Moral sight and ethical praxis in the prison classroom

Abstract

The deployment of moral sight (a sensitivity towards the humanity of all people) and ethical praxis (taking account of important matters for learners) enhanced learners’ sense of dignity in a prison classroom comprising university students and men serving long prison sentences. This in turn enhanced the trustworthiness of the space, helped learners benefit from interaction and prevented moral blindness among prison educators. Three domains of ethical praxis for enhancing moral sight among educators are discussed: person-centred praxis; situational praxis; and pedagogical praxis. The article grounds the discussion using empirical data from participant reflections to uncover what mattered to them in creating a trustworthy learning space. Recognising the human dignity of learners, and engaging in practices that enhance this dignity and protect associated rights, was important for both groups of students. Deploying ethical praxis enabled participants to feel ‘seen’ in the classroom, in turn enhancing their sense of belonging and comfort in the space. For the prison-based students, having their contributions heard, recognised and valued was a rare experience in the context of serving a life sentence. For university students, the space provided a new and refreshing pedagogical experience, away from the institutionalised logics and constraints of the contemporary university. Relatedly, teacher-facilitators involved reported this to be their most enjoyable higher education teaching experience. There are wider implications for how higher education institutions ‘see’ the people they work with. The article argues for prioritising the human activity of learning over the institutionalisation of education processes, to create more trustworthy learning spaces.

Introduction

Human dignity and rights in prison

The titular classroom refers to a space inside a prison for adult men sentenced to life imprisonment (HMP Lifer). ¹ This space was shared between a group of prison students, university students and a pair of lecturer-facilitators for the duration of an 8-week course designed to facilitate educational dialogue and the opportunity to learn from each other.

Despite a long cross-cultural history, ² considerations of human dignity have tended to be absent from discussions of carceral contexts until relatively recently (Ugelvik, 2014). This is a significant omission because the loss of dignity is inherent to all societal punishments imposed on individuals, especially imprisonment and its associated pains and deprivations (Crewe, 2011; Snacken, 2021). Imprisonment involves treatment designed to make people feel inferior, lessened or lowered in status (Whitman, 2003), impacting on dignity.

Discussions about dignity attained a higher profile in the post Second World War period, with a series of international treaties seeking to protect it. Human rights have also been invoked to protect prisoners’ dignity (Snacken, 2021). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26), for example, states ‘Everyone has the right to education’, implying that the right to education applies to everyone, including people in prison (cited by Vorhaus, 2014). Similarly, article two of the first protocol of The Human Rights Act, which sets out the fundamental rights and freedoms for people in the United Kingdom are entitled to, states that ‘no person shall be denied a right to an education’ (Human Rights Act, 1998, Part II Article 2).

Vorhaus (2014) considers three grounds for conceiving of prisoners’ rights to education as a human right: human dignity, respect for persons, and citizenship. By contrast, life imprisonment has been described by people subject to it as a punishment more severe than the death penalty. It has been compared to death itself, terminal illness, torture and to a pain that grows over the years (Testoni et al., 2020), a form of social death (Sowle, 1993). The challenges to protecting, or enhancing, the dignity of people sentenced to imprisonment, particularly those detained for long periods, are thus profound (Crewe, 2011). Snacken identifies two fundamental challenges to protecting prisoners’ dignity and human rights: the role of degradation as an element of punishment, and the power relations and extreme dependency of prisoners in a total institution (Snacken, 2021: 303).

The language of education and learning tends to be aspirational and hopeful. With regard to contexts of incarceration, the Council of Europe is clear that education has wider purposes than preventing recidivism or finding employment, important though these are in practical terms. It sets out three ‘justifications’ for education in prison (Council of Europe, 1989; Warner, 2018: 15). First, to limit the damage done to men and women by imprisonment; to help them cope with the degradation and survive the experience. Second, since a high proportion of people in prison have had limited, disrupted or negative past educational experiences, they are now entitled to support to address their educational disadvantage. Third, to support the process of moving away from crime. These considerations inform the exploration, and analysis, of ethical pedagogical praxis in the prison classroom.

Moral sight

Moral sight refers to an individual’s consciousness of another person’s humanity, fundamentally ‘. . . valuing the personhood of people’ (Velleman, 2013: 72). More broadly, Murdoch has articulated the importance of ‘moral vision’; that morality is not just about our actions and choices, but how we see the world in a broader sense (Cooper and Lawson-Frost, 2021). Murdoch (1970) argues that the more one sees other people as fully real, with thoughts and wishes and their own equally valid way of seeing things, the harder it is to treat them inconsiderately or exploitatively.

