Despite the “cultural authority” that abstinence-only education has achieved in the last 30 years (Fine and McClelland 2006, p. 299), a feminist, queer, and anti-racist vision of sexuality education has found a voice in many universities, academic journals, and advocacy organizations (Marsh and Fields 2014). As the contributions to this volume attest, ongoing concerns about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, anti-gay violence, gendered sexual assault, and the possibility of liberation have inspired innovative thinking about sexuality education. Over the last 30 years, sexuality education research, curricula, and programming have emerged to interrupt constraining models of abstinence-only education and to advocate gender, racial, and sexual justice in the lives of young people.

These same years of innovative thinking have been marked for many in the United States by widening economic inequalities, starved social welfare systems, disparities in health care and outcomes, and a punitive War on Drugs. One striking manifestation of the stark divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged is the mass incarceration of people of color and poor people. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to The Sentencing Project, over 700 of every 100,000 people (about 0.7 %) in this country are in prison or jail (2014). In 2012, approximately 1 of every 35 US adults (about 3 %) was court-involved—in jail, or prison, or on probation or parole. Over half of the men and women in prisons and jails are Black or Latina (Bonczar 2003). One in three Black men and one in six Latino men can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes; one of every seventeen white men can expect the same (The Sentencing Project 2013). While men are six times as likely as women to serve time in jail or prison, over the last 30 years the rate of increase in incarceration rates for women has been more than one-and-a-half times that for men (Bonczar 2003; The Sentencing Project 2012). Transgender people, particularly transgender people of color, face considerable social and economic discrimination and are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and incarcerated (Tarzwell 2006). About one in six transgender people have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, and nearly half of Black transgender people have been incarcerated (Grant et al. 2011).

Communities’ disenfranchisement in the face of mass incarceration reflects a broader vulnerability to a host of social and sexual inequities, including violence and coercion, HIV and other STIs, and unintended pregnancies. Imprisoned and court-involved cisgender and transgender women and men typically live in areas of concentrated poverty, lack formal education and work histories, and have neither affordable nor safe housing (Covington and Bloom 2007; Freudenberg 2002; Haywood et al. 2000; The Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007). Many are addicted to or using drugs, and many contend with serious mental illness (Kantor 2003; McClelland et al. 2002). Violence and discrimination often continue during their incarceration at the hands of jail deputies and others (Beck et al. 2013; Human Rights Watch 1996). These histories and experiences contribute to the likelihood of criminal behavior, court involvement, and poor sexual and reproductive health. They also render sexuality education and other efforts to interrupt these entrenched conditions all the more important.

Sexuality education has long aimed to prevent poor health outcomes and promote social and moral well-being (Luker 2006; Moran 2000). And, as state-sponsored sexuality education has focused on those whose health, morality, or intimate relationship seem to require some intervention, it has often affirmed oppressive ideas about the sexual lives of youth, women, people of color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people (Fields 2008; García 2012). As we noted at the opening of this chapter (and as other chapters in this volume suggest), contemporary feminist, queer, and anti-racist researchers and advocates have resisted the pull of this history, claiming instead that sexuality education which emphasizes agency, desire, and pleasure has the potential to address and perhaps even reverse social inequities and injustices (Fine 1988; Fine and McClelland 2006).

Surely, then, sexuality educators have an important role to play in addressing the profound injustices marking imprisoned people’s lives. Having been pushed out of school and other social institutions offering care and education, people caught up in the US carceral system do not have reliable access to any version of sexuality education—let alone one marked by a commitment to sexual and reproductive justice. They receive sexual and reproductive health care and education while under state surveillance; only once they become involved with the courts are they likely to receive sexual and reproductive health education and care. The question becomes, what meaningful and efficacious teaching and learning are possible within the context of racialized and gendered mass incarceration? Below we explore the possibilities for interrupting the inequalities and injustices that thread through sexuality education available to those most affected by mass incarceration, focusing throughout on the tensions between education and punishment, intervention and liberation. While sexuality education gained through jails, prisons, and street outreach is an opportunity to learn and to support agentic claims to one’s own sexuality, this teaching and learning is always encumbered with the demands of the carceral institution.

