The construction of student identity in prisons in La Pampa: the impact of education and punitive imprisonment

Abstract

This article proposes to present the meanings given to education by people deprived of liberty who attend schools in federal prisons in La Pampa, who go through a significant process of construction of student identity. To investigate the proposal, those students who registered a period of at least two years of schooling were included in this project, paying special attention to the incidence of punitive confinement in this construction, as well as to the institutional actions of the Penitentiary Service and the school, who intervene in this process to guarantee access to education. Three penitentiary units located in the city of Santa Rosa were selected, No. 4 for adult men, No. 30 for adolescents between 18 and 21 years old, and No. 13 for adult women. Adult Schools No. 15 and No. 16 are located in these institutions. Although the educational proposals are equivalent to those implemented in extramural schools, the challenge in this context of confinement is to build a school in a field of tension, of interactions, differences and similarities between the pedagogical logic and the logic of the institutions of confinement, centered on a corrective and normalizing ideal.