For an AP class in high school, Josephine Burke ’27 (CLAS) and her classmates had to read a banned book.
Which book they read was up to them, but the book had to be banned somewhere.
“Read the book, research the context of its banning, and then write a research paper,” explains Burke, who grew up in Naugatuck. “We spent several months on this. It was a pretty extensive project.”
Perhaps slightly more extensive for Burke, who chose not to read just one book for her junior-year project, but several.
Amongst others, she read the autobiographies of the civil rights activist Malcolm X; of the political activist Assata Shakur; and of the feminist political activist, philosopher, and academic Angela Davis.
The common thread between these books that Burke chose for her project was not only that all the writers had experienced some form of incarceration, but also where the books themselves were banned at that time.
In prisons.
Burke also read “I’ll Fly Away,” by the Connecticut author Wally Lamb – a volume of testimonies from women incarcerated at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic. All of these books, she explains, were either banned in prisons, had content that discussed the impact of reading and education in prisons, or both.
But more importantly to Burke, they exemplified how certain types of books tend to be banned in prison at greater rates than others.
“I decided to focus my project more on books that were banned in prison, just because I knew that books on Black radical thought, the Black prison experience – those sorts of more radical books on the Black experience – are disproportionately banned in prison,” Burke says. “So, I wanted to read a lot of those books and figure out what it meant for those to be banned in prison.”
‘These books left a big impact on me’
Burke doesn’t share a lot of the same personal experiences of the authors she read – she’s never stepped foot in a prison, let alone been incarcerated.
But what she does share is an interest in politics, political activism, and criminal justice reform.
“The first issues that I was really interested in were women’s and LGBTQ community rights issues as well as police brutality – I was interested in learning a lot about that in middle school,” she says. “And then, in high school, I was more involved in political organizing.”
She served as a hub coordinator for the Sunrise Movement – a youth climate organization – at Naugatuck High School, but it was that middle-school interest in the criminal justice system that led her to investigate those prison-banned books.
And that interest hasn’t waned for Burke. It’s something she’s still pursuing now as political science and human rights major at UConn.
“These books left a big impact on me – they were very powerful in shaping my outlook on a lot of things,” Burke says. “Reading about the experience of incarcerated people, specifically incarcerated Black political prisoners, shaped my understanding of the prison system and the purpose it serves.”
The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, and though Black Americans make up about 13% of the country’s population, they make up 37% of people in prison or jail. Even in a progressive state like Connecticut, Black people are overrepresented in prisons and jails, Burke notes, and racial disparities persist in educational systems inside and outside of prisons.
Censorship books on the Black prison experience, says Burke, is significant because of the disproportionality of their bans.
But in addition to the ways that incarcerated people subject to racialized policing, surveillance, and prison systems are denied rights and liberties because they are incarcerated, she says, constraints on access to books in general have the potential to further limit access to educational and other opportunities.
“Is a U.S. history textbook banned?” she questions. “That would be pretty impactful, because then they wouldn’t be able to participate in any course that required that textbook.”
More complex dynamics than appeared at first
After starting her studies at UConn as a Nutmeg Scholar – a merit scholarship that recognizes the exceptional accomplishments of a limited number of Connecticut high school graduates – Burke applied for an internship with the Connecticut Sentencing Commission, an independent criminal justice agency that reviews, researches, and makes recommendations about the state’s criminal justice system.
“I had such good mentors in that internship,” Burke says. “I really owe them so much for placing trust in me and for allowing me to study what I was most interested in. What I spent most of my time on was the criminalization of mental health and substance use disorders and how that intersects with reentry housing and other reentry issues in Connecticut.”
She was still working on her internship when she decided to apply for an IDEA Grant through UConn’s Office of Undergraduate Research and return back to her questions about prison-banned books.
The IDEA Grant program awards funding up to $6,000 per undergraduate student to support student-designed and student-led projects, including creative endeavors, community service initiatives, entrepreneurial ventures, and research projects and other original and innovative projects. The program is available to undergraduate students of all majors at all UConn campuses.
