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…

Purpose: Annually, over 1.25 million children face the reality of one of their parents being incarcerated. Additionally, there has been a massive rise in the incarceration of women, and the majority of those women are mothers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the power and influence of children's literature as windows, mirrors and doors for…

Many schools and districts include character education in their curriculum, the content of which is decided on a local level. These programs flow through multiple grade levels and are often part of career planning. However, it is unknown if youth in juvenile residential placement facilities, who could benefit from these programs, are offered…

In this chapter, I argue that prison education is dangerous. In a context where individual incarcerated people have restricted autonomy, non-incarcerated students, staff, and faculty from colleges and universities can cause real harm by neglecting to consider the vast power differentials between non- or never-incarcerated educators and students in…

Transitioning back into society successfully after incarceration comes with its downfalls, but educational support could potentially address transitional success, especially for formerly incarcerated women. Previous research mainly focused on exploring education options and recidivism outcomes for formerly incarcerated men. There is limited…

As criminological perspectives of youth justice shift from rehabilitative ideals to desistance frameworks whereby young people assume a central role in their own identity-development and relationships with others, child-centred approaches that afford youth with agency and voice have been seen as increasingly important. However, noting that…

Recidivism rates across the world remain high, and one of the key reasons for this situation is that people leaving the prison system have great difficulty in securing employment. Addressing this issue must be explored from a broad perspective, but one potential career option that is under-explored is self-employment, with few entrepreneurship…

Corrections education (CE) faculty Lauren Zavrel reflects on the vacuum of graduate-level programs and professional development (PD) that prepare teachers for the specific work of teaching adults in prisons and jails. Citing her own unique journey into the field of CE, similar stories from colleagues, and literature on the topic, she argues that…

The California State University (CSU) Project Rebound is a re-entry program that provides educational, social, financial, and case management to formerly incarcerated college students with the goal of helping them become successful post-incarceration and post-graduation. This exploratory study examines successful career-building strategies…

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…

Introduction: Peer health education programs for adolescents in schools and for adults in prison are effective at increasing health knowledge and improving leadership skills. However, there have been no peer health education programs in juvenile detention facilities despite proven benefit in similar environments. We created a pilot study to…

The application of technology in education has often been proposed as a positive support to improve access to and quality of education generally. However, research on technology in prison-based education is limited. This paper investigates the existing literature on educational programming in youth correctional institutions, and the role of…

Cultural competence is essential to building effective practitioners in the criminal justice field. However, there is limited research on this issue. Using a qualitative methodology, this study examined the perceptions of cultural competency among 24 students majoring in criminal justice at a Midwestern university. They ranged in age from 20 to…

This paper presents the educational focused outcomes of a set of workshops entitled 'Introduction to Archaeology' that were delivered within a prison. The workshops were delivered as part of a project that seeks to explore the pro-social benefits and social capital (i.e. social and structural aspects that support positive identity formation) that…

The juvenile justice system is charged with the welfare of the children it serves, yet less is known about the prosocial behaviors of adolescent youthful offenders. This study identifies patterns of prosocial behavior for 7 years among serious adolescent offenders, the correlates of each pattern, and associated patterns of secure placement. Using…