Sites and Experiences of Incarceration and Vulnerability

We approach incarceration as a broad experience of court involvement that spans multiple settings and institutions—prisons, jails, parole, probation, and the streets. People in state and federal prisons have been convicted of felonies and are serving sentences of more than one year. In contrast, jails are city and county facilities with prisoner stays typically less than a year and as brief as 24 hours. Jailed people are either awaiting trial or sentencing (often without the resources to make bail) or serving shorter terms for misdemeanor offenses. Someone on parole has been released from jail or prison before the completion of their original sentence. Their freedom is contingent upon meeting the conditions of parole; these conditions often include reporting to a parole officer. Probation is a sentence in lieu of a prison or jail time: as long as someone adheres to the terms of probation (e.g. abstaining from drug use or maintaining employment), they can avoid a jail or prison term. Many people chronically entangled with the criminal justice system are released to probation or parole to live on the streets—either homeless or unstably housed. Frequent arrests mean that many court-involved people “repeatedly [go] in and out of the court system, [spend] nights in jail or in court pens at enormous expense, and [come] back out only to face the same situation, with no lasting change or benefit to these people or their surrounding community” (The Urban Justice Center 2003, p. 3).

Just as the geography of mass incarceration extends across these sites and environments, health risk and vulnerability travel across prison, jail, release, and street involvement (Cloud et al. 2014). While one in ten Americans contends with a diagnosable substance use disorder, seven in ten people in jail and half those in prison contend with substance abuse (Fazel et al. 2006; Karberg and James 2005). Rates of mental illness are two to four times higher in prisons than in the community at large (Prins 2014). Violence, injuries, and suicides are common occurrences inside jails and prisons. And, while these sites, like the United States more broadly, have seen a decrease in HIV infections in recent years, HIV infection remains two to seven times as prevalent among incarcerated women and men in the United States as it is in the United States in general (Spaulding et al. 2009).

The entanglement of vulnerability, intimacy, and risk in incarcerated women’s lives leaves them particularly susceptible to poor health. Court-involved cisgender and transgender women endure systemic and interpersonal violence and discrimination—for example, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of corrections officers and other incarcerated persons (Arkles 2009). Many women face long-term (and even permanent) separations from their families when their children are placed into the foster care system (Hines et al. 2004). Pregnant incarcerated women are subject to the continued practice of shackling during childbirth and have experienced a long history of abusive sterilization practices (Daane 2003; Richie 1996, 2002). The rate of HIV and STI infection among women in jail or prison exceeds that of men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2011; Maruschak 2005, 2012). Women whose partners share a history of incarceration are more likely to report histories of STIs and coerced sex (Kim et al. 2002). All women’s lower earning power and lowered economic status increases their vulnerability to HIV, limits their access to health care and education, and makes it difficult for them to leave relationships that compromise their well-being (Wingood and DiClemente 2000). Women at risk for HIV infection have high prevalence rates of intimate partner violence (Cohen et al. 2000); this history of abuse suggests that these women may have limited ability to negotiate sexual concerns with their partners (Gómez and Marín 1996; Melendez et al. 2003).

Heteronormative expectations compel the separation of women and men prisoners—the assumptions being that women and men would become sexual partners if not separated and that separation from the desired pool of heterosexual partners represents a significant punishment. Ironically, sex segregation allows for, and even facilitates, same-sex interactions and partnerships—even as sex segregation also pathologizes these relationships as perverse responses to deprivation. And, the same heteronormative expectations that compel sex segregation also render healthy and freely chosen LGBTQI genders and sexualities invisible to many sexuality and HIV educators, care providers, and corrections officers—even those committed to advocating for prisoners’ rights (Richie 2005; Zierler and Krieger 1997).

