"We Are Poised Between Hope and Despair": Professor Alison Liebling on Building Moral Prisons

____________________________________________________________

 

 

 

I was offered a job researching young offender throughcare towards the end of my part-time Criminology Masters course in Hull by Professor Keith Bottomley. The rest is history, as they say. The job involved long fieldwork placements in 3 different sites: a former Borstal, a young person’s prison, and a detention centre. That whole experience changed my life and set me on this path. The intimacy, tragedy, and yet the moments of humanity, in prisons just drew me in. I loved the researcher role – I could be a sympathetic listener in places where everyone needed someone who would take their experiences seriously. People need to be understood. The task of making sense of what was going on gave just me enough distance to make the closeness manageable. Everything I observed challenged my preconceptions about who staff and prisoners were. The compelling human-ness and fragility of young offenders, the compassion and will to help among some staff, alongside the brutal dismissiveness of others, led me to want to explore the conceptualisation and impact of different moral climates or prison cultures on prisoner survival and well-being. It was like being dropped into an intensified version of the basic human puzzle, with a notebook.

 

2. In your new book, you draw a powerful parallel between Dostoyevsky's experience in the Omsk prison camp and your own research findings. What led you to connect his 'house of the living dead' with contemporary prison analysis, and what can his transformation teach us about rehabilitation today?

 

I have found that extreme contrast - the absence, and then occasional or fleeting presence, of goods or values that human beings need (e.g., humanity, relationships, respect, and safety) – bring about powerful emotional responses in prisons, turning prisoners into sharp analysts of the human condition. They sense, and can often articulate, the rightness or wrongness of their treatment, and the effects of different kinds of cultures or moral environments on their own well-being and development. When I returned to Dostoyevsky after all these years of prisons research, I saw so many parallels in his writing. He experienced a profound transformation in Omsk prison camp in Siberia where he spent four years. He wrote that life there was ‘morally unbearable’. That is a really striking term. I have heard prisoners express this feeling. What is morally bearable? Where does the threshold lie? Dostoyevsky’s faith in humanity was destroyed by fear, abuse and humiliation, but then restored as a result of kindnesses he received and witnessed. Savagery and humanity co-existed in this ‘house of the living dead’: the distinctions between them, and the effects of the differences were clarified. In my book, Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places, I draw on data from some least and most survivable prisons (exceptional outliers), to explain why prisoners are so adamant in their descriptions of the best prisons. They say things like: ‘I’ve been out in the desert. I was starving and now I am fed!’ The desert is mute and destructive. Its opposite – the oasis – is where ‘the wire to the world begins to vibrate’. They describe a ‘vibe’ in these prisons – what I now call ‘a between’ (following Martin Buber) – that supports their well-being, growth and development. We all become more alive in these resonant conditions, as Hartmut Rosa has recently argued (in his book Resonance, 2019). Going back to my work on suicides in prison, finding the right literature, and linking these projects to my observations in the best prisons, has helped me to work out that growing the life force might be a helpful way to think about rehabilitation.

 

 

A powerful conversation in a Dialogue group in Whitemoor prison in 1998 made me think about freedom in ways I had been blind to – like the ways we give away our own freedom and create prisons outside. There are different forms of imprisonment. One prisoner said that art, like other creative activities, and faith practices, ‘rearranges the hierarchy on new criteria . . . it’s a leveller’ (Prisoner). That was a typically shrewd observation and says so much about being treated with basic respect for personhood. Prisoners make clear that survival and growth are grounded in the ‘ordinary’ - in human relationships, generous gestures, or in play - and not (generally) in ‘expert’ intervention or knowledge. Many times, I have heard accounts of how powerfully we are touched when we receive something from others. This often becomes the source of our capacity to give, or our own moral development. What is striking is that prisoners are often expressing the insights of religious or spiritual wisdom. Many use the word ‘soul’ to talk about the deepest part of themselves and the effects of being reached by others. There is so much imagination, thought, and feeling in prison: so much wisdom. More should be done to honour and grow that.

