The Role of Power in Prisoners’ Educational Activities: A Foucauldian Dispositif Analysis

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the role of power in the formation, organization, implementation, and evaluation of prisoners’ educational activities using Michel Foucault’s dispositif analysis. This qualitative, historical-interpretive study was conducted based on Foucauldian dispositif analysis. Data were collected through purposive examination of laws, prison regulations, organizational documents, administrative directives, and provisions directly related to prisoners’ literacy education, continuation of formal education, scientific instruction, and vocational training. The sources were selected through theoretical purposive sampling, with the analytical scope restricted exclusively to educational activities. Data analysis was conducted at three interconnected levels: archaeology, genealogy, and dispositif analysis. The archaeological stage identified statements, concepts, subject positions, and rules governing the formation of educational discourse. The genealogical stage examined the connection between these discourses and techniques of power. Finally, dispositif analysis reconstructed the relationships among regulations, institutions, educational knowledge, assessment procedures, documentation practices, and supervisory mechanisms. Inferential findings revealed five major mechanisms through which power operated in prisoners’ educational activities: educational classification and individualization, temporal regulation of learning, continuous surveillance and documentation of performance, linkage of educational participation to institutional incentives and sanctions, and hierarchical organization of educational planning and evaluation. These mechanisms transformed education from a merely instructional process into a field for producing knowledge about prisoners, comparing individuals, normalizing conduct, and directing educational trajectories. Consequently, the prisoner was constituted as an educable, measurable, governable, and partially self-regulating subject within the educational dispositif. Prisoners’ educational activities function within a power–knowledge dispositif that simultaneously develops educational and vocational capacities and organizes educational conduct through classification, assessment, surveillance, and normalization; therefore, prison education should be understood as a dual process in which empowerment and the exercise of power operate concurrently and remain deeply intertwined.