The current paper presents data from a social literacy programme implemented in the prison school in Cyprus for 18 months. The programme was theoretically informed by critical literacy, genre pedagogy, multimodality and non-formal education and it aimed to opt away from skill-based, autonomous and corrective models of literacy education that are widespread in prison education. The current programme approached literacy from the ideological and social perspective. The methodology adopted was a combination of intervention (design and implementation) and ethnographic research (reflective diaries, field notes of the implementation process) along with texts produced by the prisoners. The main findings indicate that the prisoners were very responsive to this type of literacy education since it provided them space to reflect on their own experience, freedom to express themselves and produce texts, away from corrective educational models, and the programme as a whole was appropriate for prisoners of varied educational and social background.