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Commentary
Philosophy in prison
M.M. McCabe*†
mm.mccabe@kcl.ac.uk
Abstract
The UK prison system is in crisis: overcrowded, understaffed, ill fitted to whatever purpose imprisonment might be intended to have. Prison education is particularly under pressure, especially since a majority of prisoners are functionally illiterate. The charity Philosophy in Prison seeks to address the complex problems of prison education by offering philosophical conversations in prisons: oral, so accessible to most, but driven by difficult philosophical questions that are puzzling to anyone. This process faces down the disadvantage suffered by many within the criminal justice system, that their voices are not heard (the problem of epistemic injustice). For these conversations have an equalising effect, since the problems they address are puzzling to anyone, whether new to it or expert. That general puzzlement allows the participant both to see the viewpoints of others, and to have their own viewpoint seen by others. This matters: it shows each prisoner that they do have standing, in themselves, after all. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
UK prison systemprison educationphilosophy in Prisonphilosophical conversationepistemic injusticeequalising effect The prison system in the UK is not in a good way: prisons are overcrowded (95,526 people were in UK prisons in 2023; 61% of prisons were estimated as overcrowded)1 and they are understaffed (things have improved a little recently; but the problem is still chronic).2 Staff are very often dedicated and inspiring in the work they do, but they are hopelessly overstretched; as well as the numbers of prisoners they are managing, the prison estate is dilapidated and difficult: noisy, neglected, uncomfortable. Sentencing policy is driving upwards the time served; even although indefinite sentences are no longer passed, there are still prisoners serving IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences (at December 2022 the total England and Wales figure for IPP prisoners was 2,892)3. Facilities for the occupation of prisoners are patchy, depending on factors that are unpredictable: in some prisons the prisoners are locked down except when visiting education or engaged in work, and neither education nor work is available for all.
In part, perhaps, the state of the prison system may be a consequence of unclarity about public policy: do we imprison to rehabilitate? Or to deter? Or to protect those outside prison? Or to exact retribution on behalf of the state? Public pronouncements about imprisonment expressly hope for rehabilitation; but the protection of the public is often dominant in government rhetoric. Prisons are often, then, seen as places of containment, impervious from the outside, closed off and largely ignored by the public—new prisons are built in remote places, and local prisons may be run down and sold off (Oxford prison, for example, is now a hotel, offering some kind of penal tourism). But rehabilitation is not easily served.4
This is particularly evident in the piecemeal systems of education in prison. There are some educational facilities, as well as work training facilities, in every prison; but they are necessarily limited by poor funding and the need to manage complex demand. In particular, the prison population has an extremely high rate of functional illiteracy (in March 2022, 57 per cent had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old)5 and a disproportionate percentage of prisoners were excluded from school (in 2017, one estimate was that more than half of the imprisoned had been excluded from school)6. There is quite a different problem for the highly educated: the resources for them are exiguous (no internet of course, but often no computers, thin libraries, and very hard physical surroundings) and profoundly frustrating. On top of this, there is a severe restriction on how prisoners may access degree courses, even if they could benefit from them: it is currently government policy that prisoners are not eligible for a loan to pay for study, for example, at the Open University (which has an extensive prison programme) until within six years of release. This is apparently for reasons of cost-effectiveness: the loans could not be repaid if someone was still serving a long sentence. But it is immediately evident that exactly those on a long sentence would be best served by the opportunity of a university education.
Both educational disadvantage and educational advantage can thus be harmful in the prison context. Neither may reflect ability: wealth and privilege do not in themselves confer intellectual capacity, nor destitution destroy it, even if opportunity is radically unequal. Obvious, perhaps: but this fact is obscured by a system that takes the ability to read as the precondition for any other educational engagement. In UK prisons, many courses and activities are simply inaccessible to those whose literacy is compromised. By parity, those who are advantaged may escape the notice of prison education, because they cope, and may be left to do so. The criterion of literacy does some kind of harm, perhaps, across the board. So what if this could be got round, by providing activities with serious intellectual content that do not require the participants to jump high educational hurdles?
