Welfare behind the wall: the bureaucratic origins and development of correctional education in the United States 1915-2012

This dissertation draws on approximately 8,000 pages of archival data to excavate the origins and development of prison education in the United States. I locate prison education at the crossroads of welfare and carceral state development, not as an exceptional policymaking sphere. This dissertation develops a geological metaphor of the marbled penal welfare state to capture and assess bureaucratic-centric penal state building. I find that prison education is the result of decades-long bureaucratic innovation carried out at the institutional level of prisons from 1915 to the 1960s, coordinated through a national reform network. I then analyze how correctional education fared in the punitive era in Texas. I find that programs persisted in spite of hostile policymakers in other domains, but suffered double exposure from both punitive actors and broader welfare retrenchment. I conclude with an analysis of how the marbled penal welfare analogy, and the case of Texas in particular, shed light on the modern criminal justice reform debate.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference