“An Enrollment Opportunity That’s Aligned with Who We Are” A Critical Analysis of Campus Presidents Supporting Prison Education During Targeted Incarceration

Abstract

This qualitative study draws upon semi-structured interviews with 31 college and university presidents whose institutions host prison education programs. We examine how presidents justify their support for prison education and find three dominant themes among their narratives: mission and margin, knowledge and experience, and the social duties of higher education. These narratives reflect familiar dimensions of presidential leadership, but they also do important symbolic and political work: they legitimize institutional participation in prison education, align institutional priorities with the aims of carceral systems, and obscure structural harms through individualized narratives of opportunity and transformation. Guided by an analytic framework of Targeted Incarceration, we situate prison education within a broader sphere of gendered racist violence and argue that while such efforts hold significant possibility for decarceration and equity, they require more explicit engagement with the structural conditions that produce incarcerated people as potential college students. Campus presidents have power to shape narratives and practices of prison education, and we invite them to do so in ways that counter carceral logics and work toward more humane futures.