Audio Coursesby JellypodLesson 09 of 10
Overview
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: This week, we're stepping inside the cage—not just as a building with bars, but as a geography of punishment, social death, and, paradoxically, transformation. We'll walk with Christian Bolden as he enters the Texas prison system and is stripped, numbered, and relocated into a Southern plantation prison landscape designed for control, not growth. Alongside his story, we'll bring in desistance and cognitive transformation theory to ask how people begin to imagine a different self in a space built to keep them exactly who they were when they came in. We'll look at the role of mentorship, fellowship, and education—as practices of freedom that emerge inside the cage—and connect Bolden's experience to current data and debates about what rehabilitation really means in U.S. prisons today. By the end of this episode, I want you thinking hard about one question: what actually enables change in spaces that seem purpose-built to prevent it?
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Before we dive into Bolden's story, let me tell you about a conversation I had back when I was teaching at Weequahic High School in Newark. I had a student—I'll call him J—who was deeply involved in gang activity. One day after class, he told me something that's stuck with me for years: Ms. Hagan, I’m not making it to 18. I already know that. He said it matter-of-fact, like he was telling me the weather forecast.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: That conversation is where I started developing what I now call the H.T.I.L.G. framework—using Hip Hop cultural literacy as a lens for understanding how structural conditions shape youth outcomes in marginalized communities. J wasn't being dramatic. He was reading his environment accurately. His neighborhood, his school-to-prison pipeline exposure, the way police patrolled his block versus mine—all of it was telling him the same story about his future.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Now, J didn't end up in prison, but many of his friends did. Many of them died due to gun violence, gang culture. And when we talk about Christian Bolden entering TDCJ at seventeen, we're talking about someone who heard that same message and ended up living it.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: So let's map Bolden's journey. County jail in San Antonio. Then diagnostics. Then transfer to TDCJ units scattered across rural Texas—Garza Unit, Segovia Unit, Huntsville. Each move is a severance. Each transfer cuts another tie to the person he was, the neighborhood that knew him, the family that could visit him.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: This isn't incidental—this is geographic punishment. The state deliberately builds prisons far from urban centers where most incarcerated people come from. In my research on Louisiana's River Parishes, I've seen this same pattern. Facilities built in remote areas, often on former plantation land, creating what geographers call carceral landscapes that enforce isolation as part of the punishment.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Carson's 2023 Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows us the scale: about 1.25 million people held in U.S. prisons—state and federal combined—at yearend 2023, with state prison populations up roughly 2 percent from 2022. That's not just individual choices adding up—that's a mass spatial project. Think about it: 1.25 million people forcibly relocated, displaced from their communities, placed in total institutions designed to remake their identities through isolation and control.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Now let me walk you through what Bolden experienced during intake at Huntsville, because this is where we see what scholars call social death in action.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Strip search. Shaving. Delousing spray. Assignment of an ID number. Being told explicitly that you are just a number. Being advised to fight rather than expect protection from guards.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: These aren't just administrative procedures. These are degradation ceremonies—rituals designed to communicate that you no longer belong to the moral community of human beings deserving dignity and protection. You are being resocialized to survive your current geographic space.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: I remember reading Bolden's description of this and thinking about my Newark students who'd been through juvenile detention. They described the same thing—the moment when your name stops mattering, when you become a case number, when the state makes clear that your former identity is being erased.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: This is social death: the systematic removal of name, status, autonomy, safety. And it's not accidental. The system stages these rituals deliberately.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Here's where we need to talk about the plantation prison model unique to the South. After Ruiz v. Estelle in the 1980s forced Texas to reform some of its most brutal practices, the state didn't actually move toward rehabilitation. Instead, they massively expanded prison capacity—building rural units that operate according to plantation labor logic with unpaid work and punitive conditions.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Before Ruiz, Texas used what they called the building tender system—certain inmates deputized to control other prisoners, creating a violent hierarchy. When courts dismantled that system, prison gangs like Texas Syndicate, Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood of Texas rushed in to fill the power vacuum. They became the unofficial enforcers in a plantation-like order that the state created but could no longer directly manage.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: This connects to my work on gangs and criminal networks. Gangs don't emerge in a vacuum—they emerge in response to power vacuums and institutional failures. When the state withdraws legitimate protection, people create alternative structures. That's what happened in Texas prisons. That's what happens in under-resourced neighborhoods like the ones I taught in Newark.