The condemnation and prohibition of sex between people in prisons and jails suggest “queer sexuality, not sexual violence, is the problem that [detention] administrators care about eliminating” (Arkles 2009, p. 536). This implication has acute consequences for LGBTQI prisoners, who are frequently cast as the perpetrators and thus face, on the one hand, disproportionate discipline and isolation and, on the other, little help when they themselves are the victims of sexual violence (Tarzwell 2006, p. 179). Transgender and gender-nonconforming people also face repudiation of their gender identities, denial of health care to which they are entitled, verbal abuse, and physical and sexual violence within prisons and jails. Most facilities make gender classifications based on genitalia—not gender identity—and some facilities segregate transgender individuals into solitary confinement or protected status simply because they are transgender (Just Detention International 2013). Transgender people, convicted sex offenders, former gang members, and others share and, not surprisingly, meet harm in this ostensibly protected space.

Sexual violence and vulnerability extend across the landscape and logic of mass incarceration. If overcrowding, extended periods of solitary confinement, and sexual victimization at the hands of other prisoners or prison staff characterize jails and prisons (Cloud et al. 2014), the street can offer respite from imprisonment and surveillance. On the streets, court-involved people may be able to reunite with family or community and find opportunities for personal autonomy. However, the street is often a site of vulnerability, violence, and marginalization. In the first two weeks following release from jail or prison, court-involved people are particularly vulnerable to homelessness and death (Weiser et al. 2009). Those who remain on the street often participate in sex work, robbery, or petty theft; some sell or use illicit drugs. These strategies may allow for survival, but they may also make it difficult to achieve economic and social stability, cope with mental illness and substance use, and secure sexual and reproductive health. And, given the increasing criminalization of poverty and homelessness, life on the street frequently results in subsequent incarceration.

Sexuality Education’s Entanglement with Punishment and Control

Such criminalization is one product of the 1980s War on Drugs. The focus of criminal justice efforts moved decisively from rehabilitation to punishment and resulted in the mass incarceration of people of color and the poor. The reproductive lives of women—African American and Black women, in particular—have been subject to acute surveillance. Women were, and continue to be, incarcerated for exposing their infants and fetuses to drugs, including crack; many lost access to children placed in foster care (Roberts 1999 [1997]; Freudenberg 2002; Toquinto forthcoming). Imprisoned women were, and continue to be, routinely and forcibly separated from their children, cast as bad parents, and then encouraged or required to attend classes promoting parenting skills and contraceptive use (Thompson and Harm 2000; Loper and Tuerk 2011). Some were coerced into abusive sterilizations (Johnson 2013; Justice Now 2012; Roberts 1999 [1997]).

Mass incarceration has also disrupted father/child relationships; one in forty American children has a parent—most often a father—in prison; one in fifteen African American or Black children have an incarcerated parent (Schenwar 2014, p. 12; Tierney 2012). Men, too, have been targeted for parenting classes inside correctional facilities and as conditions of parole (Jarvis et al. 2004). Despite these educational efforts, however, child welfare policies make it nearly impossible for mothers and fathers to regain custody of their children even following release (Roberts 1999 [1997]).

Alternatives to incarceration, including pretrial diversion and alternative sentencing, often include requirements that one complete sexuality education courses, broadly defined. For example, men charged with domestic violence are often sentenced to complete batterer intervention programs rather than jail or prison sentences. Such programs aim to address men’s violence against women and to transform men into egalitarian, empathetic intimate partners (Healey et al. 1998). Integral to the criminal justice system’s management of an enormous volume of convicted offenders, alternative forms of punishment maintain the system’s focus on disciplining, educating, and treating individual people, rather than addressing wider social, economic, and political conditions of harm (Lamble 2013). Batterer intervention programs fail to address the norms and practices of masculinity that promote violence perpetrated by men against women (Mason-Schrock and Padavic 2007). This persistent commitment to addressing social problems by rehabilitating people threatens to obscure systemic patterns of inequality and discrimination and to perpetuate systems of oppression and abuse.

