A Habit is as Dangerous as Anything

Scholars and practitioners have argued that higher education in prison (HEP) can transform incarcerated people and prepare them to re-enter society in productive ways. While we agree that a liberal arts education can create transformative experiences, transformation is a tricky metric. Focusing on transformation could cause administrators and professors to place their own goals and biases on students and constrain the transformative potential of a liberal arts education. However, viewing education as a mechanistic device to help incarcerated students attain jobs without engaging larger questions of personal growth and fulfillment does a disservice to incarcerated students. Through a combination of surveys and focus groups in one college in prison program, our project explores transformation as a category of analysis with particular focus on how students themselves talked about transformation. Our data suggest that a liberal arts education within the prison can be transformation in measurable ways. However, administrators and professors must view students as partners and active participants in their education. In this article, we investigate transformation as a category of analysis; discuss ways administrators and professors can support student growth; and explore the transformative potential of HEP on the prison environment itself.