A Prison Education Counternarrative: “Mock Citizenship” in a Women’s Prison

In this article, we develop a perspective on the purposes and possibilities of education in prison through the stories of the first author, a prison educator and critical pedagogue. In the context of today’s prisons, we complicate universalist notions of citizenship by weaving theories of citizenship into the story of education. We share the daily concerns of a prison educator and explore the transformative possibilities that women convict students try on. We question how to shape educational practices in prison and contemplate the construction of a new “mock citizenship” informed by the realities of felony disenfranchisement. Our hope is to bring to the conversation something that has been lacking when discussions of incarceration occur: insight into the ways incarcerated students perform the role of citizen and how the purpose of prison education must extend beyond job readiness toward the creation of full citizens able to participate in the democratic process.

"forfeiture of property, the loss of the right to appear in court, a prohibition on entering into contracts, as well as the loss of voting rights" (para. 2). "Civil Death" aspects were brought to the U.S. by the English colonists. All but the loss of voting rights for felons have been abolished. Today, the lack of voting rights for those with criminal backgrounds is referred to as "felony disenfranchisement" and traditionally supported by interpretations of the 14th amendment.
States control voting rights, and approaches to voting for incarcerated individuals vary widely. For instance, felons in Maine and Vermont never lose their right to vote, even while incarcerated (Allard & Mauer, 1999). But in states such as Iowa and Virginia, felons and ex-felons permanently lose their right to vote unless given a gubernatorial pardon (National Council of State Legislatures, 2016). The procedure for getting one's voting rights back after leaving prison are cumbersome, and statistically very few former inmates restore their voting rights, especially in southern states where the process is particularly restrictive.
According to the Sentencing Project (2013), "legal challenges to felony disenfranchisement laws have been mostly unsuccessful because courts have refused to apply the same legal principles regarding the fundamental right to vote to individuals with criminal convictions" (p. 7). Opponents to felony disenfranchisement claim that under §1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, rights of felons and other formerly incarcerated individuals should be afforded equal protection under the law, which includes the right to vote. Unfortunately, cases like Richardson v. Ramirez (1974), a case from California where formerly incarcerated individuals claimed that under the 14th Amendment the state was violating their equal protection rights, the courts sided with the state laws concerning restrictions on voting rights for certain individuals in their citizenry. Although there is some dissenting opinion regarding state laws that are highly restrictive concerning restoration of voting rights to former felons, courts have tended to side with the prevailing law.
In this article, we aim to address the lack of attention given to women's prisons and complicate notions of education and citizenship. We share the daily concerns of Sultana (first author), a prison educator, and explore the transformative possibilities that her students try on. In our analysis, we question how to shape educational practices in prison and contemplate a "mock citizenship" informed by the realities of felony disenfranchisement. We began this paper sharing the broader policy literature related to prisons.
Next, we share the impetus for writing this project, our positionalities, contributions, and approach to presenting a counternarrative. Our hope is to bring to the conversation something that has been lacking when discussions of incarceration occur: insight into the ways incarcerated students perform the role of citizen and how the purpose of prison education must extend beyond job readiness toward the creation of full citizens able to participate in the democratic process.