It is hard to know where to begin: at least, perhaps, one needs to start somewhere. The charity Philosophy in Prison7 was founded in 2018, after a series of successful philosophy courses led by Mike Coxhead in HMP Belmarsh from 2016, to offer philosophical conversations in prisons, oral discussions which are accessible to anyone (provided they have enough fluency in English). Now think about what happens next …
Suppose that you offer a group of interested thoughtful people a philosophical puzzle that is intractable. How many ships does Theseus have, for example?8 Can you go back in time and kill your grandmother, so that you could not go back in time? Should you push the fat man off the bridge?9 Should we lie to save a friend? To questions like that the answers are persistently puzzling: indeed, as Plato’s Socrates observes, hard philosophical questions reduce all the interlocutors to puzzlement, flummoxhood, bewilderment. These prison conversations begin, regularly, with the intractable questions, so that everyone in the room, prisoners and outsiders alike, is flummoxed. This may sometimes have the effect of infuriating the interlocutors (a Thrasymachean flounce is always possible, although in a prison you can’t go far …); but most of the time these puzzles prove so engaging in practice that the questions and the discussion continue on the wing, with other prisoners and even with prison officers: the effect, we are told, is a ripple, as the philosophical discussion spreads, asking about reasons and explanations in places where usually there is only a fist. Of course this is not, and we could not claim that it is, an instrument of moral reform: philosophy does not make people good … Nor is it, I think, necessarily an instrument of well-being, or therapy either: this Socratic method is designed to get us to think, and other consequences may be incidental. But it does, in these situations, push everyone in the conversation into the same difficult place. None of us knows definitively what the answer to the question is, and that none of us knows is evident to us all. This recognition is a step towards understanding, in a complex way.
Philosophy may not reform, but it seems still to matter. We might think that doing philosophy together is in any case a good thing, in itself. But there is more to be said, I think, about the context of conversation. In one particular group of long-term prisoners (call them the Z-wingers, but Z is not their wing) each is educationally disadvantaged: most of them were excluded from school, few have any qualifications and they are all subject to racial discrimination (one of them wrote a poem for a presentation on what it is to have especially dark skin past which no one is willing to see). The Z-wingers are all young (around 25 years old) and all have at least another fifteen years to serve. They are brilliant, engaged and reflective: and they think in ways that are unexpected and exciting and inspiring. But conversation with them is complicated. Often they shout fast and across each other, rather than talking quietly as we—coming in from the academic outside—expect.10 The shouting itself teaches a lesson. For it is hard to understand them, because of the noisy speed. Their response to being asked, on one occasion, to speak differently, was to observe that this is how they speak. For conversation to continue we all needed to change our assumptions, about them and ourselves: we saw that our own responses were unfair (why should we require them to speak like us?). The fact that we were all puzzled should have brought out right away that these intractable questions are equalisers.
Think then of the effect of these conversations on the parties to the discussion. One prisoner told us (let us call her Zelda, but Zelda is not her name…) that philosophy classes gave her her name back: when she came into the prison she was given a number, and a colour for the level of her sentence, and that was all she was (Blue 1234, if you like). For Zelda the philosophy session was a means of restoring her identity to her. But the process is mutual: it is not only the prisoners who are at a loss about Theseus’ ship, so too are those of us who come in from the outside. And it is not only Zelda who wants to insist on her name and her standing in the room: all of us want to count, especially in conditions where we are afraid of the alienation of a number and a colour, but also when we come from the outside into a difficult environment like a prison. That is connected to ownership of what is said: with no name, Zelda could not claim the (profound and sometimes deeply strange) things she said as hers. Without that ownership, she could not engage in the giving and taking of an account that was the conversation; she could not be held accountable for what she said within that context. But when she gets her name back, these conversations have a doubly equalising effect: not only is everyone in the room given a voice; but everyone in the room is in a position to notice exactly that fact.
