Browsing by Author "Pylkkänen (nyk. Korhonen), Annikki"

The focus of this discourse analytical study was to review the meanings which prison education and its participants are given in the formal educational policy and to find out whether these meanings are agreed by the prison students. The interests of this thesis were to examine what kind of social and individual promises are related to the prison education and what kind of subject positions are possible to the prison students. The thesis was also interested in the meanings of education in different contexts. The aim of this study was to examine prison education especially for women. This thesis was based on Michel Foucault's ideas of power and the view of this study was directly critical. The prison education was seen as normalizing governance which tends to prepare its subjects to the normal. In this process of differentiating the "normal" and the "abnormal" the subjects of prison education are reconstructed as the "others". The three research questions of this thesis were: how and what kind of prison education is reconstructed firstly in the strategy of prison education and secondly in the interviews. Thirdly it was questioned how and what kind of meanings gender receive in the discourse of prison education. The main data was consisted by the Finnish Criminal Sanctions Agency's document The Strategy of the Prison education for years 2008 2012 and the three interviews of women who participated to prison education. The interviews were made for this thesis in Autumn 2010. Two other Finnish Criminal Sanctions Agency's documents Prisoners in education (2007) and Visible women (2008) - the report of the working group on female prisoners were also used as subtext materials. The methods of critical and realistic discourse analysis and rhetorical analysis were applied in the analysis. The results of the thesis support the outlook of prison education as a form of normalizing governance which reconstruct the "others" position for the prison students. Prison education was seen supportive for personal life control and for integrating to the society. The participants of prison education repeated the official discourses in their accounts which is a signal of internalized governance. The interviewees also used different types of anti-discourses when forming implications of prison education.