Methodological (Re)considerations: Using Narrative to Bring A Counternarrative
In Fall 2016, we gathered for a conference in the Northwestern U.S. and Sultana, at the time a professor in an educational program in a women's prison, invited the other authors to participate in a discussion www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/jecs Journal of Education and Culture Studies Vol. 3, No. 4, 2019 443 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
group with her students. We were eager to participate for various reasons. Brian was formerly involved with a prison reform non-profit organization. Melissa, after attaining a PhD in cultural studies of education, was pursuing a law degree. Brittany had done significant work in anti-racist education including educating teachers about the school to prison pipeline.
It was an invaluable opportunity to dialogue with women in this othered space-a classroom behind bars. Students had been invited to voluntarily participate in a discussion on "culture and politics" with the authors. We began with light conversation, but the biggest question on the women's minds at the time was who would win the presidential election. They watched some of the 2016 presidential debates on television, and they were intrigued by the discussions regarding the candidates and their positions on topics such as for-profit prisons, immigration, and women's rights. Our discussion grew to include academic projects the students designed, how they felt about the prison they were in, their lives inside and outside, and the prison system generally.
We continued to discuss what we had seen and heard into the night. That we had participated in a passionate dialogue with a diverse group of adult women on the complexities and contradictions presented by the 2016 presidential election was not necessarily striking. What was striking-and what continued to beg for attention-was the fact that about a quarter of the discussants in this heated dialogue had been relieved of the fundamental right to participate in the democratic process under discussion. How, we wondered, did they reconcile this disconnect? And how could we as educators-privileged with full citizenship-interpret this positionality?
In this manuscript we do not claim to speak for these women, but inform our thoughts through the discourses they offer. Like aunties in the back yard after Sunday dinner, they invited us into their circle for a moment and we soaked up what we could. But knowing that these particular aunties do not have the voice that we do-and because their conversations linger in our heads-we pursue the implications here. Thus, we come into this project with three of us as outsiders. Brian, Melissa and Brittany are positioned as those not directly connected with the prison system. None of us have been incarcerated or worked directly with prisoners. However, we position ourselves as cultural studies scholars that have a deep connection with issues pertaining to social justice, of which, the topics surrounding the women prisoners would fall. Author #1, on the other hand, is an outsider on the inside. Working closely through an education program within the walls of the women's prison, she is witness and participant, taking advantage of the special position of "honorary" insider afforded to her by her students while constantly aware of the opportunities that going home-outside the gates-afford her every day.
In our efforts to (re)imagine prison education, we employ a narrative methodology (Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2013). With narrative we problematize traditional notions of prison education by sharing the stories of Sultana. We consider Sultana's story central to our analysis given her daily role working with incarcerated women and use her voice to create a counternarrative that challenges the narrow conception much of the public holds of prison education and helps to interrogate the performance of citizenship. We do not include a separate "theoretical framework" as a lens to share our With the understanding of who we are and the positionality that we have as scholars within this paper, what follows is a documentation of how we interpreted and theorized what we learned from a group of incarcerated women about their relationship to notions of democracy and citizenship. We argue that a critical pedagogy is essential to support their participation in the democracy and that-disenfranchised-they inhabit a type of mock citizenship reminiscent of 19th century republican motherhood.

Education and the Arcane Principles of Citizenship Formation
In Another Kind of Public Education Patricia Hill Collins (2009) begins by sharing a story from her senior year of high school about a prompt given to her asking, "What does the flag mean to you?" In the United States, the red and white stripes, and white stars on a field of blue are typically associated with freedom, liberty, and a patriotic nationalism. For Collins, an African American woman who had realized that the "American ideal of meritocracy was a myth" (p. 2), however, the flag was problematic.
Her opinions about race, school, and democracy were not welcomed in her public school. Collins ultimately argues, "democracy is not a finished project but rather is constantly in the making" (p. 5).
With an understanding that education and democracy are interconnected and are always in the making, we must acknowledge that citizenship is a dynamic force with those same interconnections. We must question "citizenship" as well as who gets access to it, and how and where it is obtained in the current Quantz (2015) describes citizenship as the knowledge, skills, and values needed in a particular time and place in a particular society; and that in a democratic citizenship these knowledge, skills, and values are needed by citizens to shape their own government. For Turner (1993), citizenship is "that set of practices (juridical, political, economic, and cultural) which define a person as a competent member of society, and which as a consequence shape the flow of resources to persons and social groups" (p. 2).
Collins (2009) narrows the context of citizenry, noting, "depending on where you stand, American democracy constitutes a reality, a promise, a possibility, or a problem" (p. 7, emphasis added). If being a citizen is a set of practices, if it requires "knowledge, skills, and values", does everyone, regardless of position, have access to these "knowledge, skills, and values?" Collins' flag narrative was considered a problem much in the same ways W.E.B. DuBois so prophetically described over 100 years ago: she was censured for trying to be both Black and American. As we learn in her story, her desire to share her truths about what the flag meant to her and its representation of citizenship were not welcomed in her public school. In refusing to accept her teacher's suggested rewriting of her speech to be more "patriotic", she was silenced. Without being able to share what she knew about her own reality, did she share the same citizenship status as her peers did? It is stories such as these-in which some individuals are considered problems and denied their voice-that complicate the relationships between democracy, citizenship, and education. The specific context of women's prisons is a locale with many of these kinds of stories. central role in its shaping. In fact, many people begin life as already marginalized citizens. Through the ways that race, class, and gender intersect and function, some groups have more at stake than others, such as women, people of color, and those living in poverty-all of which can occur simultaneously (Collins, 2009). We suggest that citizenship for marginalized people is not necessarily composed of the same "knowledge, skills, and values" as the dominant norm.