When we fail to see other people properly, ignore them, and do not try to imagine what things are like for them, Murdoch argues it becomes easy to be thoughtless and cruel, to treat them as unimportant, or like objects. In such circumstances human rights are at stake. Relatedly, Bauman and Donskis (2013) have closely considered the phenomenon of moral blindness; the failure to see the humanity of another person. They argue this has been a growing problem in societies developed under capitalist ideologies, a phase of societal development they refer to as ‘liquid modernity’. Moral blindness arises from technologies of knowing employed by the powerful in such societies. This article applies this concept more specifically to professionals working in prison and the requirement for them to be able to ‘see’ prison students as humans who can learn and contribute to the learning of others.

The moral blindness of forensic psychologists working in prisons has been distinguished from ethical blindness here (Warr, 2020b). Ethical blindness here refers to an insensitivity in how forensic psychology praxis impacts on the lives of people serving long sentences, such as their prospects for release and the associated impact on their identities, sense of self and mental health. This distinction between moral and ethical blindness is helpful owing to the ‘unruly application’ of morality and ethics in scholarly literature (Keane, 2016: 21). Keane notes that these terms are often used interchangeably, in contrasting ways, or treated as requiring no definition at all. Practitioners who are ethically blind are thus those who fail to perceive the full weight of the consequences of their actions due to the limited, and/or limiting, professional lens through which they understand and conduct their professional practice (Ward and Syversen, 2009).

There are two sets of logics, or institutional rationales, to consider here which impact on the ways in which staff working within them come to see the people they are serving. First, the bureaucratic logics of prison; second, the bureaucratic logics of higher education institutions. Prison is a key part of the criminal justice apparatus that serves to convert people into ‘offenders’ with associated ‘risk profiles’ encapsulating a risk of re-offending and associated harm. The way this operates has been well explored in the criminological literature (Feeley and Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001; Sparks, 2001). Armstrong (2020) has explained how bureaucratic logics are part of the prison and the violence that characterises it. Second, the bureaucratic managerialist logics that have shaped our contemporary ‘hopeless’, ‘anti-human’ universities in England that put profit and surplus before people (Hall, 2020). Within systems underpinned by such logics, university students become reduced to units of educational achievement, used to reflect or embellish an institution’s reputation.

This partly explains issues such as grade inflation (Bachan, 2017), the importance of ‘graduate outcomes’ and the proliferation of student ‘success story’ narratives in recent years. One of the paradoxes is that systems underpinned by these logics, despite being imposed in an era characterised by student diversity and difference, have brought about institutional and governmental standardisation. As Blackmore observes ‘The external pressures of the performative state and university have pushed the quality movement towards accountability and assurance, rather than improvement’ (Blackmore, 2009: 869). Both prisoners and university students can easily become units of institutional utility that staff become morally and ethically blind to. There are thus some similarities between these logics which have developed in the two different institutions in recent decades.

Education in prison

MacCormick’s (1931) book on adult education for prisoners in the United States marked a significant development in the field. Based on nationwide research, it proposed a philosophical approach that sees people in prison as needing access to education, rather than criminals in need of reform. ³ The latter constitutes a deficit approach (Warner, 2007). By contrast, an educational perspective argues for providing each person with opportunities to participate in academic, vocational, health, cultural and social education. In the recent period, there has been something of a re-emergence of interest in scholarship and policymaking on education in prison in the United States, and internationally too (Behan, 2021; Biao, 2017).

In England and Wales, the location for this research, contemporary education in prisons is seen by government as functioning primarily as a component of offender rehabilitation (Flynn and Higdon, 2022; Nichols, 2021). Officially, it is asserted that education in prison should achieve rehabilitative outcomes; a review commissioned by the Ministry of Justice review stated: ‘education in prison . . . is one of the pillars of effective rehabilitation’ (Coates, 2016: 3). Five years on, and the role of education had shifted to become more explicitly about facilitating access to employment in the official discourse: ‘Improving education is crucial to improving the employment rate of prison leavers’ (Ministry of Justice, 2021: 37).

