Trying to get higher education while forced to suffer decades of sensory deprivation in prison? Get set for eternal bureaucratic runaround because you can't get there from here. When prisoncrats say "education" they mean "GED". They pay lip service to education, then make it impossible to get any beyond the three "R's". They want you to be able to sign confessions and receipts, but not much else.
This prison is typical: two teachers service 2000 captives. They have to provide "library" services too, (place discarded pulp fiction just out of reach of the cages.) They have to act as guards during mass ransacking of cages, sit on classification boards and vote in the guard's "courts," etc.
They have a $70,000 per year school administrator to see that both teachers do their 4-hour per day jobs correctly. He also presides over correspondence courses. He has the catalogue/price list of permitted courses available from the state's colleges. No one can afford the price due to enforced poverty and forbidden business opportunities, but the gesture is there.
The office of correctional education division of the U. S. Department of Education is worthless. Their job appears to be to enjoy bloated federal paychecks to send form letters advising prisoners that no programs of any kind exist for state prisoners.
If you do manage to get past the money barrier, here are some courses you will not be permitted to complete and the excuses used to forbid them, often after you have paid for course and book: Chemistry (Drugs! Bombs! Poisons!) Electronics (you could unlock our solenoid operated gates!) Accounting (Tax fraud scams!) Non mainstream History/Sociology (Revolution! Subversion! Riot!) Writing (Subversion! Publicity! Profits!) Business (Business! Profits!) Math/Computer science (Secret codes/messages about drugs or escape plans!) Biology, Genetics, Physics, Earth science, (see Chemistry).
You get the idea. They fear you will rise above janitor and become smart enough to compete with them. They also suffer jealousy, envy and resentment. They have a mail guard who is the "literary review committee." He is an ignorant, spiteful person carefully schooled in suspicion and on how to create plausible scenarios of security risks from your attempts at activity. The guards and prisoncrats don't want you to have a pencil stub; they damnsure don't want you to learn to use one effectively.
Why? You'd blow their sadistic little gravy train vocation. You'd describe to others the mental atrocities guards perpetrate daily. You'd gain friends, empathy, benefactors and empowerment. You'd gradually get their harassment, torture, deprivation and mindless cruelty replaced with something worth living for, like education, arts, humanities and humane treatment. You might even make a profit, buy a time cut and change their rotten system from massive overkill to a modicum of fairness and honesty. Of course, nothing changes until you make the effort.
--an Oklahoma prisoner
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