As the election progresses
Perhaps for the typically White, typically male, typically middle-class conception of "citizen", access to higher education is part and parcel of the rights they are accorded. But for incarcerated women, that is not the case. The connection between a critical education and citizenship for incarcerated women then becomes one based on recognizing that citizenship is a type of social capital intricately reflective of a certain type of education-an education intent on creating participant citizens, with the knowledge to actively participate in an informed manner in democratic processes. However, fragmented cultural experiences, like those often experienced by incarcerated women, often leave little room for considerations of the same kind of participation. The same conventions that push education out of the eyesight of these women are the same ones that belittle and beguile their ideation of citizenship.
Education is critical in the formation of citizenship and voting is a fundamental right of citizens.
Prisoners, generally, are denied both. The deleterious effects of such denials may be evident in high recidivism rates. But in our experience with the women inmates in Washington, we saw glimpses of the potential for critical education to lead not only to employment, but to a deeper sense of citizenship that began in classes as mock citizenship.

Towards a "Mock" Citizenship
The definitions of citizenship provided by Quantz (2015) and Turner (1993) provide a starting point for many critical theorists of citizenship. The benefits of defining citizenship as a set of practices, knowledge, skills, and values are that we can avoid the imposition of nation-state-driven definitions that historically have been exclusionary. Current debates in critical citizenship scholarship focus on the extent to which certain private elements in people's lives "count" as qualifying for citizenship (e.g., Kershaw, 2010;Longman, De Graeve, & Brouckaert, 2013), but a more relevant departure point for our narratives are debates regarding inclusion, exclusion (e.g., Lister, 1997), and the body (e.g., Beasley & Bacchi, 2000). These all become issues of critical importance in the context of education programs in women's prisons because of the ways in which women convicts are included, excluded, confined, and free.

Feminist Citizenship and the Republican Mother
Lister (1997)  voting. The division of public and private inherent in this conception of citizenship demeans women and the domestic. When women are acknowledged, their duty as a citizen is to procreate (Roseneil, Crowhurst, Santos, & Stoilova, 2013) and nurture the next generation. Feminists critique literature that describes citizenship as a universal, inclusionary force: the universalism hides the ways in which discourses of citizenship exclude groups and individuals from exercises of power in terms of rights and practices. The dilemma posed by women's public activities and republican theories relegating women to the hearth and home found an apparently simple resolution. The problem of female citizenship was solved by endowing domesticity itself with political meaning. The result was the idea and image of the republican mother (Evans, 1997, p. 57

