Teaching in prison: The transmutation of the Prairie Region contracted correctional educators, 1994--2000

This study explores the professional reality of teachers in federal penitentiaries controlled by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), Prairie region (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba) during the period of September 1994 and September 2000, although the data gathering process was conducted between May and September, 2000.;The philosophical elements of the research draw on critical realism and hermeneutic phenomenology to articulate a research strategy that includes interpretive text analysis of administrative files and open-ended participant interviews; a Freirian participant-based process of enquiry and reflection linking micro and macro analysis; and a linguistic analysis of CCE experiences. The application of this research design revealed the complexities of the mutative experience of CCEs resulting from their participation in the conflicting CCEs-prison-corporate relationship and the systemic cultural effects resulting from exposure to the prison influences in professional, social and private life.;In Canada, correctional education was privatized in 1987. Since then, educators enter the prison settings and work by prison rules to fulfill the mandate of the CSC's education policy as contracted correctional educators (CCEs). The corporate and institutionally assumed explanation for the CCEs' retention is prisonization. Complementing the work of Ruth Morris refuting prisonization and introducing the alternative of emancipation and manifestation of abolitionism (1995), the thesis challenges the various theses concerning resocialization and, because of the "impossibility of prisonization" looks at the dialogical strategies (dezoning and disowning) for personal resistance and identity mutation. The thesis concludes with recommendations for enhancing the potential for abolitionism through dialogical reflexivity and encourages CCEs to actively organize to reverse the marginalization created by bureaucratic domination and corporate privatization and to work to counteract workplace violence and advocating for state and social rectification of the failures of correctional education.