Book Review: Imprisoned Tongues
| Published date | 01 June 1969 |
| Date | 01 June 1969 |
| Author | J. G. Mitchel |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486586900200208 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
122 AUST. &N.Z. JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (1969): 2, 2
in the field
may
well benefit by reading
such accounts of men's periods of impris-
onment in
order
that
they may have an
opportunity of realizing
the
assessment of
their endeavours by the "consumers".
ALLEN A. BARTHOLOMEW
Melbourne
Imprisoned Tongues, Robert Roberts, Man-
chester University Press, Manchester, 1968,
214 pp.
Since little seems to have been
written
about teaching the illiterate and educa-
tionally
backward
in gaol, I have tried
to set down an account of my own
experience in
the
hope
that
it
might
be
useful to
tutors
and
others coming new
to
the
prison service.
WITH these
words
Robert Roberts (a pseu-
donym, surely!)
sets
down his aim in
writing
Imprisoned
Tongues. The first half
of the book is taken up
with
adescription
of
that
section of the prison population
which ranges from
the
educationally de-
prived or
"backward"
to
the
totally illiter-
ate
and
with
the
methods used In
basic
education classes in a British prison to
remedy
the
weaknesses of these
IJ;len,
par-
ticularly in
the
areas of reading and
writing.
The
pattern
of basic education in this
British prison (un-named) appears
very
similar to
that
pertaining in Australian
prisons. Prison.ers, .who
are
foun~
after
testing in classification to be functionally
illiterate or
very
much below average on
standardized
tests
of reading
are
encour-
aged to
attend
classes-in
this case a six-
teen weeks' course of one hour
per
day
under
the guidance of a
tutor
(usually
called an education officer in this country).
The
author
gives us some insight in his
chapter
"Who
Are The Illiterates?" into
the
backgrounds of the small group of
functional illiterates
with
whom he was
concerned. Unfortunately he does
not
see
fit to include full details of
the
men
at
the
various levels
of
literacy,
but
instead
quotes figures relating to a group of 500
prisoners interviewed as possible
students
for basic education courses. Presumably
these would
an
fall in
the
below average
groups
but
would be unlikely
to
be
illiterate in
the
generally accepted sense.
After
stating
that
70% were
born
in
the
United Kingdom or Ireland, while
the
re-
mainder came from
West
Africa,
the
West
Indies,
Pakistan,
Malta, Cyprus, Hungary
and Poland,
the
author
then lapses
into
rather
vague generalizations
about
the
ap-
parent
rates
of
illiteracy in prisoners from
the
United Kingdom,
the
Irish Republic
and the
West
Indies.
One does
not
learn much from a state-
ment such as: "Most of
the
group
drawn
from the Irish Republic were on the whole
much less literate than their British
counterparts"-when
no figures or indi-
cations of the criteria used are given. More
revealing
are
the
anecdotes and reported
statements of prisoners, such as
the
young
West
Indian's
"Ah
wanna
learn
...
an' be
three times as clever as a white man. Then
mebbe I'll get a job as half as good."
To me
the
value in Roberts's book
lie'S
in his ability to
recount
these anecdotes
of life in prison as revealed to the prison
tutor-the
conflicts
between
inmates,
their
discussions on
current
events and life in
general, the humor, pathos and suffering
that
is ever-present in
the
prison situation.
Role playing and group discussion sessions
give Roberts a
great
opportunity to
display
his facility in representing the convict
argot, while
Chapter
Nine is in reality a
novelette or
short
story
displaying
great
literary skill. To complete this pot-pourri,
chapters on criminal types, custodial staff,
penal reform, a use·ful section on tattooin.g
(written by a prisoner) and a glossary of
prison slang
are
added.
Roberts does
not
present
us
with
any
new or radical solutions to
the
problems
of teaching
the
adult
illiterate. Many
workers in
the
remedial field, in this
country and elsewhere, would probably re-
gard
the
methods
and
techniques he uses
in teaching reading as
rather
outdated. He
dismisses
the
phonic approach which has
been used by
workers
such as Gattegno
and Diack,
and
relies, in
the
main, on a
look-and-say technique using primers ap-
parently designed for use by young chil-
dren. He
states
that
he has found this ap-
proach more
than
satisfactory and sup-
ports
it by presenting us
with
the picture
of
"two
large young men in
their
early
twenties,
each
with
ahorrifying record of
robbery with violence, sitting heads to-
gether, like children, mouthing
with
deep
interest a
tot's
story
about
'Fairy Pink
and aforget-me-not
who
is
very
ill.'''
As
if prison is
not
bad
enough without sub-
jecting men to this!
Apart
from
the
anecdotes and reported
conversations
that
Roberts sets down, the
most revealing
and
probably
the
most valu-
able memorable
parts
of this book
are
the
examples of
prose
and
verse composed by
prison inmates. To
any
man who would
understand prison, or prisoners, or
the
problem
of
illiteracy, these provide food
for thought.
In
conclusion, it
must
be stressed
that
this is
not
acriminological text-book,
but
essentially a
most
readable glimpse
into
an
important
area
of
prison
life-prison
edu-
cation-and
more
importantly aglimpse
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