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Bolden entered a system where violence wasn't incidental—it was structural. The geography, the labor exploitation, the isolation, the gang dynamics—all working together to create conditions that actively oppose transformation.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Alright, now we shift to theory. And I know some of you might be thinking, Here we go with academic jargon—but stick with me, because Peggy Giordano's cognitive transformation theory is one of the most useful frameworks we have for understanding how people actually stop engaging in criminal behavior.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Giordano published her original theory in 2002, and then significantly revised it in 2022. That 2022 article, Some cognitive transformations about the dynamics of desistance, is required reading this week for good reason—she's acknowledging what she got wrong initially and what two decades of additional research taught her.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Here's the framework broken down: First component: General openness to change. You have to reach a psychological state where you can imagine life being different. This isn't about wanting to stop doing crime—it's deeper than that. It's about believing change is even possible.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Second component: Exposure to hooks for change. These are tangible alternatives—relationships, work opportunities, education programs, religious communities—anything that offers a different identity to grab onto.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Third component: Forming a new identity. You start seeing yourself as fundamentally different from your criminal self. You can't just stop doing crime—you have to become someone who doesn't do crime.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Fourth component: Transformation in views of deviant behavior. You shift how you view criminal activity itself—it's no longer positive, viable, or personally relevant to who you are or who you're becoming. This is about fundamentally changing your attitude toward crime as a life option.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Now here's what Giordano got right in 2022 that she understated in 2002: this process is messy as hell. It's not linear. There are what she calls derailments—setbacks, relapses, moments where the old identity comes roaring back. And these aren't evidence that change was fake. They're normal features of transformation happening inside emotionally volatile, structurally constrained environments.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Let me show you how these four components play out in Bolden's narrative, because this is where abstract theory meets concrete reality.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Openness to change: For Bolden, the shock of receiving an eight-year sentence at seventeen created a psychological break. But here's what's important—that openness was already there in seed form. He'd earned his GED earlier. That achievement cracked his gang-centered identity just slightly. He knew he was capable of something beyond survival and violence, even if he didn't know what that something was yet.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: This reminds me of conversations I had with gang-involved students in Newark. Several of them told me they stayed in school specifically because it was the one place where they weren't defined by their set or their street. School was where they could practice being someone else, even if just for six hours a day.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Hooks for change: Now we get to Chapter 8, Fellowship, which is where Bolden's story gets really instructive. He describes Christian bunkmates who pushed him toward spirituality. San Antonio homies who helped him navigate prison politics without completely abandoning his gang ties. People like Panda who coached him on survival while encouraging him to think about a future beyond the cage.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Notice what these hooks are—they're not formal programs. They're informal networks, micro-communities created by people inside the cage offering each other something other than gang membership. This is mutual aid happening in a punishment machine.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: And then there are the letters. More than 1,000 letters exchanged with family and friends during incarceration. These letters became what I'd call proto-classrooms—dialogic spaces where Bolden experimented with new narratives about himself, tested ideas, practiced different ways of thinking and writing.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Later, formal education entered: college classes inside, disciplined study, eventually a pathway to a PhD and an FBI research fellowship after release. But the foundation was built through those informal networks first.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Identity shift: The movement from Wicked—his gang name, his identity in that world—to someone who sees himself as a writer, student, eventually sociologist. That's the third component in action.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: And this didn't happen overnight. It happened through repeated practice of this new identity in letters, in classrooms, in conversations. In H.T.I.L.G. terms, this is what I call narrative reconstruction—using cultural tools literacy, storytelling, intellectual practice to build new identity frameworks that can coexist with or eventually replace old ones.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Transformation in views of deviant behavior: This is where Bolden's autoethnographic method becomes crucial. His book doesn't glorify or romanticize gang life or violence. Instead, he presents gang membership and criminal activity as responses to structural conditions—but crucially, as responses that are no longer viable or relevant for who he's becoming.