Both in prison and in her dealings with the criminal justice system before that, Zelda’s credibility was under threat. As a result of her circumstances and her presentation of herself, she was heard less well than others from the moment she entered the system (that this is so, is independent of her guilt or otherwise). And in the prison itself she felt that she was not heard as herself, but only as Blue 1234: she was the victim of what Miranda Fricker has called epistemic injustice.11 Epistemic injustice may affect the credibility of what is said—where the testimony of some particular speaker gets less, or more, credit that the testimony of another, for reasons that are other than the value of the testimony itself. This is a familiar enough phenomenon for many in ordinary transactions. But testimonial injustice is amplified many times over in a prison, where it is built into the aetiology of the place that some of its inhabitants are not to be trusted. Or epistemic injustice may affect the comprehensibility of what is said—where the language of one speaker is impenetrable by another, whether for reasons of privilege or its absence (consider the use of Latin in the UK lawcourts, familiar to those raised on the elite UK ‘public’ school system, but incomprehensible to those who are in the dock) or for reasons of disadvantage (imagine a situation where someone’s disability makes their speech slow, so that impatient interlocutors fail to pay attention).
The Z-wingers’ shouting embodied this kind of injustice in both directions; but neither side understood what that was until we were able to talk about it. All of these cases have in common the inequality between one speaker and another, considered in terms of some principle (or other) of justice. They have in common, too, their means of redress, once the injustice is made explicit and problematic. In the face of some of the intractable questions of philosophy, no-one knew best: once we saw that, some redress of injustice began. And this began, too, the development of understanding: not the knowledge of some answer to the question, but understanding of the nature of the discussion, our places in it, and the recognition of the others in the room.
We may go further. These examples of epistemic injustice focus on the speech acts of its victims, and how either testimony or linguistic competence is hampered by the position of the victim. But Zelda’s story, and its context, makes clear that the real and deep injustice operates at the level of the speaker, rather than merely in terms of what is said. The scope of justice includes each person’s standing, their position in the world, their capacity to take up exactly the amount of space that properly belongs to them as a human being. In a philosophical conversation in a prison, nothing really hangs on how we decide about Theseus’ ship; but that each discussant has standing is important in itself, and that we all come to see it marks a major change, against the grain of the deformations of the prison system itself.
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks are due to my colleagues at Philosophy in Prison, Bill Brewer, James Chamberlain, Mike Coxhead, Clem Harrison and Tom Harrison; and also, with admiration and respect, to both our brilliant volunteers and our inspiring participants in prison.
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash.
References
FootP. (1967), ‘The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect’, Reprinted in Virtues and Vices (Oxford, Blackwell, 1978).
FrickerM. (2007), Epistemic Injustice (Oxford, Oxford University Press) https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001
ThomsonJ.J. (1976), ‘Killing, letting die and the trolley problem’, The Monist, 59(2): 204–217. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197659224
1
House of Commons Library UK Prison Statistics 8 September 2023. [In September 2024, prisons are said to be ‘full’.]
2
See this report from 2023: https://www.russellwebster.com/prison-and-probation-staffing-picture-still-bleak/
3
HOC Library 24 April 2023, Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06086/).
4
Although the prison systems of the Nordic states have radically different figures for recidivism (https://impartial.one/prisoner-reintegration-lessons-from-norway/).
5
Amanda Spielman, ‘Prison education: a review of reading education in prisons’ (HM Inspectorate of Prisons 22 March 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prison-education-a-review-of-reading-education-in-prisons/prison-education-a-review-of-reading-education-in-prisons).
6
Institute of Public Policy: in 2017, 54,164 of the total prison population (then of 85,975) had been excluded in the past.
7
www.philosophyinprison.com launched in November 2018 at the British Academy by Bill Brewer, Tom Harrison and myself.
8
Hobbes’ puzzle about Theseus’ ship is often replaced in these contexts by discussions about Trigger’s broom, where the character from the TV programme Only Fools and Horses is given a medal for keeping the same broom for twenty years—although he has replaced the head and the shaft several times. Is it the same broom?
9
This is one thought experiment in the collection known as ‘trolley problems’ (see Foot 1967; Thomson 1976).
10
I am especially grateful to the two colleagues in Philosophy in Prison, James Chamberlain and Mike Coxhead, who first encountered and analysed this ‘shouting inside’. This is a promissory note for a more detailed paper which we are in the process of writing.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a41
Published on: 17 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 267
Article download count: 20
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
McCabe, M.M. (2024), ‘Philosophy in prison’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a41 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a41Crossref
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