At 8:30 am sharp, a white van pulls up to Boone Hall, where the Outsiders are huddled in their black shirts, sleepy-faced, but in good spirits. They pile in quickly, knowing we have to stick to a tight schedule. A 10-minute drive from campus, and the van pulls up under the arch of a large metal gate crowned with razor wire. By 8:45, the Outsiders are standing in line, placing their possessions in plastic bins and waiting for the no-nonsense guards to pat them down and rifle through their things. They’re checking: are all cellphones securely locked in the van? Has the driver checked in their keys at the front desk? The Outsiders know the drill. They know that their clothing should be neutral and moderate. They know that IDs and visitor cards should be out and ready, bags open and ready for inspection. Every beep of the metal detector makes everyone go tense, and slows things down. The Outsiders know this all needs to go smoothly so that at 9 am sharp we can make it to Room 209 of the Main Building where another no-nonsense guard is waiting impatiently to let us in. With him is a group of women garbed in uniforms of various shades of blue. We know them as the Insiders. In here, they are known as the ‘offenders’.
Insiders and Outsiders intermingle and take their seats. Class begins.
We are several weeks into the semester-long course, innocuously titled ‘Introduction to Philosophy’. The class, held each Friday morning for three hours at a nearby women’s correctional facility, is part of the US national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. There are 20 students on the course. Half are ‘Outside’ students, that is, mostly 19- to 20-year-old residential students at the small liberal arts college where I teach. The other half are ‘Inside’ students with a much broader range of age, background and life experience. Today, 17 are in attendance. We get the sad-but-happy news that Shauna has been released early. Debbie can’t make it because her cell is being searched for contraband. Michael has the flu.
Since the beginning, each class begins with a round of ‘silly socks’. The students came up with this on their own. It’s funny – you can try so hard to achieve a sense of equity here, to acknowledge and address the obvious and unavoidable differences that define this space. Insiders have no phones, no laptops, no internet service in this space, so Outsiders don’t either. Outsiders have access to resources like office hours and tutoring, so Insiders should too. These black T-shirts with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program logo are worn in part as Outsider uniforms in solidarity with Insiders, in part as a simple way to satisfy dress-code requirements within the prison. But silly socks is what really brings us together – a student-led weekly ritual of showing off the loudest, silliest, craziest socks you’ve got, which lets the students be students. This week, Jenn, who is one year shy of completing a 15-year sentence for vehicular homicide, is Best in Show for the bright socks embellished with kitten faces she knitted herself.
At the time, the students didn’t realise it, but last week we began discussing Plato’s Republic. In fact, this time last week, many had never even heard of Plato, let alone the ‘Allegory of the Cave’. As a matter of principle, before any text or lecture or assignment enters the picture, we start doing philosophy. We always start with discussion, and discussion always starts with a simple question. Last week, the question was: ‘What if everything you ever knew was a lie?’ Without any mention of any scary-sounding words like ‘metaphysics’ or ‘epistemology’, the students were doing philosophy. The Outsiders complained that media, especially social media, twists everything, makes everything seem not real. Some of the Insiders, having only ever heard of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, were intrigued and perplexed. Others expanded on this thinking, arguing that other things did the same thing too, whether it was history, or capitalism, or other things they’d recently learned about in other college classes.
‘Ohhhh-ho-ho, you want to talk about a world of lies? Let me tell you about lies,’ Jess jumps in. ‘Try getting stuck with a felony charge against a cop.’ It goes on like this for more than an hour, each student sharing their own version of what the hell is going on in the cave. At noon sharp, the inmates are called to the mess hall. Inside students scramble to catch the narrow lunchtime window. We depart, agreeing that lies are everywhere, but still not sure if that means everything is a lie.