The entanglement of control and punishment may make it impossible for prison- and jail-based sexuality education to escape conditions of distrust, reach beyond rehabilitation, and enact systemic change. Mass incarceration casts prisoners and court-involved communities as manipulative, poor decision-makers, bad parents, unloving and unloved intimate partners, hypersexual, and unable to control their sexual impulses. Educators inclined to trust prisoners may instead distrust jails and prisons as punitive and oppressive institutions at odds with educators’ aims of promoting well-being and liberation. Students may distrust educators as representatives of carceral institutions and state violence; and students who have adopted a self-protective stance may struggle to trust one another inside the classroom. However, in the midst of this distrust exist multiple opportunities for intervention and care. And, some of society’s most vulnerable people are caught up in the criminal justice system. In prisons and jails and on the streets, sexuality education may address and interrupt social inequalities and provide a refuge from an otherwise unyielding regime.

We explore selected examples of sexuality education across carceral settings below. We have not assembled these examples because they collectively represent the breadth of sexuality education available to court-involved people. Instead, each example provides an opportunity to consider sexuality education’s potential to interrupt the conditions of mass incarceration.

HIV/AIDS Education For and By Women in Prison: Interrupting the Required Compliance

HIV/AIDS infection and incidence rates are disproportionately high among incarcerated people, and during the early years of the HIV epidemic, prisons and jails were widely considered “breeding grounds” for HIV/AIDS (Hammett 2006, p. 974). Correctional facilities have responded by imposing mandatory HIV testing and segregating HIV-positive imprisoned people (Hammett 2006). Testing allows people to learn their HIV status and, as necessary, receive needed care; however, non-consensual testing and routine breaches of confidentiality for HIV-positive people who are in prison or jail also perpetuate the abuse and disrespect of the imprisoned. Correctional facilities enforce abstinence policies, allowing no sex, no drug use, and no programs or services that, in promoting harm reduction, might seem to condone either (Dubik-Unruh 1999; Hammett et al. 1998). Only recently have condoms been made available in Vermont, Mississippi, and California state prisons and in five city jail systems (Kantor 2006; Lucas et al. 2014).

The AIDS Counseling and Education Program (ACE) at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility represents an alternative, compassionate peer-led response to HIV/AIDS. This education program offered for and by prisoners has its roots in participatory, liberatory pedagogy (Freire 2000 [1970]). ACE grew out of an effort to make literacy instruction more relevant to women’s lives by organizing instruction around the subject of AIDS (Boudin 1993). The content’s relevance and resonance allowed the course to empower prisoners, promote health, and reduce harm among women prisoners (Fine et al. 2004).

The initial course’s success inspired the 1988 founding of ACE—a peer HIV/AIDS education effort that now exists independent of literacy instruction. Other founders drew on histories of political activism, fears of infection, concern for family members, and a commitment to bringing their skills to a peer-based HIV education effort (Clark and Boudin 1990). Other prisoners quickly learned of the program and wanted to be involved, and local and state prison administration offered support. Tensions emerged quickly, however, between the promise of addressing the needs of, on the one hand, people living with HIV/AIDS and contending with the risk of infection and, on the other, those charged with maintaining the punitive conditions of incarceration (Boudin 1993; Boudin et al. 1999; Clark and Boudin 1990).

Peer education appears to be as effective in stemming unhealthy behaviors as those led by professional staff (Devilly et al. 2005). Their impact exceeds conventional prevention education goals, however. Peer education programs have the potential to resist systemic violence enacted inside prisons. Prisoners become responsible for teaching and learning with other prisoners, claiming some control over the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and authority. Such claims do not come easy: with minimal resources and autonomy, even trained and supported prisoners may struggle to assume the role of sexuality educator (Ender and Newton 2000; Maheady 1998). However, the appeal of peer instructor programs to prisoners and the empowerment and fulfillment some educators achieve suggest peer sexuality education may have a central role to play in not only promoting sexual health and well-being but also resisting the dehumanizing effects of incarceration.