By contrast, the Council of Europe’s (1990) landmark Education in Prison report articulates an ambition to develop ‘the whole person’ (Costelloe and Warner, 2014). This emanates from the recognition that prison damages people (Warner, 2007, 2018), and that education has the potential to limit that damage. Within 15 years of Education in Prison, its fundamental assertion was being undermined, particularly in the United Kingdom. In 2005, contrasting policy statements were produced by two different governments in relation to education in prison (Costelloe and Warner, 2014: 176). The first, from Norway, emphasises a person’s citizenship, with associated rights to education. The second, from England and Wales, instead emphasises the use of education as a means of reducing an ‘offender’s’ (re)offending, a far narrower perspective. These contrasting approaches affect the nature of the educational opportunities and spaces that can be sustainably produced in practice. If risk, punishment and security become the overriding concerns, ‘. . . then caring, supporting, nurturing, encouraging and reintegrating become marginalised in practice, whatever the lip-service paid to these values’ (Langelid et al., 2021: 158).

Ethical pedagogical praxis

Canton (2017) notes that debates about criminal justice too readily set aside ethical concerns and instead focus on the way in which related processes can be made more effective in terms of reducing re-offending (e.g. Ministry of Justice, 2021). By contrast, prisoners subject to long sentences 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’ (Liebling, 2021). Ethical praxis here then refers to pedagogical practices which attempt to mitigate the inhumanity of an institution and the harms it brings about, to create a more humane, trustworthy learning space. It relates to teachers’ sensitivity to the impact of a context on learners, and the relations and interactions between various actors in a space.

Praxis here is primarily pedagogical, though there can be broader considerations too, sensitive to the context. The awareness and associated practices are built-up over time through discussion, listening, sensing and learning (accumulated labour, Bourdieu, 1986; Herrity et al., 2021). The later discussion of findings elucidates how we ⁴ worked to advance human dignity, deploying ethical pedagogical praxis to avoid moral blindness. It makes explicit the principles and praxis underpinning our work in the prison classroom, to make these more readily available for future purposeful action (Keane, 2016: 33). This resonates with contemporary phronetic approaches to social science (Flyvbjerg, 2012) in which a focus on praxis is understood as essential in generating the contextual, bottom-up data and insights needed in contemporary democratic societies. The discussion considers three complementary domains of ethical pedagogical praxis grounded in the reflections and feedback of participants and aggregated to produce these thematic domains. First, the person-centred, humanistic domain; second, the situational domain, and third, the pedagogical domain.

The sessions themselves were characterised by using an abstract question to help generate discussion based on a weekly reading (Little and Warr, 2023). For example, after the first introductory session, our subsequent sessions focused on questions such as What is knowledge? What is agnotology? How are prisons represented in media? What is narrative labour? How does racism affect the criminal justice system? What is white privilege? Why do we punish? Two of these sessions were designed after asking the group to choose the topic to focus on; they chose questions associated with rehabilitation, and racism and the criminal justice system. This approach grew from the realisation that there was little purpose in delivering a fully pre-determined, fixed curriculum, recognising the potential for students to play a role in producing the experience (Galloway, 2021; Neary et al., 2014; Neary and Winn, 2009).

Methods

There are four main sources of data for recording and representing the pedagogical context. First, discussions reflecting on each session. Second, written reflective pieces by the prison and university student participants submitted voluntarily towards the end of the course. Third, reflective feedback sheets completed by nearly all participants at the end of the course. Fourth, semi-structured interviews ⁵ with an overall total of 20 interviewees were undertaken approximately 2 months after the 8-week course ended, comprising 10 HMP Lifer students, ⁶ and 10 university students. Subsequent quotations from participants tend to be from the recorded interviews. If from reflective written pieces, this is indicated following the quotation.

Before beginning the study, ethical approval was gained from the university and permission to interview prison participants provided by the prison governor. All interview participants gave their consent for feedback and reflections to be included in subsequent publications. The methodology is an example of ‘participatory evaluative research’; as well as acting as a facilitator of the classroom context, I was a participant within it (Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995; Jarvis, 1999). The research is evaluative because as a researcher, I am in a position to frame, code and interpret the data that results (Cousins and Earl, 1992). I was a participant in dialogue, researching the context, and this places me in a unique position as a participatory evaluative researcher (Carlen, 2020; Flyvbjerg et al., 2012). The researcher thus experiences the classroom as an active participant within it. This has benefits, such as requiring me to be embedded in the activity under investigation and becoming sensitised to the experience of those whose perspectives I sought to represent. This is a valuable means for developing empathy and research skills (Probst, 2016). There are challenges for this dual position; the facilitator role requires cognitive and emotional energy to both be part of a context and seeking to understand its operation from different perspectives. It requires a commitment to represent the essence of the contributions by participants faithfully.