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: He's doing exactly what Giordano describes—taking criminal behavior that once seemed necessary or even positive in his environment and reframing it as something that no longer fits his identity or his future. He's not saying gang membership was never rational given his circumstances—he's saying it's no longer a path he can take given who he understands himself to be now.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Here's where Giordano's 2022 revisions become essential. She emphasizes that anger, shame, and fear are part of transformation, not obstacles to it. Change doesn't happen after the violence is over—it happens inside ongoing violence.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Bolden's narrative of sexual victimization in county jail. His fear during early years in prison. His ongoing gang affiliations even as he pursued education. These aren't contradictions—they're the reality of trying to become someone new while trapped in a system designed to keep you exactly who you were.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: I think about my students in Newark who were trying to stay in school while still affiliated with their sets. They'd come to my class, engage with U.S. History content, write thoughtful essays, then go home to neighborhoods where that intellectual identity was a liability. They were living Giordano's framework in real time—navigating multiple identities, experiencing derailments, slowly building cognitive space for change while structural conditions actively opposed it.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The cognitive transformation happened despite the conditions, not because anyone provided safe space for it.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Before we talk about current prison education programs, we need to understand the historical context. Malcolm X transformed himself through reading in Norfolk Prison Colony. George Jackson turned his cell at Soledad into a study and produced revolutionary theory. Assata Shakur, Angela Davis—the Black radical tradition has always understood literacy and study as liberation practices.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: This isn't about education as job training or rehabilitation in the system's terms. This is education as claiming intellectual freedom and full humanity inside spaces designed to deny both.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: When I teach about this tradition, I'm drawing on what hip hop cultural literacy teaches us: knowledge is power, but more specifically, self-knowledge and systemic knowledge together create the conditions for transformation. That's the H.T.I.L.G. framework—understanding both who you are and how the system works, then using that double consciousness to navigate toward liberation.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Now let's connect that historical tradition to what's happening right now. The restoration of Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students represents a massive policy shift. In 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act banned federal financial aid for people in prison—virtually eliminating college-in-prison programs nationwide.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The Second Chance Pell experiment from 2015-2023 proved what advocates had been saying all along: higher education in prison reduces recidivism and improves institutional safety. Then on July 1, 2023, the FAFSA Simplification Act took effect, eliminating the prohibition. However, this isn't automatic eligibility—students must enroll in approved Prison Education Programs, and institutions need approval from corrections departments, accrediting agencies, and the Department of Education. The research is clear on this. College programs are especially effective at decreasing recidivism compared to GED programs or vocational training alone.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: So what does this look like in practice right now? Massachusetts just released data showing that in the 2024-2025 academic year, 1,367 incarcerated individuals completed educational programs across the state system, logging more than 330,000 hours of learning. Programs like the Emerson Prison Initiative graduated seven students with Bachelor of Arts degrees in June 2025.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Connecticut held its third commencement at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution through a partnership between University of New Haven and Yale Prison Education Initiative. Ten graduates received degrees. The program director explicitly rejected the language of education as a privilege or perk, stating that it's a catalyst for change and a matter of human dignity.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Here's what's new and important: the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison launched a 2025 cohort focused on remote work-based learning. They're bringing internships, fellowships, and apprenticeships into carceral spaces. This represents an attempt to counter the extractive plantation model with actual labor-market pathways that recognize incarcerated students as workers and professionals in training.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Let me trace Bolden's specific journey through three phases, because this shows us how informal and formal education work together.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Phase One—Fellowship: Chapter 8 shows informal networks creating micro-communities that buffer violence and make different conversations possible. This is pre-curriculum education—it's people teaching each other how to survive with dignity and imagine futures.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Phase Two—Letters as dialogue: More than 1,000 letters became both data for his later research and experimental space for new ways of writing and thinking. This wasn't formal education yet, but it was intellectual work—building cognitive skills and confidence.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: In my Newark classroom, I saw this same pattern with students who started writing hip hop lyrics that became political analysis, or personal narratives that became sociological observation. They were practicing being intellectuals before they had the formal credentials.