Speakers
Plenary Session
Dostoyevsky experienced a profound transformation in Omsk prison camp in Siberia where he spent four years. Life there was ‘morally unbearable’, he wrote. His faith was destroyed by fear, abuse and humiliation, but then restored as a result of kindnesses he received or witnessed. Savagery and humanity co-existed in this ‘house of the living dead’. Extreme contrast - the absence, and then occasional or fleeting presence, of goods that human beings need (e.g., humanity, relationships, respect, safety) – bring about powerful emotional responses, turning prisoners into sharp analysts of the human condition. In my new book, Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places, I draw on data from some least and most survivable prisons, and a few 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!’ They describe a ‘vibe’ – what I now call ‘a between’ – that supports their well-being, growth and development. Prisons at the highest end of a moral quality range (with significantly better than typical MQPL dimension scores) are not just a ‘bit different’ from prisons with lower scores on a linear scale, they are qualitatively distinctive. The life force is supported rather than extinguished. Outcomes are better. Staff in these prisons have different dispositions, practices and intentions from staff in lower threshold prisons, demonstrating a fundamentally ‘emergent-person centred’ approach to their work. They operate with clear attention to security, order, and the use of authority, but hold these values in tension with positive underlying assumptions about prisoners, punishment and rehabilitation. Aristotle called this kind of value-balancing ‘practical wisdom’. He was preoccupied by human potential, and by the relationship between the organisation of city states and the state of the human soul. In a striking parallel with his thinking, research shows us that only once prisons become ‘morally intelligible’ – fair, decent and humane enough – can they hope to become ‘morally enabling’. Most are not.