This week, we’ve read Book 7 of Plato’s Republic and are ready for discussion. In the past few weeks, I’ve observed how the Inside students have unwittingly raised the bar for class preparation. They show up each week with the printed texts I left with them the week before, they take good notes, and they always have their writing assignments out and ready to discuss (many of which are hand-written, given how onerous it often is for the Inside students to type and print their work). I’ve noticed how Outside students have stepped up to match them, showing up in a way that creates a homegrown sense of trust and mutual accountability well beyond anything I’ve witnessed in the college classroom. The writing prompt I’ve given them for today’s class is a spin on the topic of last week’s discussion: what if you knew it was all a lie? What would you do differently?
Students anxiously look over their responses. A principle we’ve adopted for class discussion is that everyone has something to say, which in practice means that everyone has to say something. By now, though, we know that Cassandra, who everyone calls ‘Queenie’, and who has the remarkable gift of always asking questions when she doesn’t understand something, will kick off the discussion with her trademark brand of comical scepticism.
Everyone is glad to see that the thick air of irony hanging over this scene is the good kind
‘What the hell is going on in that cave?’ she blurts out, followed by a round of laughter. ‘Can you draw a picture or something, because I do not know what the hell is going on in that cave. All those shadows n’ shit…’ I stand and go in search of some chalk. But just before I mark up the blank slate of chalkboard at the back of the room, Shelby, typically quite reserved in class discussion, excitedly suggests a live re-enactment. Turns out she’s a theatre major and is suddenly directing everyone to stand up and move to the front of the room, eager and determined to stage an impromptu performance of the Allegory of the Cave.
Someone jokes that now it’s time for the Outsiders to do some time. ‘Yeah,’ Jacynda shouts. ‘How about ya’ll get locked up! – or wait, how’s he put it?’ she asks, looking down at the desk and moving her finger over the text in front of her ‘… have ya’lls’ “legs and necks fettered” so you can’t even move your head. That’s messed up!’ Everyone is glad to see that the thick air of irony hanging over this scene is the good kind, the kind of irony we can laugh at.
But as the Outside students go to take their place at the front of the room, following Shelby’s dramaturgical orders, several Inside students rush to join the play-acting prisoners, a playful gesture of spontaneous solidarity that also reveals the meaningful bonds that have developed between the students over the past few weeks.
A guard peeks in through the narrow glass window to check on the ruckus we have brewing.
My own view is that Socrates would be quite pleased with this scene. I think this is what philosophy should look like. Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights powerful enough to make anyone forget about the so-called ‘crisis in the humanities’. But it’s not just more friendly and fun. These past few weeks have turned up some of the highest-quality philosophising I’ve ever witnessed. They highlight what’s often missing from many college classrooms, from the stale proceedings of many academic conferences, and certainly from bureaucratic rhetoric charged with protecting a tradition of humanistic studies.
‘So that’s what the hell is going on in the cave,’ I say at the close of our lively re-enactment, as we take our seats at the horseshoe arrangement of brown, rectangular tables. ‘But what the hell kind of allegory is this cave?’ I ask. ‘Why do these imagined prisoners think these shadowy shapes are real? What are they supposed to do now that they’re unchained?’
‘Unfettered!’ Queenie shouts.
Victoria, who tells such stories about her granddaughters, quickly responds: ‘At first, I was like “What the hell is this?” I remember you said it was, like, thousands of years old and, when I started reading it, I was like, yeah, it sounds like it!’ This gets a good laugh. ‘But then I started thinking,’ she continues, striking a more serious tone, ‘it’s kinda like what happens in here. You spend enough time in here and you start to think this is all there is. You forget the world out there. So like who said what and who did what is all you start to care about. It’s like your reality, and you forget it’s not like that on the outside.’
Outsiders tell Insiders about ‘cancel culture’, Insiders tell Outsiders about ‘dry snitching’
‘Except this is your reality,’ Jenn chimes in. ‘You are a prisoner, and you’ve been in prison 15 years because you decided to get into your car when you were too fucked up and you ran over somebody. That’s reality.’ Everyone is silent for a moment, sitting with the realisation that both interpretations must be right.
