This article enters the ‘intimate details’ of a participatory action research project nested inside a college-in-prison program for women in a maximum security prison. Conceived out of a conversation of prison reform advocates, the piece is deliberately not co-authored by all of the researchers - prison based and university based - because this article is an opportunity to reveal some of the delicate and difficult issues of working inside institutions of abuse and structural violence. The issues discussed could not easily be spoken about by women in prison, or even former prisoners, without jeopardizing their well being. Through the findings of the PAR project the piece will sample the impact of college in prison, but more intentionally it will interrogate questions of epistemology, ethics, method and politics as participatory action researchers take up projects inside state institutions, enforcing neo-liberalism through the prison industrial complex. The critical role of the ‘outsider’ who is ‘privileged’ to speak is interrogated, as is the responsibility to bear witness as the walls of prison consume communities of color and poverty.
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