A cognitive prerequisite for education and (re)entry into the labor market is the ability to concentrate for a long period. Conducted with 39 participants, the present study examines the effect of a six-week dance-like martial arts program on prisoners' concentration ability in an open prison in Germany (n=15), and compares their concentration…

When facilitating group art therapy for young adult male inmates in prison, response art helped an art therapist to build therapeutic bonds and maintain self-care. Both artmaking in-session and post-session enabled the art therapist to traverse relational distance, nurture trust, and create social bonds in the group. By reflecting on her response…

Objective: The present study describes the development of the Indiana Prison Writers Workshop (IPWW), a creative writing workshop, based in group theory and designed for incarcerated settings. Methods: Quantitative evaluation data from IPWW workshops conducted from 2023-2024 were analyzed using IBM SPSS V. 29. Prior to the workshop, 149 men…

Adjudicated youth face a multitude of barriers when reentering school following incarceration. School administrators and educational personnel know very little about how these students perceive their reentry experiences and what the students identify as needed supports, resources, and barriers throughout the process. This qualitative study used…

Criminals allegedly use effective novelty to intentionally exploit and harm others (creative fraud, theft, and murder). However, empirical evidence that criminals possess higher malevolent creativity than individuals without criminal backgrounds is lacking. We compared a male sample of prisoners in a maximum-security penitentiary (n = 140), police…

While many scholars have examined transformative learning in different prison education programs, the field has only recently reached Latin America. This article presents a participatory action research project which has been operating in a prison for men accused of organized crime in Jalisco, Mexico, since 2018. The analysis is based on…

Incarcerated men look to the classroom as a refuge to learn, grow, and develop, departing from their typical, everyday environment where devaluation is the norm. Unfortunately, the absence of a humanizing pedagogical praxis exposes the danger of the classroom's inability to restore human dignity, implicitly perpetuating incarcerated men as less…

The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to determine if, and to what extent, correlations existed between self-esteem level, age, and grade level change of an adult male inmate enrolled in a Functional Literacy (FL) Program in the Southern Region of Arizona. Current research examined the relationships between self-esteem and age…

This narrative inquiry explores the experiences of youth in a school within a juvenile detention facility, who participated in a hip hop and podcasting small-group counseling intervention. Specifically, youth wrote and recorded a podcast consisting of a hip hop song, interviews with their peers, and staff reflections on the youth's experience.…

Physical activity during adolescence is critical for disease prevention and health promotion. Studies show that youth who are incarcerated have lower levels of physical activity than their non-incarcerated peers, higher rates of overweight and obesity in adulthood, and worse general health over a lifetime. Sport programming is a promising…

Prisons within the United States contain a large population of inmates with low levels of education. Contributing factors of a successful release from prison have included participation in educational services during incarceration as recidivism rates increase without receiving additional skill sets afforded to inmates. The self-system model of…

This grounded theory study applies both critical race theory and anti-deficit frameworks to recognize the systemic barriers that are in place to limit the success of formerly incarcerated Black students and challenges anti-deficit perspectives that fault those affected by oppressive systems rather than the systems themselves. This qualitative…

Continued use of exclusionary disciplinary actions such as suspensions and expulsions in schools has led to an increase in the number of Black males entering the school-to-prison pipeline. This study examines administrator perspectives on how utilizing SEL practices influences student behavior and how utilizing SEL practices impact administrators'…

I began my life as a prison theatre artist 25 years ago. Over the years, through first-hand experience with prisoners, their families, and others, I came to understand some of the more oppressive elements of the state prison system, and the relation of that system to the larger prison-industrial complex. This essay is a reflection on the key…

To fully grasp the systems of oppression youth of color must navigate, educators must consider their experiences outside as well as inside the classroom. This paper adds to the small but growing body of literature across fields highlighting how Black and Latinx youth are simultaneously positioned by schools and the justice system as criminals that…