17 - Prison Education: A Northern European Wicked Policy Problem?

Summary

Introduction

Time in prison is justified as a punishment for committing an offence. But little evidence exists that incarceration of offenders affects the level of crime. On the contrary, the prison population has grown by 24 per cent since the year 2000, with an estimated official figure of 10.74 million people incarcerated worldwide (Munoz, 2009; Walmsley, 2018); unofficial figures are significantly higher. Many scholars argue that rates of imprisonment vary depending upon the level of societal trust, the extent of social welfare and the type of economic structure (Hughes, 2012; Coyle, 2016; Czerniawski, 2016).

In addition to the roles of punishment and assumed deterrence, a growing body of evidence also suggests that prison education can play a role in reducing recidivism (MoJ, 2018; Prison Reform Trust, 2018). Findings from one of the largest ever meta-analyses of prison education studies carried out in the US (Davis et al, 2013) have shown that inmates who participated in prison education programmes had a 43 per cent lower chance of returning to prison than those who did not. However, for policy makers caught between conflicting discourses around a need to combat recidivism and a need, in the eyes of the public, for punitive incarceration, prison education is what has been termed a ‘wicked policy problem’ (Allen, 2004). Such problems are complex, not fully understood by policy makers, highly resistant to change and seemingly immune to any evidence that is likely to bring about institutional reconstruction. While evidence indicates that education in prison can reduce recidivism, many politicians struggle to find an acceptable policy solution to the rise in prison populations.

In this chapter I explore this policy problem by looking more closely at the provision of prison education in three northern European countries: Norway, Germany and England. After examining what makes wicked policies ‘wicked’, I look at why making a distinction between ‘education’ and ‘training’ is important in understanding the efficacy of prison education programmes. After introducing the three national contexts, the chapter discusses their contextual specificities and their implications for policy makers when considering the impact prison education can have on genuine prisoner rehabilitation.