Post by Neni Panourgiá

The heartless injustice of the New York prison guards’ strike

Neni Panourgiá

JIE Scholars Program Academic Adviser

I belong to a generation that was bequeathed a deep commitment to the intrinsic value of education, that believed and felt in its bones that education was both an end to itself and the means to becoming a better human being. We expected education to cultivate and elevate, to bring up to the level of consciousness all those characteristics that turn an animal (the human animal) into a conscious being (the human being)—to have compassion, understanding, a sense of justice, a sense of right and wrong and their difference, to love and laugh and be kind, to be willing to fight for a just and better world.

The struggle of political prisoners for the right to education during their imprisonment and exile, the clandestine schools that they set up there, the fight for access to books, all attest to the importance of education as part of a wider project of political emancipation. But so does the acknowledgement (by Malcolm X, for instance)⁵ that confined education rehabilitates the non-political prisoner. Of course, since the times of Socrates we have known that education on its own cannot do all this, it needs a social sphere that will envelope, sustain, and augment its effects. But an experiential contradiction was also clear to all of us who held that very romantic notion of education, namely that the answer to the question “does education make a person a better human?” was a priori an ideological one—if one believed it then the exceptions to the rule that one would encounter would a priori constitute a surprising exception.

As a social scientist I know that the question is scientifically unanswerable because it is untestable and unprovable. We cannot run a study to determine whether education can really make someone a good or better person, because we don’t have controlled environments where such a question, posed as a hypothesis, can be researched, so the question and its answer remain within the realm of ideology. A glance around us, where people with exquisite educational armature are (and have been) behaving with the emotional, cognitive, and ethical acumen of an amoeba obviously complicates any such question and tests any such ideology.

But what is testable and replicable is research that answers the question of whether education helps people in prison (a controlled environment if ever there was one!) to stay out of prison after decarceration, hence to reduce recidivism, a question that has been asked, researched, and answered repeatedly, and has established amply and unequivocally the positive relationship between incarcerated education and drop in recidivism. It is a question that Jeremy Bentham, using a different lexicon, posited in his Panopticon Writings in 1787¹, as part of the groundwork that he laid for his project on the positive effects of accountability through surveillance. It appears as a question in Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s 1833 account of the Penitentiary System in the United States². And it is a question that has been asked in scientific terms from the early decades of the 20th century³.

So, it is not even a question any longer whether prison education results in the drastic reduction of recidivism, especially as part of a system of rehabilitation that includes access to post-decarceration education and to gainful employment.

Why would, then, anyone knowingly withhold access to education from incarcerated people? Or, even more to the point, why would anyone resent the educational opportunities available to incarcerated people? Why is prison education considered a privilege and not a means, as Bentham said, “to prevent transgressing; [to] save punishing.” The recent strike of the prison guards in the New York State prisons managed to effectively do that—to put a stop in most educational programs in the prison system and send prison education back to its infancy. Prison education is not robust anywhere in the world (with the exception of Northern Europe), and the one in the United States is still a point of contention, despite the heroic and selfless commitment of universities, their faculty, and foundations throughout the country who donate time and resources to make education possible for incarcerated persons.

The guards in all but two New York state prisons went on strike on February 17, 2025, a strike that ended on March 10, 2025. Classes were canceled overnight, readings were left at mid-page, work to be evaluated was lost. But the objection of most (not all) state prisons and most (not all) guards against programming, including school and arts programs, has been palpable for a long time and we have been seeing evidence of it in the hostility that we routinely encounter at the gates, as faculty, or at the more complex level of organization. Since at least Spring 2024 we encountered aberrant closures, oftentimes announced at the gate or, at least once, in the classroom; delays at the gate routinely ate into the two-hour instruction time; clearances were revoked for no apparent reason, with explanations as vague as if having been pulled from the clouds.

Whatever the grievances that the guards had (and still have), the effect of their strike on the educational programs of incarcerated people was cruel, unduly, and unjust as it withheld from this most vulnerable population the opportunity to attempt a deep recalibration of their lives and the opportunity to undo their arrested development as thinking persons that had been foreclosed to them from early in their lives, lives that are always already marked by systemic and systematic structures of multiple exclusions.

There is a reason why civil servants are not allowed to go on strike—because their remit is to facilitate the encounter of the citizen with the government, and in that sense any interruption of that encounter is inevitably absorbed by the citizen and not by the government. There is great debate as to whether the civil service is part of the working class, and even greater debate as to whether law enforcement, that belongs to the civil service, can be considered as part of the working class, and thus if law enforcement has the right to strike. But this is another discussion. For now, and until prisons are abolished or, at least, they become true places of rehabilitation and not of punishment, we are happy that classes are resuming in the New York prisons, and we are looking very much forward to being again in the classroom with our students.