 

 

In my book I include a case study of a prison that was taken from ‘unsurvivable’ to ‘survivable’ over a two year period. Much of this was practical – almost managerial – establishing effective reception and first night procedures, working well with mental health in-reach teams, improving drug detoxification procedures, and so on. But it also involved some thinking differently – working out that ‘care’, as experienced by the women, was primarily about safety, and the approachability of staff. The prison improved, less distress was generated, and where it occurred, more help was offered. Suicides became rare. But that is step one. Moving from ‘survivable’ to growth-oriented involves something more: like imagination.

 

Building a ‘between’ (this language is from Martin Buber) takes time and patience. It means working on all the building blocks to grow a moral community.  Moments of meaning and humanity proliferate. Looking at a very large sample of MQPL scores across all prisons closely shows that improvement is not simply linear. Above a certain range of scores, a quantitative difference yields a major qualitative change: there is a transition from ‘more of something’ to a completely distinct state. The ‘wire to the world’ begins to vibrate. More of the parts work. It is what is between them that makes the difference. Many philosophers and social theorists have talked about this. I could see it in the data.

 

Building a between requires activity, meaningful projects, and moments of doubt, not certainty. This in turn requires high levels of professional confidence. It is an active, not passive orientation. It requires that staff pay attention to prisoners, knowing their stories and understanding the context in which their behaviour improves or deteriorates. Rowan Williams calls this kind of attention, or engagement, a kind of reverence (Williams 2018: 32): the opposite of contempt. It relies on staff having a future-orientation – seeing prisoners as both who they are, with all the risks that involves, and who they might become. This requires a ‘tragic’ rather than ‘cynical’ perspective (that is, an assumption that we all belong to the flawed human condition, but we can also hope and be intentional).

 

The prisons I have seen that manage this have key figures in the right places throughout the prison. Senior staff lead in the right way (closely and appreciatively). Officers have sufficient power to manage the wings proactively, but they do not ‘over- police’ prisoners. The security department are highly communicative: they talk, share information with others, ask questions, and look holistically at problems and conflict. This affects the way power is used and rules are enforced. Staff see prisoners ‘justly’, appreciate their wholeness, and support them in developing their capacities. Everyone in the prison contributes, in ways that are valued by others. Some of this practical, but it is also about ways of seeing. Perhaps I can quote from my book to illustrate:

 

[Staff in these outstanding prisons] had a different metaphysics (i.e. philosophy of life, people, and punishment) from staff in [less well-performing prisons]. They imagined prisoners differently; their intentionality or attitude was different. They grasped— at the level of practical consciousness— that prisoners were agents entitled to make moral claims. This created a distinct kind of ‘forcefield’ or ‘landscape of expectation’ allowing prisoners to present, as well as become, fuller versions of who they were. Prison staff constituted and created this environment, alongside prisoner peers. The key ingredients were expertise, ‘presence’, respect, and having growth intentions (Liebling 2026, chapter 6).

 

The kind of presence I am describing is ‘co- presence’: we bring another into being by connecting to what is alive in them. These kinds of practices, grounded in a view of prisoners as people with capabilities and futures, capable of contributing to a community, produce a better climate, different between- prisoner dynamics, and less violence. To ‘be an environment for someone else’ (pp. 33– 5), staff have to develop their own capacities, so training, mentoring and morally gifted leadership are crucial. Professionally well-supported staff provide prisoners with carefully communicated, helpful, and well- informed feedback to help them unlearn violence and develop their potential. These kinds of prisons see themselves as more human and subtle rather than bureaucratic places. Yet, they can also operate a clear and consistent regime and prioritise safety. This is by no means easy. In fact, I call it the ‘hard problem of prisons’. It is why the book is called Aristotle’s Prison: so much of what goes on is about doing several opposing things at once. Not ‘finding the balance’ between security and relationships but doing the maximum amount of each. Values do not occur in the world one at a time.