Not surprisingly, tensions abound: between prisons as infantilizing and prisons as spaces for growth and between the responsibility and authority afforded peer educators and the deference and compliance expected of prisoners. Peer HIV/AIDS and sexuality education programs interrupt the conditions of incarceration: the logic of imprisonment and deprivation breaks momentarily as prisoners assume the mantle and authority of “educator”; prison-based programming exceeds the constraints established by a commitment to punishment and control. Nevertheless, the carceral logic remains in place; no education is allowed that is perceived to exceed the carceral system’s aims, and mass incarceration can survive the interruption.

Nevertheless, prisons “contain cracks and openings for change” (Boudin 1993, p. 229). The same feminist, queer, and post-structural understandings of institutions and interactions that have sparked a rethinking of school-based sexuality education similarly support efforts to consider mass incarceration and the containment of prisoners as never absolute, always negotiated, and vulnerable to interruptions. ACE calls on educators to simultaneously cultivate students’ imagination for what could be (in the spirit of Maxine Greene (2000)), while also standing in awe of the carceral setting’s capacity to assert and enforce its vision of what will be.

Claiming Space for Gender Nonconformity and Educating Jail Staff

Historically, the high turnover in US jails (as compared with federal and state prisons) has meant that fewer rehabilitative and service programs are available to prisoners. However, in recent years, public health educators and advocates have increasingly argued jails represent a “tremendous opportunity” to provide HIV/AIDS education, reproductive health care, sexuality education, and other programming and services to which prisoners may not routinely have access outside of jail (Nijhawan et al. 2009).

For gender nonconforming and transgender people, however, the care jails offer is compromised by the harassment and violence they encounter while incarcerated in correctional facilities organized around a binary logic of “female” and “male” bodies (Arkles 2009; The Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007; Tarzwell 2006). In an ostensible attempt to increase safety, most correctional facilities house transgender people in solitary confinement and protective custody housing (The American Jail Association 2015; Arkles 2009; The Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007). Sometimes, solitary confinement provides relief from violence; however, the psychological violence of isolation is associated with extended incarceration, increased surveillance, and reduced opportunities for people to build alliances and solidarity (Arkles 2009). The segregation of imprisoned transgender people severs the social networks they might find or develop in jail. It thus also isolates them from care and resources available to others inside the jail.

Challenging the logic of solitary confinement requires sexuality education for not only prisoners but also correctional staff. The 2003 passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) required nearly all lock-up facilities to comply with new federal regulations aimed to prevent sexual abuse and harassment (The American Jail Association 2015). PREA mandated education and training for correctional staff and administrators (http://www.prearesourcecenter.org/node/1912). Training topics include sexual violence, needs of gender-nonconforming prisoners, and the sexual cultures of prisons and jails. The instruction enlists correctional staff in efforts to recognize sexual and gender diversity, prevent sexual violence, and foster LGBTQI safety. Such mandated training casts those holding formal power as a body of learners and interrupts their claims to authority and knowledge.

Despite PREA, most US facilities remain poorly equipped to ensure the safety of LGBTQI prisoners, and most continue to segregate and isolate transgender and gender-nonconforming prisoners (The American Jail Association 2015). Non-governmental and community-based organizations have deployed their own efforts to insist correctional staff address the gendered and sexual violence of jailing. The Prisoner Advisory Committee of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in New York counters the effects of segregation by documenting the daily realities and conditions of confinement, recommending policy change, and developing educational programming beyond what PREA requires (The Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007). The Advisory Committee recently helped create a new transgender women’s housing unit at Rikers Jail (Mathias 2014), similar to a special jail unit for gay male and transgender women in Los Angeles (Dolovich 2012). Consistently, prisoners and advocates are educating correctional staff. Though they cannot entirely reverse the broad harms of a punitive carceral system, such efforts promise to interrupt segregation, reduce sexual assault, and foster a supportive community for people while imprisoned (Dolovich 2012).

