Ninah Jackson ’25 has been deeply involved in prison education since taking an Inside-Out class at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Coal Township in the fall of 2023. Since the course, Jackson has gone on to co-organize the Ella Baker-Kwame Ture Prison Study Group and conduct an honors thesis on the ideological, political, and intellectual dimensions of prison education. 

Inside-Out Course

Jackson first heard about Inside-Out through word of mouth, through Endia Scales ’24, who asked Jackson to join Professor Vanessa Massaro’s Cultural Geography course because “she didn’t want to be the only Black student in the class.” Jackson was unsure at first, but eventually reached out to Massaro, and was granted permission to join the course.

Encountering the prison system so deeply through Inside-Out, one of Jackson’s first observations was the “security theatre of prison,” such as the screenings, the full-body metal detectors, and guidelines about materials. She also noted that “as regimented as a prison is, it’s inconsistent.” Rules can sometimes be enforced fairly arbitrarily, where your experience depends on how a Correctional Officer is feeling on a particular day or if they’re new to the job. The security apparatus stood out because “it was so bizarre and so unlike what we experience here at Bucknell.”

On top of that, something Jackson recognized quickly and came to enjoy from her Inside-Out course was the level of social interaction. Inside students, in particular, were invested in who was present in the space, walking around and asking all the outside students how they were doing at the start of each class. Every single person wanted to contribute to the conversation. Jackson noted the difference from typical Bucknell classes, where students can sit in a classroom in silence until a professor breaks the ice and where there are often a select few students who drive engagement in each class. 

While highlighting this effervescence and synergy within Inside-Out classrooms, Jackson makes the case in her thesis that “the very condition of possibility for this educational environment…is the violence that underwrites incarceration.”

Jackson continued, “It’s not that folks who take Inside-Out are exceptional, it’s not that they’re unique human beings, not that they’re unparalleled intellectually or educationally, they’re regular humans like the rest of us. But the conditions that they exist in, whether it be just being incarcerated in general or their educational conditions vis-a-vis being incarcerated, is the very thing that gives way to approaching something like Inside-Out with such excitement and almost a certain level of, not desperation, but… ravenous, would probably be the word I would use.”

It was this complexity and fraught nature that led Jackson to find additional avenues to process what she had experienced with Inside-Out at a deeper level than the single semester course would allow. 

Additionally, Jackson found the Inside-Out experience to be a “richer and deeper social experience” because it was an intergenerational learning environment, where the people in the room had a “depth and breadth of lived experience.” Jackson also added, “I really cherish that…I’m in a classroom where I’m in the majority as a Black student…so even the social and cultural experience that I have is so unique and so enjoyable in a particular way.” 

Jackson and E. Scales chose to invite Marcus Scales, Director of Multicultural Student Services, as their guest to their class’s closing ceremony, because they “wanted him to see just a little bit of what [they] had experienced.” M. Scales was really energized by the experience of talking to some of the inside students and their family members, and as Jackson “wanted to prolong [her] engagement with prison ed, specifically with Coal Township,” the two of them got to talking.

Study Group

In thinking about a mechanism to come back to Coal Township and continue to develop a relationship with the inside students, Jackson and Scales landed on trying to form a study group. The group, now named the Ella Baker-Kwame Ture Prison Study Group (after two Black activists who played major roles in the American civil rights movement) is a collaborative effort between Jackson, Multicultural Student Services, and Coal Township. 

In contrast to Inside-Out courses, the study group has an “intentionally political character to the space.” Jackson and M. Scales wanted to focus on “Black intellectual and political history and social thought,” with Black people. Hence, the group aims to bring together Black Bucknell faculty, staff, students, and Black inside participants. 

Jackson emphasized that the study group is a “co-created, collaboratively created space.” Books and other readings are chosen democratically, and particular discussions are undertaken based on the interest of the Coal Township members.

That is not without limitations though, because the group is being facilitated within the scope of a prison. For example, there are some texts Jackson would have liked to read that they decided against because the materials would not have been allowed in. 

There have also been challenges on the Bucknell side, particularly in terms of student engagement. When the study group began in April 2024, there were seven or eight Bucknell participants, but this academic year, it has only been Jackson, M. Scales, and Public Safety Chief Anthony Morgan. While rethinking marketing and advertising, Jackson also attributes some of the loss to scheduling issues, as originally the group met in the evenings, but due to prison staffing constraints, moved to 12-4 on Tuesdays (though it is now back in the evenings). 

While there is certainly interest from the Bucknell side in maintaining the study group in the next academic year, as Jackson and some of the participants noted, a lot of that is dependent on the prison’s interest in maintaining the space. 

Honors Thesis

Just as Jackson’s experiences with Inside-Out and the reading group demonstrated, prison education and the structures surrounding it are complex. This is exactly what inspired Jackson to take on prison education as the subject of her honors thesis, explaining, “I was trying to make sense of and grapple with and process and work through a lot of these tensions and contradictions that arose from the [Inside-Out] experience.”

For her project “Captive Study: The Ideological, Political, and Intellectual Dimensions of Prison Education,” Jackson conducted interviews and participant observation at SCI Riverside (pseudonym), a local prison where Bucknell engages in a couple of different forms of prison education, including Inside-Out. 

In studying what is considered a “vulnerable research population,” Jackson had to do a lot of thinking and planning before data collection was possible. Jackson entered the honors thesis process imagining that “there would be a level of critique…against the notion of prison ed.” Yet, so as to not “further risk or endanger the people” she was interviewing, Jackson had to carefully consider her questions for participants within Riverside, and what they could share while conversations were observed by Conduct Officers. Additionally, the research included participants from Bucknell, and while wanting to “treat with care, generosity, and gentleness the stories that were being shared,” Jackson also had to balance what she thought “needed to be done, analytically and intellectually. 

In her findings, Jackson grappled with both the good and the bad of prison education. On the good, for example, Jackson had a couple of sections dedicated to the immaterial and material value and benefits that inside participants reported getting from prison education. On the other hand, in her thesis defense presentation, for example, Jackson highlighted the role that Inside-Out plays as a “prison management tool,” how it creates a moral hierarchy through the ideas of the “good inmate” and “bad inmate,” and how that marks education as an earned privilege, rather than a right within the prison. 

As a counter to that notion of education, something Jackson was interested in, but was not able to discuss in her thesis, are the forms of communal education that incarcerated people engage with. Many of Jackson’s inside participants talked about peer learning educational spaces within the prison, or having mentors within the prison who would encourage them to read certain texts or pass books down. Jackson described this autonomous education as “really awesome” and “really intriguing, inspiring.” 

When thinking about the takeaways from the structural, political analysis in her thesis, Jackson wanted to resist “providing a prescription,” because the ethically fraught nature of prison education is not easily resolvable.

Instead, Jackson proposes, “the question more so is, what do you do with this new kind of understanding of prison education that you have? And how does that new understanding shape how you navigate that experience? And I think that question that I just offered is transposable to other parts of the world, right? Like, if you’re an anti-capitalist, or if you realize the limits of capitalism, you can’t not participate in the capitalist system. But now, what are some practices that you can take up? How can you navigate this world without exploiting other people, or without leaning into the worst elements of this system?”

For those interested in reading Jackson’s thesis in full, it should be accessible on the Digital Commons soon. 

Following her graduation, Jackson will go on to pursue a PhD in Education with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Jackson plans to continue her engagement with prison education while at Harvard.