 

 

Morally intelligible prisons feel like reasonable places to be (even if sentencing has become inflated). The primary barriers to achieving moral intelligibility are escalated sentencing regimes, bureaucratically impossible routes to progression, indifferent I-It climates (where prisoners are treated as ‘experienced objects’ rather than experiencing subjects), lack of provision of work, education, and other meaningful activities, staff shortages and instability, and lack of access to help with drugs, health and mental health problems. I think we are trying to expand capacity instead of reigning in the use of imprisonment but delivering well-resourced and managed prisons for those who really need to be there. This is bad for staff as well as prisoners.

 

 

This is a really hard question. Practical wisdom is ‘a capacity to know what the situation calls for’. Barry Schwartz, who writes a lot about this, describes it as ‘the master virtue’; a ‘combination of moral will and moral skill’. It has a very specific role in prisons, where the stakes are high and the need for good discretion is considerable. I think the gist can be taught, and it can be modelled; some of it has to be learned on the job. Certain dispositions probably help – confidence, courage, the capacity to hold competing values in tension (like faith in human nature with alertness to risk). I have some good colleagues who are interested in developing some training on it specifically for prison staff (Joel Harvey and Laura Bowden) so watch this space. Some people just have it – whether this is life experience, a kind of moral giftedness, or personal qualities, I am not sure. Training for prison staff should be much more substantial than it is, throughout an officer’s professional life. I have long admired the more comprehensive Nordic approach to prison staff training – blending social work skills with dynamic authority. The mentoring model tested by the Unlocked graduate scheme seemed to make a positive difference to retention. I think there is much more to be done in this area.

 

 

I was listening to an incredible memoir this morning. It is a book by Edith Eger called The Choice. It is a story of hope, although it is also a harrowing account of her experience in a concentration camp. She raises the concept of home. She reflects that everyone knows the feeling of that word. The form it takes in the lives of individuals will vary across cultures and political communities, but we share a need for and a yearning for home. I think the concepts of respect, humanity, relationships, fairness and well-being have this kind of universal relevance. They may take on a slightly different shape in different cultures, but they are essential conditions for our lives. Human beings have experienced anger and distress since before the era of Greek Tragedy, often as a response to the absence of these values, though the symbols through which they are expressed might be culturally and historically infused. I think it is universal that human capacities require moral space to breathe and live, and that we are damaged by injustice and betrayal. This is what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses.

 

I discovered the work of Brian Doerries whilst writing this book (The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today). He takes performances of Greek Tragedy to prisons to help staff and prisoners to feel less alone in their experiences of grief, rage and trauma. Understanding the timeless nature of these terrifying emotions can help with healing some of the damage they do, and with building better futures. I was trying to explore, or reveal, fundamental human processes and capacities by locating some extreme edges of experience, and then placing a special emphasis on understanding the moral environment as a key actor, or shaper, of these experiences – positive and negative. Through close observation, I have tried to show the ways in which human experiences are morally patterned and to argue that this aspect of human life is ‘knowable’. This has relevance not just to penal systems everywhere but to social conditions more generally.

 

 

I say at the end of my book that I am poised between hope and despair. Some developments encourage me – like the signs of acknowledgement that the current state of play is unsustainable and damaging to all. I am impressed by some of the efforts being made to improve training, innovate, and engage those with lived experience in seeking improvement. But I am concerned by the political and financial mood, the resistance to tackle the overuse of imprisonment, by levels of violence and by the staffing crisis. Something drastic needs to change before those who want to work constructively in criminal justice can be enabled to do so.

 

 

Well, I hope that conferences like this contribute, but I am sure there are many other possibilities. I have just joined a group who are trying to grow a vibrant global community of researchers and practitioners (including people with lived experience of prison) to promote more human and humane justice systems around the world. The group has initial funding for two online workshops in March and April, as well as the production of a library of resources which will be freely available. It aims to identify ‘pockets of the future’, so human moments, environments and relationships that are happening now, to help build a bridge towards more transformative, human justice systems in the future. By coming together to inform, imagine and inspire, the group hopes to build momentum for a collective global voice and action, to help create a paradigm shift in this area of work, and certainly to support those who feel alone in their efforts to build a better future. (If you are interested in finding out more, you can contact Nina Champion ([email protected]).

 

We need to build ‘a between’ amongst ourselves, and to engage policy-makers in these dialogues.