Attentional Capacity and Education in Prison

Ollie Braden (Princeton Recognizing Inequality and Standing for Equality (RISE) Fellowship intern), worked with the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice on student data and evaluation. Ollie is an incoming junior at Princeton studying history. She is passionate about criminal justice, and has spent the past year helping incarcerated people assemble and write clemency applications to the New Jersey governor.

As a college student, I’ve recently begun to worry about my ability to pay attention. I spend a lot of time engaging with short-form video content on the internet. Consuming this content, I’ve realized, actively makes it harder to focus on my schoolwork and passions: when you become used to processing information in bite-sized, flashy pieces, it becomes far more difficult to sit through an hour-long lecture or read long-form texts. I’m working on retraining my attention span by reading more and scrolling less. At the beginning of this effort, I was genuinely shocked by the amount of work it took to sit down and sustain focus on a novel after years of entertaining myself online. 

This contrasts sharply with the trends I noticed while interning with the Petey Greene Program this summer. One of my roles has been to process forms that new students fill out to provide staff with information about their educational histories, goals, interests, and learning styles. On these forms, most students mentioned a love for reading and that they read every day while incarcerated. Among my friends and I, these kinds of reading habits are pretty rare, and this made me wonder about the attentional environment of jails and prisons. Despite the intense hardship of everyday life behind bars, is it possible that people with restricted access to technology are able to develop healthier attention spans than the outside world facilitates?  

While it’s an interesting question, it may come from a naive perspective. It’s very likely that people in carceral environments that make particular efforts to encourage education and self-betterment can use their time in prison to develop new skills, including an improved attention span. For the vast majority of incarcerated people, though, the prison environment drastically harms their ability to pay attention by being simultaneously overstimulating and understimulating. 

One source of overstimulation in prison is sound and light pollution. In an article written for the Prison Journalism Project, David Annarelli describes “oppressively bright lights” and a “piercing wake-up call over the PA system” greeting him in the early hours of each morning of his incarceration. At his prison, lights are on for eighteen hours a day. The PA system is active about every fifteen minutes, and cell doors are constantly clattering loudly enough to disrupt conversations. These stimuli, accompanied by difficult interpersonal dynamics and the mental strain of life behind bars, make prison an incredibly distracting environment. 

Simultaneously, prisons manage to be cognitively understimulating. While people behind bars are subject to full days of strictly regimented routine, neuroscientists find that these prescribed lifestyles are “deliberately impoverished.” Incarcerated people are deprived of tasks that engage them in challenging and varied mental labor, degrading executive functioning abilities, including the capacity for sustained attention, in the long term. There is not readily available information on this phenomenon in the United States, but a study in the Netherlands found a decline in the executive functioning of incarcerated individuals that spent sixteen to twenty hours per day in their cells after just three months of imprisonment. This suggests that time spent in prison without adequate cognitive stimulation actively harms people’s ability to focus, a problem that is likely to persist upon release. 

It is also worth noting that ADHD symptoms are extremely prevalent in prison environments. The estimated prevalence of ADHD in incarcerated populations is 25.5 percent, and many of these people likely have not received the diagnoses that might allow them to access support. Youth in prison are reportedly five times as likely to have ADHD symptoms than the general population, and adults are ten times as likely. These numbers align with the entry data I looked at, where many students reported having either diagnosed ADHD or difficulties with attention and distraction. The challenges of constant over- and under-stimulation are likely significantly exacerbated for people who have existing neurodevelopmental difficulties. 

For the Petey Greene Program, and for any educational programming that serves incarcerated or formerly incarcerated students, these impediments to deep focus in prison are important to consider. Effective education requires not just that instruction is given, but that students genuinely receive and process it. Understanding the difficulties involved in doing so helps us think about how to best help as educators, as well as what policy reforms may be necessary to get at the root of the problem. 

First, it is important to recognize that offering educational programming in prisons to begin with helps solve the problem of under-stimulation. Giving people behind bars meaningful ways to engage in cognitive work allows them to better maintain executive functioning abilities while behind bars.  Attention spans are essentially muscles, building with exercise and atrophying with neglect. 

Secondly, steps should be taken to minimize light and noise pollution. This is important for the health of all incarcerated people, and students will enjoy particular benefits. On the Petey Greene Program’s most recent student feedback survey, 27 percent of students said that a “dedicated space for tutoring” would improve their program experience, and it’s easy to understand why. The PGP strives to have all programming occur in designated learning areas, but capacity issues can often get in the way, and even when a space is available, it is not necessarily a distraction-free zone. The PGP will continue to pursue learning environments that are conducive to focus, as this can dramatically improve students’ experiences. 

Thirdly, tutors and educators must work to create and implement strategies that help students sustain attention during learning sessions. The PGP works hard to incorporate strategies for engaging students into its tutor training so that volunteers are equipped to help students learn the best they can—some include building in “brain breaks,” varying teaching strategies to keep students interested, and structuring lessons around compelling questions. It is certainly worth continuing to develop these strategies, as ultimately, educators must approach tutoring in prison with an understanding that this environment makes attention particularly difficult.