The work of teachers in a prison context: Assemblage between socio-technical devices and labour subjectivities

Abstract

In recent years, education for young people in prison has been increasingly questioned for its limited ability to provide meaningful learning opportunities. Adolescents deprived of liberty often enter detention centers with interrupted educational trajectories, significant learning gaps, and histories of school exclusion. These conditions are intensified by institutional constraints such as restricted instructional time, scarce resources, and the tensions between educational aims and the custodial logic structuring daily life. Consequently, prison education frequently reproduces inequalities rather than transforming them.

While previous research has examined factors such as school organization, resource scarcity, and students’ socio-educational backgrounds, less attention has been paid to how public policies interact with the teachers who implement them. Specifically, there is limited understanding of how policy instruments operate in everyday practice and how educators interpret, negotiate, or adapt them within highly regulated institutional contexts. This relationship is crucial because teachers are the main agents who translate policy frameworks into pedagogical action inside detention centers.

This study analyzes the relationship between the sociotechnical devices embedded in public policy and the labor subjectivities of teachers working in a school within a Juvenile Detention Center. Sociotechnical devices refer to the material, organizational, and normative arrangements through which policies are enacted, such as curricular frameworks, administrative protocols, and security regulations. Labor subjectivities denote teachers’ understandings of their professional role, values concerning education in custodial settings, and the meanings they attribute to their work with incarcerated youth.

A qualitative design based on focused ethnography was employed to explore these dynamics in a specific institutional setting. Data were gathered through participant observation, semi-structured interviews with teachers, and analysis of institutional and policy documents guiding educational work in the center. The analysis followed Grounded Theory procedures to identify emerging categories and relationships between policy mechanisms and teachers’ professional orientations.

The findings reveal three main types of sociotechnical devices shaping educational practice: (1) educational devices, including curricular and pedagogical frameworks aimed at supporting learning processes; (2) operational/managerial devices, encompassing administrative routines and management mechanisms regulating teaching work; and (3) security devices, defining the regulatory and custodial norms that structure daily life within the institution. These devices intersect with three teacher subjectivities identified in the field: Committed, Laissez-faire, and Punitive, each expressing different interpretations of the school’s educational mission, relationships with students, and pedagogical orientations.

The interaction between these devices and subjectivities generates diverse work experiences, characterized by varying degrees of alignment, tension, and contradiction among teachers. These findings demonstrate that educational practices in detention contexts emerge not merely from macro-level policies or institutional constraints but from the ongoing negotiation between policy frameworks and teachers’ subjective engagement with their work. The study concludes by discussing implications of improving policy design and institutional conditions to strengthen the coherence between public policy, school organization, and teachers’ professional practices in juvenile detention education.