ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a critical framework is constructed for understanding opposition to prisoner education through convictism – a prejudicial opposition to prisoners and former prisoners similar to racism. Like all forms of social dominance, covictism rests on rhetorical practices including the language of criminality, the myth of neoliberalism, and the ritual of punishment. The chapter concludes with a Scale of Convictual Sentiment, a similar matrix to Entman and Rojecki’s in The Black Image in the White Mind, to explicate how the opposition functions to incite the public to oppose prison education. It adds the Freirean category of false charity to the original scale in order to best explicate public sentiment toward prisoners and criminals.