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Phase Three—Formal education: Chapter 9 tracks enrollment in college classes, disciplined study routines, eventually post-release PhD pursuit. The hook of education continued working long after release because Bolden had internalized it as central to identity, not just as credential or escape route.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Now I need to be clear about something: education is not a magic bullet that fixes mass incarceration.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Giordano warns in her 2022 article that programs focused only on fixing individual cognition without addressing structure will have limited effects. You can't cognitive-behavioral-therapy your way out of structural inequality. Effective desistance requires changed opportunities plus changed thinking.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Carson's BJS data backs this up. Despite increased educational programming, we still have 1.25 million people in state prisons, with populations rising. The 2023 jail data shows midyear population around 664,000, with especially rapid growth among older incarcerated adults. We're creating an aging, long-term incarcerated population—that's not what a system focused on transformation and reentry looks like.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: So when we talk about education as freedom practice, we're not saying education alone fixes the system. We're saying education creates conditions where some people—like Bolden—can grab onto something and use it to build different futures despite systematic barriers designed to prevent exactly that.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The system's primary function remains warehousing and punishment. Education programs exist because people fought for them, not because the system naturally evolved toward rehabilitation.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Let's ground this theoretical discussion in current realities, because I need you to understand what's actually happening inside U.S. prisons and jails right now.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The Marshall Project recently analyzed more than 21,000 deaths in custody. Here's what they found: For incarcerated people under age 55, just under half of deaths were from largely preventable causes—suicide or drug overdoses. Suicide is the third most common cause of death overall behind bars. Almost one in ten deaths.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: For comparison: suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails, with rates far exceeding the general U.S. population. That's not because jails house uniquely suicidal people—it's because jail conditions create suicidal despair.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Fatal violence between incarcerated people happens regularly. More than 400 deaths in the dataset were ruled homicides not involving law enforcement. In Mississippi prisons alone, nearly 50 people have been killed over the past decade, but only about one-third of those homicides were referred to prosecutors. Just eight resulted in convictions as of early 2026.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The homicide rate inside Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman was five times the state's overall homicide rate—and Mississippi already has the highest state homicide rate nationwide. Think about that. The place supposedly designed to protect public safety is five times more lethal than the outside world.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: New York experienced a correctional crisis in 2024-2025. Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi—both young Black men—murdered by correctional officers. Cell phone videos and surveillance footage documented staff facilitating violence, even participating directly.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The brutality prompted the New York State Senate to pass comprehensive prison reform legislation in June 2025, which Governor Hochul signed in December 2025. Now unredacted video footage of any death involving correctional officers must be turned over to investigators within 72 hours. Next of kin must be notified within 48 hours. Surveillance cameras required in all areas except cells, showers, and toilets.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: These reforms happened because people organized, because families demanded accountability, because journalists at The Marshall Project kept investigating. Not because the system suddenly decided to be humane.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: But it's not just violence. The Prison Policy Initiative's 2025 report documents that jails routinely put people with mental health problems in solitary confinement, provide limited counseling, leave them unmonitored due to chronic staffing shortages.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Poor nutrition. Contaminated water. Pests. Exposure to extreme heat and cold. These conditions compound health problems and create what researchers call Post-Incarceration Syndrome—a PTSD-like condition that makes maintaining employment and housing after release significantly harder.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: At least 16 states considered 31 correctional oversight bills in 2024. Only Maryland and Virginia actually passed legislation creating independent ombudsman offices. Currently, about 20 states and Washington D.C. have independent prison oversight bodies. Everywhere else relies on internal accountability—which critics describe as letting the system grade its own homework.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: So here's the central tension: Federal policy now encourages prison education through restored Pell access. Advocates argue higher education reduces recidivism, improves safety, represents basic justice. Critics frame education as a perk, raising moral panics about rewarding criminals.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: That debate reveals the core American contradiction about prisons: Are they for punishment or transformation? And can they be both?