‘But what about all the misinformation,’ asks David, the class clown who started the silly socks tradition. ‘All the crazy QAnon conspiracy theories and stuff. The anti-vaxxers and flat-Earthers. The alt-Right pipeline stuff?’
The Insiders look confused, unsure of this strange new dialect spoken among young people. At times like this it’s clear that, on top of racial, generational, socioeconomic and experiential differences, it’s sometimes just a language barrier that separates one reality from another. But this also creates openings between them. Outsiders tell Insiders about ‘deep fakes’ and ‘cancel culture’, and the Insiders tell Outsiders about ‘Bo-Bos’ (prison shoes) and ‘dry snitching’, which, as Queenie explains animatedly, is when somebody rats somebody out without naming names.
Except Jacynda, the youngest Insider – she knows what’s up. And she is not afraid to flex her glorious gift for whip-smart oratory in laying out why Plato is just trying to get us to think about who we should trust: ‘These people over here locking us up and throwing shadows at us, or these people over here coming in here telling us we’re free now, just come along with us even though your eyes are burning from the bright light? Who are these motherfuckers, anyway? Oh lemme guess – they’re supposed to be the philosophers?’
‘That’s right,’ I admit. ‘The philosophers.’ And everyone has a good laugh.
Philosophy’s relation to the prison has evolved since Plato’s time, from analogy to reality. So many great works of philosophy were written in incarceration. For example, Martin Luther King Jr’s oft-quoted ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, where he was held in April 1963 on charges of unlawful protest against racial segregation. Back up nearly one and a half millennia, and we find The Consolation of Philosophy, written by the late-Roman philosopher Boethius awaiting execution while in prison on trumped-up charges of treason. There is Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, written during a six-month stint in Brixton prison in 1918 for voicing pacifist views against the US joining the First World War. Meanwhile, Ludwig Wittgenstein was a prisoner of war while he compiled the notes that became the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Thinkers such as Viktor Frankl, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre scrawled groundbreaking treatises under Nazi imprisonment, and the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote his prison notebooks while imprisoned by Italian Fascists. (Fun fact: the most up-to-date English-language edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks was translated and published by Joseph Buttigieg, a modernist literary scholar and the father of Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary under Joe Biden and a presidential hopeful).
Even under the threat of surveillance, Bentham imagined the prison as a place of learning
Eventually, some philosophers came around to philosophising about prisons too. Leave it to a British utilitarian to draw up both the intellectual and the architectural blueprints for one of the most notorious conceptions of carceral punishment. Granted, Jeremy Bentham’s discussion of the infamous ‘Panopticon’ is but one aspect of his sprawling treatise ‘The Rationale of Punishment’ (1830), a utilitarian justification of state-sanctioned force to uphold a social order of laws. Granted also that the outsized scholarly airtime that Bentham’s prison plans have received is due largely to the dramatised analysis offered by the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault describes the idea of enforced reform through constant, anonymous surveillance as central to the ‘cruel, ingenious cage’ of the Panopticon. This notion of absolute power through one-directional observation has itself proved an influential metaphor in the philosophy of prisons, furnishing a conceptual language of surveillance that has found its way into more recent critiques of digital tracking, data-collection and the like.
Give Bentham some credit, though. Even under the sinister threat of uncertain, anonymous surveillance, he imagined the prison as a place of learning. Somewhere within the vortex of solitary cells would be a space in which prisoners could find restoration through education. ‘The prison should be their school,’ says Bentham, a dedicated advocate of universal education. Alas, however, what Bentham has in mind is corrective education, an enforced moralising influence valued only for its capacity to offer ‘great assistance in changing the habits of the mind’ and of ‘elevating’ their self-esteem.
Perhaps education has these and similar benefits to offer the incarcerated. But, of course, that’s not exactly what we’re going for in this class. What good, then, are we doing in the name of prison education?