Inclusion and Exclusion
Lister (1997) describes the ways nation-state-bound notions of citizenship exclude women and other groups from within and without. Migrant workers, refugees, and immigrants are groups that, though their members may reside in a nation-state, are outside the definition of citizen. As such, they seemingly lack the rights afforded to citizens and are subject to maltreatment. Within those that are identified as citizens, the exclusions "are inherently gendered, reflecting the fact that women's long-standing expulsion from the theory and practice of citizenship…is far from accidental…" (p. 38).
Lister describes ways in which the false universalism of citizenship, firmly challenged by feminist critique, can analogously reveal the false universalism of "woman" in that the typical use of the term excludes women of color and of other marginalized groups. But because "the patterns of entry to the gateways to the various sectors of the public sphere remain profoundly gendered" (p. 39), solidarity among women is possible.
This solidarity is necessary to reconstruct notions of citizenship. What is needed, Lister says, is a conception of a differentiated universal citizenship that "embrace[s] both individual rights…and political participation", which is defined as "a dynamic concept in which process and outcome stand in dialectical relationship" (p. 35). This conception moves away from citizenship as tied to the nation-state towards an internationalist, social justice-oriented perspective. Critical in the implication of Lister's citizenship is the understanding that, "People can be, at the same time, both the subordinate objects of hierarchical power relations and subjects who are agents in their own lives, capable of exercising power in the 'generative' sense of self-actualization (Giddens, 1991)" (p. 35).
Women in prison are indeed subordinated by various institutions in society such as the economy and the legal system, and social sites such as their interface with guards and other prisoners. While their agency is limited, they are capable of making certain decisions. Lister's discussion of citizenship, in terms of rights and practices, could affect change for women in prison. In Vickery's research, the participants were teachers in secondary education, but the community-based social justice intent of their practice is not dissimilar from the prison educators of Cantrell's (2013) interview study of prison teachers. These teachers had a strong desire to build agency within their students with goals of not only reducing recidivism but encouraging activism on the part of prisoners once they were released. Wright and Gehring (2008) go further in asserting that in their classrooms, prison educators can encourage the civility, authenticity, and autonomy required for prisoners to re-imagine themselves as citizens.

Bodies in Prison
Lister's (1997) vision of citizenship offers much potential with women in prison, but they complicate her theoretical framework in two ways: women convicts are stripped of their citizenship. That is, they are excluded from within in traditional ways (lack of access to traditional modes of citizenship beyond procreation) in their lead-up to becoming prisoners, and then become excluded from without when their rights to vote and engage in other aspects of citizenship are taken from them by the legal system.

Further Thoughts
Considering the importance of prison education in reducing recidivism (Davis, 2013;Western, 2007), the work of prison educators, such as Sultana, have much to teach us about the ways in which citizenship can be (re)formed, facilitated, and interpreted through critical pedagogy that values the connection between education and democracy. When we hear the narratives that contain fragments of the identities of women inmates and the choices they face when incarcerated, we may feel outrage, guilt, or resignation. The reactions of Brian, Melissa and Brittany after the discussion group in Sultana's classroom included the following: You mean they can't eat the food they grow in their garden?! And they go into isolation if they steal it?! They're learning to think critically but if they act, they're penalized for it! (see Author 2 and 1…) These emotions should spark a call to action in the development of democratic curricula in the prison system. What knowledge, skills, and values can we bring to bear within our communities to develop mutually enhancing relationships that extend into the greater society? Some claim that prisoners take away funding from non-prisoner initiatives; some legislators claim prison education is a "'slap in the face' to law-abiding citizens" (Editorial Board, 2016, para. 4). At what point do the never-been-incarcerated learn to exclude the incarcerated from "we?" How and why do we systematically deny the right to education and voting in the U.S. to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals?
As educators, we see ourselves as part of a much needed collective "we." We note that within this collective, we must resist, and this resistance often comes with a cost. As Collins (2009)  In Lister's (1997) concept of citizenship, she emphasizes the split between those excluded from within and without. Prisoners are excluded from both within and without. And they likely were "problems" as Collins (2009)  Looking forward to how teaching practice can be adapted in this space, words like these provide guidance. We begin by challenging our privileged notions of empowerment-we educated, outspoken, free folk. If we practice what we preach and believe that education is about more than skill acquisition for a future job, then the walls become less powerful. Then, we acknowledge critical knowledge is social capital-with the power to provide incarcerated women with the contextual tools to explore their own relationship to the nation state. They get to name and wrestle with the systemic inequalities embedded in gender, race, and poverty-even as they recognize their resilience and resistance to these forces. Prison does not define them: survival does. As cultural studies scholars, we are tasked to engage, to cross the line, to explore raw subjects, to protect and to follow where our students sometimes lead us.
Like one student elegantly wrote: it's funny but when they take away the physical, you really learn what love is. We advocate for this type of education at every part of the journey.