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: When higher education operates inside plantation-style prisons characterized by violence, medical neglect, degradation ceremonies—is it a subversive liberation site, or a reform that leaves the underlying carceral geography intact?
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: I don't have a clean answer to that, and neither does the research. What I can tell you is this: the data on education effectiveness is clear. College programs reduce recidivism. But the political will to expand them remains limited because American prison policy is driven more by punishment ideology than evidence about what promotes public safety.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Let me pull all these threads together by returning to Bolden's arc and what it teaches about transformation in carceral spaces.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The Cage: TDCJ as violent, racialized plantation institution enforcing social death through geographic displacement, degradation rituals, structural violence. This is the system as designed—punishment and control.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: The Classroom: Informal fellowship, letter-writing, formal college courses as spaces where Bolden experimented with new self and imagined different futures. These weren't gifts from the system. They were spaces he and others created or fought to access, often despite official policies.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Liberation: Desistance, academic career, autoethnographic scholarship as counter-knowledge. Bolden's book challenges both folk-devil myths about gang members and simplistic rehabilitation narratives.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: His transformation happened, but it happened through specific conditions—access to education, mentors willing to invest, his own cognitive and emotional labor to build new identity.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: This brings us back to our core question. Three-part answer, and none of it is simple.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: First: Structural hooks matter. Access to education, mentors, non-exploitative work create possibilities that didn't exist before. Restoration of Pell funding, growth of prison education programs, initiatives like work-based learning—these represent structural changes making transformation more possible. But they remain marginal to a system whose primary function is punishment.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Second: Cognitive and emotional transformation matter. Seeing yourself as capable of something beyond survival in a gang requires tremendous psychological work. Especially while navigating fear, shame, trauma, ongoing violence. Giordano's theory helps us understand this process, but we shouldn't romanticize it. The emotional labor is intense, and many people don't have access to conditions that would support it.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Third: Institutional contradiction matters. The same system that degrades and cages can, under pressure from litigation, activism, policy change, host sites of transformation that were never its primary design. Prison education programs exist because people fought for them.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: When you hear politicians invoke rehabilitation, ask whether they're talking about real investments in conditions supporting transformation, or just dressing punishment in gentler language.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Carson's data shows a system still primarily expanding and aging. Marshall Project data shows violence and medical neglect remain endemic. The structure hasn't fundamentally changed.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: If we're serious about what desistance research teaches—that people can change, that education creates pathways, that cognitive transformation is possible—then we need to ask what redesigning carceral spaces around those conditions would actually require. Not as add-ons or privileges, but as core functions.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: In my Newark classroom, I had students who could have been Christian Bolden. Some of them ended up incarcerated. The ones who didn't—it often came down to luck, to which teacher noticed them, to whether their school had resources or was being systematically defunded, to whether police decided to arrest or give a warning.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: That's not justice. That's geography and structural inequality determining life trajectories.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Bolden's story isn't about individual exceptionalism—look how this one person transcended circumstances through willpower. It's about what becomes possible when structural conditions shift slightly, when people find each other and create micro-communities of support, when someone decides they're capable of becoming something other than what the system designed them to be.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: That's the real lesson. Transformation in prison isn't automatic, isn't guaranteed, isn't the system working as intended. It's people surviving and occasionally thriving despite the cage, not because of it.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Pay attention to the tension between punishment and transformation. Consider how structural conditions shape who gets access to hooks for change and who doesn't.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: And remember: this isn't just about people inside cages. It's about how we understand human capacity for change, how systems either support or sabotage that capacity, and what it means to build a justice system that actually believes in redemption rather than just performing it rhetorically.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Alright, that's it for this week. We are getting closer to the end of our journey. Stay focused. Blessings!
