Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places
Lecture by Professor Alison Liebling, University of Cambridge.
Abstract
In this lecture, I will talk about my new book, Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places. I describe how doing research in prisons over a long period of time led me to the two poles of human experience: the desert (which is morally unbearable) and the oasis (where the life force is affirmed).
I show how these qualitatively different poles of human experience shape outcomes, such as violence, versus survival and moral growth. Staff in outstanding prisons have different dispositions, practices and intentions from staff in lower threshold prisons. 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. They know when to use ‘intelligent trust’ or ‘intelligent doubt’. Aristotle called this kind of value-balancing ‘practical wisdom’.
I found a striking fit between my research findings over a professional lifetime, which effectively consist of the careful organisation of what prisoners and staff have to say, and the insights of traditional, religious, spiritual or indigenous wisdom, as well as recent social theory. Human beings need presence, connection, and resonance. These ingredients of the good life are literally a matter of life and death, and yet they are being undone in prisons and in our lives outside as both harden into a world of It. What can we do about a harshening criminal justice system and a hardening world?