ABSTRACT
A friend who is a web developer identifies an “attribute to waiting” that has to do with agency and choice. Counter-wise, and curiously, this likely has to do with the slowing of time in prison, the absence of the usual measurements of its usefulness, its forward motion. Time inside the walls actually seems to be more spacious, capacious, more inviting of attentiveness. A student in her first semester with a program says she feels “relaxed” in prison, much more so than at the college, where she’s losing a power struggle with a professor. A friend with decades of experience teaching inside says similarly that she “loves being in jail,” where the expectations are lower than in the academy. In Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Sing, Unburied Sing, a ghost named Richie describes his entrapment at the infamous prison farm that is Mississippi State Penitentiary. Daniel Karpowitz celebrates the capacity of universities to offer the most marginalized people access to the best education.