Positionality (reflexivity)

Collaboratively producing and facilitating this learning space in prison became the most rewarding experience of my teaching career to date. By this stage, I had a range of experiences of teaching and training in higher education and professional spheres. My unique position as a facilitator-researcher helped ‘tune in’ to the ‘emotional ecology’ (Zembylas, 2007) of the classroom as a distinct ‘emotional zone’ (Crewe et al., 2013), offering a lens through which I could interpret discussion among the group. Following each session, we discussed our reflections on the ‘sensory feel’ (Herrity et al., 2021) of the classroom, in relation to the quality and quantity of discussion, the strength of the responses elicited and the emotional (dis)comfort of participants. A number of personal characteristics undoubtedly influence my perspectives on prison life, including my age, gender, social class, ethnicity and time spent in and around prisons over a period of 25 years, as well as how people respond to these characteristics. The habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) of the prison educator was, to some extent, unfamiliar to me. However, I had prior experience of developing a course in the same prison, and other courses in a nearby ‘resettlement’ prison.

One of the most important aspects to preparatory work as a teacher-facilitator in prison was appreciating the particular context. This developed over a period of many years beginning with research in a Young Offenders Institution in the late 1990s. Shortly afterwards I participated in debates with prisoners as part of an ad hoc programme of connection between the university of my postgraduate study and HMP Lifer. University colleagues who worked with me to co-facilitate this classroom space also brought with them their own experiences of prison. Understanding the prison world was built over years through an iterative process of reading, research, practical experience and immersion in the field of prison reform organisations, including attendance at many events on prison-related topics.

On being invited into the prison by the Governor, I risked becoming part of that institutional infrastructure, or being seen to be part of it, particularly by prison students. As Sim (1990) argues, professional presence in institutions is a direct consequence of a burgeoning disciplinary infrastructure. As well as individualising the person in prison, Sim notes the risk of homogenising them into a single narrow ‘offender’ category, denying the reality of individual experiences. I was determined not to replicate, nor fall into, this way of working. My awareness of it, and the focus on creating a learning space, involving students from beyond the prison walls and culture, helped to enhance my own ‘sight’, reducing the likelihood of moral blindness, mitigating some of these risks.

Ethical considerations

There are important ethical considerations when undertaking work of this nature. Attendance was voluntary for students. Likewise, all participants were invited to give signed consent before engaging in recorded interviews. One prison learner did not consent to interview and it did not proceed, despite a peer offering to accompany them for moral support. While disappointing from a research perspective, the refusal demonstrated the voluntary nature of participation; there were no consequences for non-participation. Obtaining true informed consent from people in prison can be challenging, given the actual, and presumed, power imbalances (Wener, 2007). It is also essential for researchers not to manipulate or extend conditions that may be harmful (Fisher and Anushko, 2008). Interviewees were not offered a reward or incentive for participation and thus non-participation was not associated with reward withdrawal. This helped distance the pedagogy and the associated research from systems of reward and punishment, the omnipotent, omnipresent disciplinary apparatus of the prison institution (Drake, 2012; Warr, 2020b).

Data analysis

A hybrid narrative-thematic form of analysis was applied to the data generated by the reflections and feedback. Thematic analysis is ‘a method for identifying, analysing, and reporting patterns (themes) within data’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 6). Narrative analysis refers to the analysis of the stories that people tell about their lives and their experiences (Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016). Narrative is one of the most frequently occurring and ubiquitous forms of discourse (Cortazzi, 1994), helping individuals to make sense of their own lives and explain them to others. Significantly, we are not just passive consumers of stories; we interact with them and they act on us (Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016). Indeed, the work discussed here is underpinned by the realisation that these are ‘. . . shaped mostly by interpersonal encounters, or our moral environment’ (Liebling, 2021: 110).

