This dissertation examines the relationship between community colleges and prisons as similar institutions that absorb and manage displaced workers, economic refugees, and dispossessed adult populations. Based on interviews with adult learners in two community college settings, I discuss how these two seemingly distinctive institutions work together to subvert individual and collective desires for self-determination through policies and pedagogies that institutionalize discouragement and emotional management. Specifically, I am concerned with what it means for working-class adults to participate in higher education in the context of precarity and incarceration-literally and figuratively. Drawing from the growing field of scholarship that underscores the consolidation of practices and interdependency between academia and incarceration (Chatterjee, Davis, 2003, 2005, Meiners, 2007, Sojoyner 2016), the contexts I have chosen for this project are two institutions where students gather each week to participate in the project of higher education. Carrying past and present traumas related to schooling, many participants viewed community college as the one remaining institution deigned to help them remake their lives. This study asks how participants made sense of their lives, choices, and sacrifices to participate in higher education and how these factors structure their expectations of what college might provide them. Utilizing critical race theory, this dissertation offers a theoretical framework pedagogy of repair, which I define as the interpretive structures and stories used by non-traditional students to make sense of their past and potential futures amidst the normative neoliberal structures of precarious labor, vulnerability, social abandonment and debt.

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Thesis advisor: Andrés Castro Samayoa / The involvement of colleges and universities in the provision of higher education opportunities in prison has reemerged after a long pause following the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, which effectively ended the majority of postsecondary prison education programs. The 2016 Second Chance Pell Program has been instrumental in the development and expansion of higher education opportunities in prison. Support for justice reform measures has led to the likely full restoration of Pell Grant availability in prisons, taking effect as early as 2023, with funding for the initiative included in the most recent congressional stimulus bill. Both Second Chance Pell and one of the most progressive state-level prison education policies, New York’s Right Priorities initiative, rely almost exclusively on positioning higher education in prison as a tool for meeting the market needs of the state: reduced recidivism equating to taxpayer savings. This dissertation extends prior research examining the pitfalls of justifications overly reliant on narratives of recidivism. Using a three-article approach, it explores justifications capable of articulating the full moral vigor necessary to sustain long-term commitments to such policies and programs, ones that prioritize humanized responses to incarceration. The first article amplifies justifications articulated by those who have been the beneficiaries of such educational opportunities, investigating formerly incarcerated student perspectives on the value, meaning, and purpose of such programs. The second article, by focusing on policy developments within the state of New York, examines how the rhetoric of recidivism emerges in media coverage of both federal and state level support for college-level prison education. And, finally, the third article considers the pedagogical implications of adjusting the lens through which programs are defended, exploring the use of andragogical teaching methods—those associated with the tenets of adult education—in the context of prison classrooms. Taken together, each study contributes to literatures examining justifications for higher education in prison, and develops deeper understandings of the need for the provision of such opportunities. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.