shailor, will be of particular interest to scholars focusing on performance and gender, as it explores the way performances can challenge and change how individuals understand the relationship between violence and masculinity. In chapter 2, authors Shelly Schaefer Hinck, Edward A. Hinck, and Lesley A. Withers claim that service learning in carceral facilities offers student participants a promising “way to develop citizenship concerns” (57). The chapter traces the shifts in participants’ belief in and perpetuation of negative stigmas and an increased investment in service to their communities. In the final chapter in part 1, David Coogan argues that autobiography writing workshops are one creative way to “prepare a public to create a more just society” (73). He emphasizes the way that confronting one’s own life script inspires reflection and change. He also charts multiple strategies for using writing to build bridgework across barriers that divide free society and incarcerated individuals—in publication and pedagogy.

All three chapters would interest academics invested in radical education, social justice, and questions of contemporary citizenship. These chapters are set apart from other recent publications that address education in prison, because their emphasis is not primarily on educating prisoners to social literacy or basic-education literacy. Instead, these education models challenge problematic social knowledge that sustains power imbalances through stigmatization and violence. While the section focuses on educating within carceral facilities, all three chapters consider what learning can take place inside the prison to press an imaginative refiguring of social assumptions and policies outside the prison.

Part 2, “Working on the Outside: Building New Selves and Strong Communities,” stresses the ways interventions in the PIC must also attend to considerations of the communities impacted by the prison. Chapter 3 introduces “Courtesy Incarceration,” hoping that naming the stigma experienced by loved ones of the incarcerated will expand the ways experiences of incarceration are understood and encourage further scholarship on stigma or family communications. In chapter 4 Jeralyn Faris considers possibilities for reforming the reentry process to allow formerly incarcerated individuals to participate in the community as citizens so that “the stigma of their incarceration can be replaced” (121). This chapter makes an argument for social reform that would balance state coercion and self-agency. The important contribution of this chapter—and, in fact, all of part 2—is the inclusion and amplification of voices that are often left out of conversations about prison—namely those who are most affected by the PIC. This is certainly the critical contribution of the final chapter in this section, which presents excerpts and themes from interviews with women in reentry facilities who are working both to create identifications for themselves and identify their own support needs after incarceration.

Part 3, “Working on the Media,” considers the ways that the majority of mass media serves to educate the public...