Teaching prisons – contentious, political, and sensitive

Teaching Criminology comes with its own set of challenges. Unlike other subjects, everyone seems to have an opinion on crime and prisons, and often these opinions are informed by what we see or hear on the media. Yet media discussions of prisons are rife with language like “prisons are holiday camps”, “Britain too soft on crime”, and so on. Often, such discussions of prisons are not informed by research or statistics, and are designed to evoke moral outrage in the general public.

This means that students often arrive with their own views of what prison is and is not. Part of the challenge is to ensure that they delve into scholarly work about prisons and ensure that their views – whatever they might be – are well-informed by high-quality data. I seek to encourage them to delve into prison statistics and ethnographic studies, and to approach mass media with a healthy dose of scepticism. I also ask them to challenge their own views – to separate emotions from opinions informed by good evidence. This larger understanding came about through ‘reflexivity on action’ (Schoin 1983), which is reflecting on what went well after a teaching session has concluded. I understood that I cannot teach effectively without being appreciative of the fact that students will come to my classes with preconceived notions of what crime is and what punishment is for.

However, teaching prisons also means I need to challenge myself as a lecturer. I too have strong (and often highly emotion-laden) opinions about prison. For example, I believe that we should seek to rehabilitate rather than punish. I have had students who expressed views which were the polar opposite of my own. I realised quickly that there was a skill to how I, as a lecturer, needed to approach such discussions. I cannot, and should not, react emotively. I needed to practice what I preached and respect the views of all of my students, while prompting them to provide evidence for the arguments they made. This is so-called ‘reflexivity in action’ (Schon 1983) – that is, reflecting and reacting at the time of teaching.

I found it useful to pick out the parts of students’ arguments that were sound and backed up by evidence, while showing them those parts that did not hold water. For example, a student once argued that they believed that dangerous and violent offenders should be subjected to the death penalty as this satisfied the basic need for revenge. Although I was firmly against this view, I helped her frame her argument in the context of Durkheim’s theories about the moral/emotive aspect of punishing crime. Certainly, violent crime raises the natural desire for revenge – but this may not be so in the case of petty parking offences!

Of course, the above understanding came about through reflecting on the 5+ years of teaching Criminal Law and Criminology. Reflexivity is perhaps especially critical when teaching social science and humanities subjects, where the issues discussed above may be particularly pertinent.

Schon, D. (1983) The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action, London, TempleSmith.