Resistance and Reimagining Outside Correctional Facilities

Street-outreach programs operate outside the criminal justice system to provide vulnerable communities peer outreach, education, and access to hormone therapy, reproductive health care, and other services (Alexander 1997; Jenness 1993; St. James Infirmary 2014). Ironically, sexuality education within jails and prisons provides court-involved persons with the knowledge—and sometimes tools—to practice safer sex. Yet, the criminal justice system frequently punishes those who adopt the recently advocated behavior once they are released from correctional facilities. For example, “Condoms as Evidence” policies cast sex workers’ possession of condoms or condom wrappers as evidence of intent to practice sex work. The arrest of these sex workers—usually homeless and unstably housed people of color—is thus justified (Human Rights Watch 2012; St. James Infirmary 2010). Street outreach can counter these efforts.

Outreach workers interrupt the logics of incarceration by, on the one hand, touching the lives of those still caught in the carceral system and, on the other, positioning themselves outside the system, on the streets where court-involved people live, congregate, and work (Valentine and Wright-De Agüero 1996). For these workers, education is a tool of activism—an opportunity to create and model equity while challenging structures of oppression and striving for mutually humanizing interactions (Freire 2000 [1970]). Outside the surveillance and control of correctional facilities, people on the street can “reimagine themselves as agents who make choices, take responsibility, create change for themselves or others, … and design a future not over determined by the past” (Fine et al. 2004, p. 101). Reimagining can take many forms. The change may lie in knowing how to better ensure their health and safety inside correctional facilities if they are locked up again (Wenger 2014). Alternatively, instruction may mean discussing healthy relationships and strategies for reducing harm suffered in intimate partner violence. Other times, at needle exchange sites, in drop-in centers, or on street corners, people receive an education in safer injection, overdose prevention, and HIV/Hepatitis C/STI prevention.

Indeed, outreach spaces create the possibilities for educational exchange of immediately applicable information (Valentine and Wright-De Agüero 1996, p. 67). Volunteers, case managers, re-entry workers, and peers work in homeless drop-in centers, street corners, residential hotels, and mobile outreach vans to provide safer sex education and materials (condoms and lube) to sex workers and sometimes johns. A rapid HIV-test becomes an opportunity to discuss strategies to reduce the risk of violence. A visit to a residential hotel means the chance to suggest using female condoms (FC2) as an alternative to unprotected sex.

In these brief moments, the guiding principle is supporting every individual as “the authority and expert of the issues that concern them” (Koyama 2001). Learners engage and negotiate the information and resources they desire, define and communicate their needs, and make decisions that outreach workers strive to recognize and respect. Education and authority are co-constructed and learner-centered as community members—including court-involved people—participate in and help create the programs designed to serve them. As with prison-based ACE, peer education and community involvement counteract educational models with top-down agendas that perpetuate revictimization and stigmatization (Bolton and Singer 1992). On the streets, tensions among control, punishment, empowerment, and learning may be eased.

Pedagogical Models: Identifying Opportunities and Responding to Life Conditions

Below we offer two models of HIV and sexuality education, drawn from our work with people moving through the courts and incarceration. We do not offer lesson plans. Instead, we offer models of sexuality education we have developed and implemented in carceral contexts where planning is difficult, adaptability is invaluable, and the goal of interrupting the conditions of mass incarceration—even momentarily—shapes our most ambitious efforts.

Jail-Based Collaboration: Participatory Sexuality Research and Education

Jailed Women and HIV Education was a participatory action research project that aimed to understand the many ways incarcerated women experience HIV/AIDS risk and infection and identify the obstacles that incarcerated women confront when trying to implement HIV/AIDS prevention strategies (Fields et al. 2008). The workshops were a collaboration among researchers from San Francisco State University, health educators from the Forensic AIDS Project of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and women incarcerated in San Francisco County Jail.

The project approached HIV/AIDS through a focus on sexuality, incarceration, and vulnerability. With training from the university partners, incarcerated women interviewed one another about HIV risk and prevention and worked with researchers to analyze the information they had gathered. They also acquired skills and knowledge that prepared them to act as peer health educators, both in jail and after their release. Some women who first became involved in the project while incarcerated joined the team after their release as paid project staff. The team sought opportunities for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women to voice their understandings and experiences of HIV/AIDS, well-being, and safety and to work together to promote health and justice in the lives of incarcerated women, their families, and their communities.