Burke initially approached her IDEA Grant proposal as a project to investigate how banning certain books that appear on syllabi for university courses would be a form of censorship that could preempt incarcerated individuals from pursuing educational opportunities.
But after embarking on a deep-dive literature review of more than 200 sources on the topic, she found that the dynamics around censorship in prisons and the educational implications for incarcerated people were far more complex than she had initially thought.
“Once I started actually doing my project, I learned that there is so much more going on that can impact prison education than just book banning,” Burke says. “There’s a lot of different types of book banning in prison, all of which have the potential to impact prison education. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on that’s more inherent to the prison itself, including the psychological, physical, and social conditions that exist within prisons, as well as the power relations between people who are not incarcerated entering prisons and interacting with incarcerated people in an educational setting.”
She continues, “Even if there was that discrepancy of a book being on a banned book list, and it being on one syllabi and not another, there wouldn’t be any way for me, as a researcher, to really claim that the reason for that is because of the book banning when there’s so much else going on.”
Those factors include the dynamics between incarcerated students and teachers, but they also include things like the impact of frequent prison lockdowns and pedagogy as well as the focus of many prison education programs – as well as governments and reform organizations – on recidivism and reentry outcomes, something absent in a traditional university setting.
“Despite the undeniable role that neoliberalism plays in the university, through things like the prioritization of market-driven outcomes and employability, we view higher education in prison as different from higher education in non-carceral settings,” Burke says. “While we might increasingly value job readiness in both cases, after graduation, release, or both, we don’t view someone’s deservedness or right to education in terms of increased public safety or cost-effectiveness via decreased recidivism in non-carceral settings in the way we do for incarcerated students.
“Education should be viewed as a right, a personal experience, rather than merely a means to mold productive citizens.”
Research project a culmination of personal interests
As Burke’s research has evolved, so has its scope.
The work on her IDEA Grant project will flow into an undergraduate fellowship with the UConn Humanities Institute, where she plans to interview formerly incarcerated individuals who participated in higher education in prison, as well as prison educators and correctional staff, to gain a deeper understanding of censorship and other conditions in carceral settings that impact prison education.
Her project proposal is currently pending approval from UConn’s Institutional Review Board. She’s already begun gathering 10 years’ worth of course catalogs from various prison education programs in the state as part of a compilation of prison taxonomy as preparation for her fellowship work.
“I’m looking at all the courses that they’ve offered, and I’m looking at those in relationship to their mission statements,” she says. “A lot of different programs will cite recidivism reduction or other reentry outcomes as their primary goal of offering programming. Others have to do with counteracting institutionalized social disadvantages for people who are disproportionately incarcerated. Others have to do with liberatory pedagogical or educational experiences for individual incarcerated people.
“So, I’m looking at what those mission statements are in Connecticut, specifically, and looking those courses – are there more courses that are on personal finance, or how to operate certain technology, like more job and vocational training classes? Are there classes that offer skills, or just information to be memorized? Or are there classes that have to do with critical and social inquiry?”
Burke plans to conclude her year-long fellowship with a formal research paper, but that’s not likely to be the end of her work in the area. Running for political office is not in her future plans, but the pursuit of a Ph.D. in political science is, with the hope of working in academia one day.
“I think that one thing that attracts me to a career in academia is the connection with students and student organizing that has been a huge part of activism in American history,” she says. “That potential connection with students and their activism is something that draws me to the university – that later in my life, once I’ve had the chance to be involved on my own, I can potentially support students in their activism.”
Programs like the IDEA Grant and fellowship through the Humanities Institute, says Burke, as well as internships, offer opportunities for undergraduates – and, in particular, undergraduates in humanities fields – to conduct research that might otherwise be difficult to pursue.
Those opportunities also have given her an opportunity to see her research evolve, to work through assumptions and mistakes, and to learn not just from the research itself but also from the process of conducting her research.
“I feel like this project has been a culmination of things that I’ve been personally interested in, and that I’m interested in engaging with politically and academically,” Burke says. “But I’d say that this is a project that I’ll likely be continuing for the rest of my time in undergrad, if not even further than that.”
