Corrections_Today_Fall_2025_Vol.87_No.3

EDUCATION

Keeping these motivations and barriers in mind, Flynn et al. conducted a qualitative study (43). Through interviews with adults who chose not to pursue adult education, they identified five main themes of their hesitance: (1) family values and responsibilities, (2) emotional effect of poverty on participant’s lives, (3) disrupted school and learning experiences, (4) social ex clusion and personal challenges and (5) turning points in participants’ education and hopes for the future (Cabus et al. 171; Comings 32; Flynn et al. 48). The importance of education to a person can be influenced by generation al, cultural and language differences in family’s feelings towards education (Cabus et al. 173; Felix 16; Flynn et al. 46, Ioannidou and Parma 103). This represents the family values and responsibilities theme presented in the study (Flynn et al. 46) and can be identified as a dispositional barrier to adult education. Under the emo tional toll of poverty, participants described how living in poverty caused them psychological and emotional distress, fear about physical safety and anger towards the welfare system (Cabus et al. 174; Felix 14; Flynn et al. 52; Ioannidou and Parma 87); and can be summed up as a situational barrier to adult education. Multiple school changes, negative experiences with teachers, unrealisti cally high expectations from teachers and a perceived inability to do educational work can lead to a person feeling a sense of instability and inconsistency that leads to them finding alternatives to being in school (Cabus et al. 172; Felix 12; Flynn et al. 43; Ioannidou and Parma 94). These experiences act as institutional and situ ational barriers for an adult to participate in educational programming. Some other individual and situational barriers to adult education are social exclusion and personal problems. These include isolation due to race, class, ability and age differences. These differences may lead to a person finding community with others who par ticipate in crime and substance misuse (Cabus et al. 175; Comings 34; Flynn et al. 52; Ioannidou and Parma 96). Turning points included reasons for why adults turned their lives around, without pursuing adult education, and included factors such as having a child or run-ins with the law (Flynn et al. 45). Many of the themes stated throughout the study (Flynn et al. 48) may be true for adults in correctional facilities as well, who are often faced with the decision of attending adult education programming (besides what is required) or not. Prison

literacy programs that inadvertently focus on breaking down these barriers and increasing these motivations may have a higher participation rate, as well as a more inclined audience of students who want to do well, which may have beneficial outcomes for the prisoners, their family and their community. Background on corrections Individuals who end up incarcerated at correctional facilities face many consequences that begin with the decisions and actions they took, leading them to their incarceration (Boudin 141). The primary point of this punishment, historically and today, is their removal from society, which can lead prisoners to be limited in their access to resources. In addition, what can determine the length of which a person will serve in prison can be de pendent on the policies that currently exist. For instance, there has been a trend within the past few decades in the United States that “nothing works”, which has led to more punitive policies resulting in a large increase of people incarcerated and reduction in rehabilitation pro gramming (Aiello 293; Stickle and Shuster 1281). This trend started with the “get tough” policies that were initiated during the time of the “War on Drugs” in the 1970s, which was a way to eliminate the idea that individuals incarcerated can be rehabilitated (Aiello 310). Concurrent during this time included escalated punishments such as the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and the popu lar three-strikes laws in the 1990s (Stickle and Shuster 1264). Stickle and Shuster noted that the time of “War on Drugs” proved the increase of punitive efforts to fur ther punish prisoners and those that commit crime was not only counterproductive but catastrophic for society overall (1264). These punitive efforts have led to 2.4 mil lion people incarcerated in the United States which make up 25% of the world’s prison population, most of which are uneducated (Aiello 293; Reed 538; Scott 42). Since the “War on Drugs” period, there have been more efforts to return to the social movement intro duced in the 1880s. This social movement emphasized rehabilitation through education which focused on increased literacy so prisoners could read and compre hend the Bible (Finlay and Bates 122; Galeshi and Bolin 429). Then, more secular education was introduced

Corrections Today | Fall 2025

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