This study shows how education and training in prison is essentially accommodative, an adjunct to the overall apparatus of surveillance, regulation, and punishment. Further, prisons are presented as something more than just another relevant context for the deployment of adult education methods and materials. The analysis, informed by critical theory perspectives and on-site investigations with both inmates and prison educators, yields disturbing insights on how the kind of power relationships and coercive structures that impinge, with more immediacy, on prison education also shape much of the modern practice of adult education; in particular, that which is characterized as self-directed learning. Some alternative strategies to an accommodative practice of adult education in the prisons and on the outside are identified.
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