We’ve come a long way in prison philosophy. While we continue to philosophise about prison, there has been a welcome increase in efforts to philosophise in prison. I highly recommend Andy West’s The Life Inside (2022), a lovely memoir that illustrates the impact of these rich discussions among men who may seem unlikely beneficiaries of philosophical practice (see also West’s Aeon essay ‘Inside Ambiguity’). Kirstine Szifris’s book Philosophy Behind Bars (2021) draws on her experience teaching in prison to make a compelling case for the value of this kind of education for the growth and development of incarcerated individuals. The Guardian also featured a series of articles on philosophy in prisons, the bulk of them written by a veteran prison educator, Alan Smith. And, while not strictly speaking a philosophical text, Ahmet Altan’s autobiography I Will Never See the World Again (2018), about his political imprisonment in Turkey, is rich with philosophical insight.
Meanwhile, a host of prison education programmes have cropped up in recent years, many of them in the context of higher education. In addition to the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, these initiatives include the Prisons and Justice Initiative at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, the Bard Prison Initiative in New York, the Yale Prison Education Initiative, and the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, among others. A few of these are even philosophy-specific, such as the Philosophy in Prison charity in the UK, which includes outreach collaborations with centres such as the Uehiro Oxford Institute, and the Philosophy in Jail programme from the Humanities Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Of course, for Plato, it isn’t only about escaping the cave. Equally important is the responsibility of the liberated to return to the cave to see to the liberation of others. These and similar programmes can be seen as a modern-day effort to make good on the responsibility to put education toward emancipatory ends, particularly for those who have been systematically deprived of such opportunities. This is, I think, a crucial component of what has recently been billed as ‘public philosophy’, especially insofar as it is focused on a population often excluded from both philosophical and social conceptions of ‘the public’. In notable contrast to the Rawlsian-liberalist tradition of conceiving ‘the public’ abstractly, as an undifferentiated mass of rights-bearing individuals, one of the chief values of a philosophical practice that engages with incarcerated communities is that it proceeds from a non-ideal notion of ‘the public’ in the name of public philosophy, one that aims to include those often excluded from the centre of public life, denied certain rights and opportunities, and cut off from the benefits of political and social participation. Put differently, teaching philosophy in prisons is one of the best ways of doing public philosophy.
What can doing philosophy in prisons do for philosophy?
Notice, however, that the value of such initiatives is pretty much always framed in terms of the goods that philosophy affords the incarcerated. At a certain practical level, this must be so, given that programmes like the one that make it possible for us to sit in a room and discuss Plato’s Republic depend on external, sometimes uncertain sources of funding, which in turn depend on convincing the right people that the prison population is the direct beneficiary of such programmes. But this way of thinking is also very much present in current scholarship on the value of philosophy in prisons. In an essay by Duncan Pritchard on doing philosophy in prisons, for example, we learn that there is empirical evidence that philosophy can improve ‘the intellectual virtues, and thereby the intellectual character, of the students’ as well as ‘important personal and interpersonal skills’. Similarly, others have claimed that philosophy in prisons ‘can give voice to those who are marginalised, shine a light on injustices, expose the root of social problems, and empower others to seek solutions.’
Suppose all of this is right. Suppose the virtues of doing philosophy in prisons are plentiful and the benefits are real. Still, the question remains whether and to what extent the benefit is mutual. Assuming philosophy can and does do great things for the prison population, we might also ask: what can doing philosophy in prisons do for philosophy?
To clarify – the question here is not so much ‘What do I, the philosopher, get out of it?’ Of course, I do think philosophers can and do learn a great deal from the striking insights that incarcerated students regularly offer. But if we’re discussing the value of teaching philosophy – that is, helping students to think critically about the present, much is to be gained by putting students in prisons. And the students agree.