When they began this work, team members expected to develop and distribute a participatory HIV-prevention curriculum for use with jailed women. As the project progressed, the most valuable aspect of the project proved to be its participatory nature. An established curriculum of lessons and learning objectives threatened to undermine the participation central to the project’s success. The team stepped back from the idea of a curriculum and instead developed a pedagogical model that educators and researchers could use in jails with incarcerated women. The resulting cyclical model elicited the incarcerated women’s participation and, in doing so, allowed the team to learn with them about HIV, risk, resilience, and education in their lives. The learning process, as opposed to the learning outcome, proved to be the most empowering and life-changing opportunity we facilitated (Fig. 14.1).

Fig. 14.1
figure 1

Jailed Women and HIV Education’s participatory workshop cycle

Full size image

In the first session, health educators on the team led a discussion of HIV-prevention strategies. The session concluded with the collaborators together identifying obstacles to women acting on these lessons. Questions raised in this discussion informed an interview guide that the entire team constructed collaboratively. In the second session, outside researchers trained women to implement the interview guide. Incarcerated researchers then interviewed one another in pairs, audio recording their conversations. The session concluded with a discussion of the women’s experiences talking and listening in the interviews.

The following week, researchers reviewed the interviews and identified one to three transcripts to transcribe and bring into the third workshop. During that session, outside researchers facilitated the incarcerated researchers’ open coding of the excerpts, in which they examined transcripts and field notes broadly for themes, patterns, and categories. This analysis contributed to the team’s emerging and comprehensive understanding of HIV-negative and HIV-positive incarcerated women’s experiences with HIV and AIDS, including the obstacles that incarcerated women confront when trying to implement protection strategies. These analyses generated new questions and observations for discussion in the fourth workshop session. The outcomes of that discussion guided the structure and content of the next cycle of sessions, when the series began anew. For example, when interviews about discussing safer sex with partners revealed that women stayed in relationships they considered bad for them, the next series of workshops focused on women’s decisions to stay in unhealthy relationships and obstacles to their leaving those relationships.

This model embraces sexuality education as an opportunity to discuss desire and healthy relationships and to explore the compulsory heterosexuality, sexual and physical abuse, and poverty that inform the sexual lives of incarcerated women of color. An iterative pedagogical practice affords incarcerated women greater power to determine the course and quality of their time in the workshops than in other moments of their incarceration or in conventional research and educational settings. Critics of participatory research and education are justifiably concerned about unequal power relationships, competing priorities, and (under)privileged positionalities. As a research team, incarcerated and outside co-researchers in this project sought meaningful collaboration and shared success, knowledge, and opportunity while remaining mindful of the structural constraints that threaten to undermine our collaboration.

Sexuality Education on the Street: The Opportunities Afforded by Harm Reduction

The street-outreach education model is an expansive and adaptive method aimed to reach vulnerable communities who are marginalized or displaced and often do not have the access to other supportive educational programs. At the core of the street-outreach educational philosophy are learner-centered and learner-developed curricula, peer educators, respectful and non-judgmental alliances, and harm reduction principles. There is no single curriculum for street-outreach sexuality education; curriculum is developed and defined with the learners themselves.

The Women’s Community Clinic’s Outreach Program promotes the health, rights, and dignity of cisgender and transgender homeless and unstably housed women in San Francisco. Its participant-centered education and harm reduction principles are evident in its longstanding evening street outreach known as “The Condom Ladies.” The clinic also offers “L-ternship,” a peer education-based workforce development, and “Ladies Night,” a weekly drop-in program. The community of participants are cisgender and transgender women of color of a diverse age range, most of whom have participated or currently participate in street-based sex work. Most are currently using illicit and licit substances or in recovery and homeless or unstably-housed. All are vulnerable to excessive surveillance and policing, and the majority are court-involved—that is, previously incarcerated, on parole or probation, or with warrants for their arrest.

