The language of prison re-education between agency and responsibility

Abstract

Learning about freedom as freedom to make right choices responsibly is the pivotal task of educational intervention (Chionna 2001). As a practitioner of juvenile penitentiary re-education I experiment it, trying to re-educate young offenders in a prison, where the “capability approach” should be invoked (Sen 2011) and, according to the relational ethics paradigm (Muschitiello, 2012), we teach the young the capacity/ability of choice between alternative life experiences, which should be inspired and embodied by the educational authority of the adults. As agency is a constitutive element of a capability, I wonder: who is the agent? The one who re-educates an inmate? Or the inmate himself? Who should be more efficient and responsible to act in prison? Is it all about specific required competencies that are influenced by the context where penitentiary personnel and inmates act/react reciprocally? Penitentiary educators should adjust their approach, improving their language-as-dialogue tools first, just because the relationship with inmates is based on a dialogic axis. No exception can be made for cultural and linguistic mediators, who are involved in the treatment of foreign inmates (Brancucci 2018). So, I investigate the agency level of penitentiary educators and cultural/linguistic mediators, working together synergistically and/or autonomously. They try to respond to different scenarios, recognizing there is no one-size -fits-all approach to managing cases of re-educational emergencies, and assuming that educational interventions recall a daily presence in the context (Bertolini 1993), especially in prison where people ‘live’ in close proximity (WHO, 2020). But, how to achieve agency when this proximity fades away, or is temporarily interrupted, even turning into a virtual telematic educational approach? The challenge is to transform the consolidated educational-linguistic-dialogic practices into a new bidirectional way to think, act/react (from prison personnel towards inmates and vice-versa), because of the social distance required by the COVID-19 breakthrough.