To understand why, let’s begin with some of the more positive generalisations commonly made about our Gen-Z students. These include: adaptability; digital literacy; political activism (particularly in the name of diversity, equality and social justice); a striking ability to remain optimistic in the face of staggering global calamity; and plenty more. It’s not clear, however, that an aptitude for a productive exchange of differing views belongs alongside these virtues. Let me say first that I’m fully aware of the laughably absurd caricature often drawn by reactionaries and Right-wing media of what happens on college campuses (look no further than the fit-throwing over so-called ‘safe-spaces’). But a generalisation I hear many of my co-educators making today expresses genuine concern about the willingness of many students to hear out different perspectives and make good-faith efforts to seek out common ground within what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called ‘the space of reasons’. So far as I can see, there’s little doubt that our students’ hearts are in the right places. But as any clear-eyed educator can tell you, there’s something of a value shift going on, where what matters is that other people see this virtue, not that we effectively promote these virtues, or actually succeed in changing hearts and minds. This should be particularly disconcerting for philosophers, who are in the business of giving and asking for reasons. It’s true – sometimes students’ comments sound more like proclamations looking for a round of approving finger snaps from peers than genuine contributions to class discussion. More worrisome, however, is that diminishing engagement with a range of diverse perspectives threatens to turn the classroom into what C Thi Nguyen described as an echo chamber: a place where you no longer trust people from the other side.
All of this disappeared the moment my students stepped into a prison. No flexing of pre-approved talking points. No language policing. No impending threats of cancellation. With no more guidance from me than the standard expectations of respectful discourse, the class immediately cultivated, as if by magic, an ethos of listening-not-judging that shaped the entirety of our experience together. Inside students had no trouble making clear the value of this unique opportunity. For some, it was a way to connect with the outside world that helped prepare for re-entry. For others, it was college credit that would look good on a résumé. For others still, it was a meaningful distraction from the monotony of incarceration. The value it held for Outside students, however, is harder to articulate.
Let me share an example.
When putting together the syllabus for this course, I debated whether or not to include a section on the philosophy of prisons. On the one hand, I saw only landmines. Would Outside students want to share any thoughts about prisons, and would anyone want them to? What kind of thoughts would the Inside students want to share about prison? What if the class spawned a prison abolitionist movement within a prison? Maybe we should just stick to prison analogies, I thought.
‘Instead of throwing folks in prison for doing something they shouldn’t, they should use their imagination’
On the other hand, if the writings of Angela Davis tell us anything, it is to use your imagination, take some risks, and try something different. It also happened that Tommie Shelby’s superb monograph The Idea of Prison Abolition (2022) had just been published: with its extensive engagement with Davis in making the case for prison reform, it made an excellent pairing with Davis’s bombshell, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003). So I took a risk and imagined it would go well.
The primer to this, however, was a simple question: ‘Assuming prisons aren’t perfect, should we try to fix them, or should we try to get rid of them? Quick, without thinking – show of hands: left hand fix, right hand abolish. On the count of three, ready…’
Exactly 10 right hands were raised – every single one the hand of an Outside student – to abolish, while all the nine left hands raised to fix were of an Inside student (Debbie had been transferred earlier in the week).
Wow. Amazing.
Things got so loud and rowdy after this spectacular show of difference that a guard stopped by and tapped his knuckles on the window.
The following Friday morning, just after silly socks, I ask for the same show of hands. This time, no one raises a hand. This is because, as each of them is ready to explain, with texts and notes at the ready, it turns out that Reformers and Abolitionists aren’t that different after all. Everyone is waiting for Queenie, who just says: ‘Oh, I love Angela now’ (they’re on a first-name basis).
But this week, it’s Simone who jumps in and kicks things off. Simone, who has said very little in class until last week when it was time to advocate for prison abolition, chimes in early this week to say that Tommie pretty much agrees with Angela because they’re both talking about the same reforms to prison: social services, drug treatment, education.
‘Yeah,’ Queenie joins, and explains that what Angela is really trying to say is that ‘instead of just throwing folks in prison for doing something they shouldn’t, they should just use their imagination. Take some risks. Try something different.’
A crackle of loudspeaker interrupted, followed by a sequence of beeps, each more disconcerting than the last. ‘Lockdown,’ several Insiders said out in unison. ‘We’re gonna be here for a while,’ Jess added. And with that, we settled right back into discussion.
Some names have been changed to protect privacy.
