The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy

"This is a very different kind of book. It’s largely memoir, but it’s a bit like Looking for Theophrastus in that it’s partly constructed memoir because it’s about Andy West’s involvement with prisons. Andy is a teacher of philosophy in prisons but he’s also somebody who’s had a lot of family experience in prisons from the inside, because his father, his uncle, and his brother, have all spent time in jail. So he’s got an ambivalent attitude to prisons and I think his family said, ‘What on earth are you going teaching in prisons for? That’s another one that ended up inside!’ He has a particularly interesting take on all this. The reason why I suggested that it’s partly fictional is that he discusses the sessions where he teaches philosophy to prisoners, but for reasons of privacy, he hasn’t revealed too much about the identities of particular prisoners and has openly produced composite case studies, as it were, of the kinds of thing that happen. He’s not purporting to describe exactly what happened, the exact conversations. But some of the things that prisoners say in the book absolutely ring true. He couldn’t have invented them completely, they’re drawn from his experience, though probably are mixed up a bit so you can’t just say, ‘that’s so-and-so, who was in for murder.’ It’s a really interesting book about teaching philosophy in this context. He replays some of the sort of sessions that have occurred, and it’s really fascinating. It depends on the individual and on the prison. The vision of a quiet, secluded cell in which to study is not actually how it is for most prisoners, though some long-term prisoners may get that kind of treatment. In the shorter term, it’s overcrowded, it’s noisy and smelly, and people are liable to denigrate what you’re doing if you’re studying just as much as celebrate it. I think it can be very difficult for people to concentrate in those circumstances. On the other hand, in a sense, prison has been presented to them as a kind of reflective break from the rest of their life, whether they like it or not, so people do reflect on their lives and on questions of morality and justice. What’s important in life, not least the importance of freedom, is made very clear to people in prison through experience. Also, a lot of people are mixing. They’re stuck in there having conversations. Conversation is an important part of people’s experience in prison. From my experience of that—and from what Andy says and what other people have said to me about teaching in prisons—it’s great to have something to talk about. Sometimes a little prompt from studying an interesting philosophical passage from a book or article or a thought experiment can stimulate genuine, deep discussions that go far beyond the classroom because people are all thrown there together. They’re passing time and conversation is a good way of doing that. So I think for many people prison both is and isn’t a good place for reflecting. “The modern successor of Descartes’s evil demon could be the creator of a Matrix -like virtual world” There’s another book about this that came out this year that I wrote an introduction to. It’s a more academic book and it’s called Philosophy behind Bars by Kirstine Szifris. It’s based on her criminology doctorate. She visited two very different prisons, teaching philosophy within those prisons, and then reflected on the kind of dynamics of what she was doing in the different prisons and how that played out. So if somebody wanted a more detailed response to that question that you asked me, her book is great for understanding how prison isn’t just one thing. The kinds of prisoners that go to different prisons are different, the kinds of circumstances you find yourselves in from day to day are different, and what’s possible in terms of teaching philosophy varies from prison to prison. There is actually a lot of philosophy taught in prison, which is great. It’s something got involved with when I worked at the Open University. Prisoners are very receptive, usually. There’s a charitable organization that is headed by a Five Books interviewee, M.M. McCabe, who recommended books about Socrates for us, too. She runs Philosophy in Prison , which helps to coordinate philosophy being taught in prisons."