Prison Education and Reentry Commons^™

No Cell For The Soul: Prison, Philosophy And Bernard Stiegler - A Short Appreciation, Rod Earle

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher who served 5 years in prison for a series of bank robberies committed in his youth. He died in August 2020, aged just 68, a professor celebrated in the highest ranks of continental philosophy. Stiegler subsequently published over 30 books, at the core of which is the series tellingly gathered under the title ‘Time and Technics’. His essay, ‘How I became a philosopher’, convinced me he, and it, should be on every prison philosophy course. In this article I outline why, as a convict criminologist, I feel an affinity with Stiegler’s project.

Bridging A Gap Of Understanding: A Model Of Experiential Learning For Incarcerated Students And Non-Incarcerated Undergraduates, Dale Brown, Zoann K. Snyder

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

Service learning has evolved as a primary experience-based curriculum for undergraduate students. But much of what universities put forward as service learning is not a genuine engagement with community partners to help advance meaningful social change to address social problems. In this paper, we outline our preliminary attempt to do just that—what we call The Bridge Model. The discussion that follows occurs in the context of a semester-long project between undergraduate students at a Midwestern University (MU) and incarcerated participants from the university’s prison education program. First, we briefly situate the partnership in terms of its theoretical background in experiential …

Transaction Or Transformation: Why Do Philosophy In Prisons?, Mog Stapleton, Dave Ward

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy there is a well-entrenched tendency to think in transactional terms. The academy has something of value that it aims to pass on or transmit to its clients. Usually, this transaction takes place within the confines of the university, in the form of transmission of valuable skills or knowledge passed from faculty to students. Public philosophy, construed within this transactional mindset, then consists in passing on something valuable from inside the academy to the outside. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of …

Trust, Power, And Transformation In The Prison Classroom, Fran Fairbairn

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

This article does three things. First, it asks a new question about transformative education, namely ‘what is the role of power and trust in the decision of whether to transform one’s meaning scheme in the face of new information or whether to simply reject the new information?’ Secondly, it develops a five-stage model which elaborates on the role of this decision in transformative learning.[1] Finally, it uses grounded-theory and the five-stage model to argue that power and trust play an important role in facilitating transformative learning.

[1] This account should be thought of as complementary to (not exclusionary of) Mezirow’s …

Philosophy In Prisons And The Cultivation Of Intellectual Character, Duncan Pritchard

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

There have recently been a series of prominent projects in the UK that aim to bring philosophy into the heart of prison education. The aim of this paper is to consider a possible rationale for this pedagogical development. A distinction is drawn between a content and a sensibility approach to teaching philosophy, where the latter is primarily concerned not with teaching a particular subject matter but rather with developing a certain kind of critical expertise. It is argued that the sensibility conception of teaching philosophy dovetails with an influential account of the epistemic aim of education in terms of the …

‘…In The Secret Of One’S Life’: Bernard Stiegler And Philosophy In The Intimacy Of His Prison Cell, Anna Kouppanou

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

In his book, Acting Out, philosopher Bernard Stiegler confesses that the question once posed to him by Marianne Alphant − namely, ‘How does one become a philosopher in the intimacy and secret of one’s life?’ threw him ‘into an embarrassing position’, mainly because Stiegler became a philosopher in the intimacy of his prison cell. There is no question that from Socrates to Antonio Gramsci, there have been philosophers who have suffered shorter or longer periods of imprisonment, but this was mainly because of their philosophy – their individuated way of being and thinking. In Bernard Stiegler’s case, it appears …

What Is Philosophy In Prison? George Eliot And The Search For Moral Insight, Alison Liebling

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

I argue in this article that people in prison make excellent philosophers, for reasons related to what they are deprived of. I also suggest that great novels constitute, or at the very least, introduce us to, philosophy. Some of the deepest questions about human life can be addressed by fusing philosophical thinking with empirical research in prisons. Prisoners talk with depth and insight about what it is to feel human, what matters most in human experience, and the importance of the ‘vibrations of fellow feeling’.

A Case For Unforgiveness As A Legitimate Moral Response To Historical Wrongs, Hollman Lozano

Journal of Educational Controversy

Abstract:

The emergence of forgiveness as the preferred mechanism through which historical wrongs are addressed within reconciliation discourses has meant that for the people who cannot forgive or will not forgive, there are no alternatives other than insisting on forgiveness until it hopefully one day arrives. As such, the point of unforgiveness is to constitute an agentic space where the people who cannot forgive can articulate their stance in ways that not only allow them to articulate their resistance to the injunction to forgive, but also constitute alternative spaces whereby they can articulate their stance in inclusive ways. If we …

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …