The genesis of prison education

The Youth and Adult Education Program at the penitentiary, as a socio-educational policy for social reintegration. The theme is based on the challenge of promoting Youth and Adult Education in places of deprivation of liberty, taking into account aspects related to constitutional rights of access to education, human rights and educational guidelines for prison education. At the same time, the arguments of Paulo Freire and Michel Foucault on the perspectives of education and power relations. The qualitative data presents the representations of the actors involved in prison education, through interviews and a documentary survey, which were carried out in 2015. The results are presented in three categories of analysis: the structure of the EJA program; the relationship between the condition of deprivation of liberty and the concept of formal education; and the contribution of the EJA program as a tool for the social reintegration of inmates in the prison system. Even though the EJA program, in this case, does not meet the purposes of social reintegration, it is an important tool for building citizenship.