The outreach program’s success rests in part on its approach to sexuality education. Most often, people initiate contact with street-outreach workers for assistance with peripheral needs—for example, obtaining clean syringes or condoms. This contact affords workers opportunities to inquire about their health, safety, sexual behaviors, housing, and well-being and offer support, education, referrals, and safer sex/drug-use supplies. To address these needs, the clinic collaborates with a consortium of supportive educational programs, including needle exchange, overdose prevention and naloxone training, violence prevention and safety, reproductive health care, health care for sex workers, affordable housing, case management, and tenant’s rights. The street-outreach educational model recognizes that the “realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both people’s vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with harmful behaviors” (Harm Reduction Coalition 2014).

Learner-centeredness and harm reduction are the underlying principles. Learning is successful when it acknowledges the contexts of people’s lives, and the understanding of and sensitivity to, psychosocial, economic, and cultural factors and when the learner is regarded as the expert on their issues, experiences, motivations, and feelings (Harm Reduction Coalition 2014). Learning is enhanced within a climate in which the learner is affirmed as an agent making choices about their lives and where learners have access to a spectrum of sexuality education, practices, and strategies. Harm reduction emerged at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis as a philosophy aimed to establish quality of life and well-being, as the criteria for successful interventions and to reduce an individual’s harmful behaviors and the structural harms vulnerable communities are often faced with. Canadian activist and scholar Susan Boyd asserts, “[H]arm reduction is not a panacea, it is unreasonable to believe that it will eradicate all social oppressions. Yet, harm reduction initiatives can provide a shift in policy and practice that bring social factors to the foreground. It can also pave the way for compassionate and human-rights models of care” (2007). Harm reduction and learner-centeredness in the context of street-outreach provide an alternative and resistance to carceral punishment as an arm of sexuality education for vulnerable communities and challenge us to collectively reimagine a safer, healthier, more just society.

Conclusion

The destructive forces of confinement and punishment have important implications for sexuality education for court-involved people. Sexuality education can interrupt inequality and injustice, but these interruptions must always negotiate the suffering and oppression wrought by court involvement. The correctional setting may offer a critical opportunity to provide sexuality education for hidden and marginalized populations; however, relying on imprisonment to reach hidden and vulnerable communities threatens to affirm the value of incarceration. While jail and prisons may provide safety nets for those in need of sites of sexuality education and health services, they remain inherently harmful institutions.

Peer HIV/AIDS and sexuality education programs, such as Bedford Hills’ ACE, advance momentary allowances for the imprisoned to assume authority as educators and resist top-down learning and the dehumanizing impact of incarceration. These programs also must contend with the tensions within an infantilizing regime. Efforts to re-educate jail and prison staff through PREA-mandated efforts as well as community-based efforts of groups like The Sylvia Rivera Law Project and the Prisoner Advisory promise meaningful change as they interrupt the pull of solitary confinement and claim spaces for imprisoned LGBTQI people. Nevertheless, once again, the structures and systems responsible for isolation, surveillance and brutal policing remain in place. Outside jails and prisons, on the streets, on parole or probation, or in alternative sentencing practices, court-involved people may find both relief from the starkest conditions of incarceration and educational opportunities that affirm their personhood. However, their bodies remain vulnerable to the disciplining power of the carceral system. Within the conditions of mass incarceration, the resources people gain while incarcerated are opportunities for empowerment and occasions for exclusion: yes, people may have new or renewed access to benefits, but they may also find themselves on a path to failure—a failure to take advantage of an opportunity, a failure to succeed despite resources being available, a failure to achieve the sexual lives others want for them.

The swift expansion of mass incarceration in recent years and the dominant systems that subjugate vulnerable communities are unlikely to yield. Sexuality education, prisoner advocacy programs, and supportive social services are thus all the more important. These programs have the potential to be restorative and transformative, but they remain constrained by their dependence on correctional facilities. Developing and strengthening community-based responses to sexual and social health inequities and committing to decarceration efforts offer the greatest hope for interrupting recidivism and fostering solidarity and resistance. We must consider and implement alternatives in which liberatory education imagines a new future no longer mediated by incarceration.