ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an examination of personal factors that may discourage engagement with education in prison, focusing in particular upon substance abuse and difficulties with self-confidence. It analyses prison-based institutional factors that may serve to discourage education, including reduced wages paid for education in comparison to prison jobs, limited curricula in education departments and difficulties in accessing distance learning. It also looks more specifically at the influence of other individuals within a prison, including education department staff, prison officers, governors and fellow prisoners. This will allow for a more careful examination of wider attitudes towards education within a prison as well as consideration of how other individuals' attitudes may discourage educational undertakings. In examining disincentives for education in prison, the chapter allows for the development of a more complex push and pull' model of the factors influencing educational decision-making within prisons.