Discussion of findings

Three complementary domains of ethical pedagogical praxis were found to produce a trustworthy, comfortable classroom space in which participants were morally and ethically ‘seen’. These domains aggregate elements of praxis identified by student participants and teacher-facilitators as important. First, the person-centred, humanistic domain comprising inclusive practices that foster a sense of ease, comfort and belonging to aid openness and connection between people in the space. Second, the situational domain, including an appreciation of the long-term impact of imprisonment for prison students, the associated pains and local contextual pressures in HMP Lifer. In relation to university students, it recognises the spatial transition from campus to prison. Third, the pedagogical domain, comprising approaches to level the field between learners, create a more equitable space, encourage active listening and enhance the ‘pedagogical capital’ of learners (Little and Warr, 2022). What follows is a necessarily selective discussion of illustrative examples of praxis that provide support for the importance of appreciating the essence of what really matters to learners in producing a trustworthy prison classroom space.

Humanistic, person-centred domain

One of the most common sentiments expressed by interviewees was how ‘at ease’ they felt in the classroom, despite expectations:

. . . there was none of this trying to force it down a specific road that could have been used, which put me at ease. It put me at ease very quickly. . . (Duncan, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

. . . my nerves quickly disappeared as we all introduced ourselves and realised the men are just normal people . . . Interestingly . . . they too were nervous meeting us. (Mina, De Montfort University (DMU) student, 2019)

The feeling that the ‘agenda’ was clear, that we were there to do what we said, helped put students at ease. Together with the pedagogical approach, this created an inclusive dialogic space that encouraged contributions. There were at least three important aspects in creating this student-friendly dialogic space. First, seeing all people in the space as humans with the capacity to learn; not, for example, as generic ‘offenders’. Second, seeing all learners as individuals with a variety of potential interests, needs, and prior (educational) experiences rather than homogeneous representatives of their institution. Third, seeing all learners as people with something of worth to contribute. This includes the potential for contributing to the learning of others in the space. First then, seeing the prison students primarily as human learners, not ‘offenders’, was a fundamental part of setting the tone in the classroom. Prison students were particularly sensitive to this:

. . . you know when people just talk to you as normal and treat you like a normal human being. It gives you that respect, self-respect as well, that someone is respecting you. When you are in prison you don’t get that; no one cares about you . . . So it’s just good to be valued. (Laeon, HMP Lifer, 2019)

‘. . . It was refreshing to be a Student rather than a Prisoner. The use of the term prisoner is degrading, the word is pejorative making one feel second-rate and disadvantaged. This is not a sobriquet or term of endearment, it is a label and part of the process of subjugation inflicted under the guise of rehabilitation and to be able to cast that off for the duration of our sessions was not only liberating but exhilarating, reminding me that there is life beyond the walls of [the prison]’. (MC, HMP Lifer student written reflection)

Being treated as human, instead of a ‘second class citizen’ or ‘animal’ (common expressions about prison treatment) was appreciated by the prison students. University students also picked up on the nature of the interaction and described taking their cue from teacher-facilitators:

. . . it was important for us to introduce ourselves to them and for them to feel comfortable around us. But as well, it was quite quick how they started bantering with you . . . and it was nice that they felt like you were friends, in a way. (Alanis, DMU student, 2019)

. . . after the first two weeks I was like I can’t believe how much I enjoy it, I am really getting to know these people; it’s nice to see them as students not as prisoners. (Lizzy, DMU student, 2019)

Second, seeing and treating all learners in the space as individuals with their own perspectives and experiences to draw on helped convey that prior knowledge and understanding could be useful and valid in classroom discussions. Appreciating contributions, rather than dismissing them as insufficiently ‘academic’, encouraged speakers to expand on their point. Reflections provided in interviews strongly suggested it had the desired effect, with Duncan highlighting the significance of having the ‘. . . chance to speak out and be honest and be ourselves’ (HMP Lifer student, 2019). This also had an effect on other learners taking on the role of ‘active listeners’ (Rogers, 1969):

. . . it makes you be more, I don’t know if it’s more liberal, but more understanding of how people can take on views that you view as wrong, if that makes sense. (James, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

This helped advance the sense that human dignity was important in the space, increasing the likelihood that participants would feel morally and ethically ‘seen’. There is a connection here with respecting people’s human rights. As Muñoz (2009) argues, human dignity, core to human rights, implies a respect for the individual, in their actuality and their potential. Furthermore, the exchange of ideas and knowledge is a fundamental human activity, and contrasts with the social and civic death that occurs when humans are excluded and isolated absolutely from society (Guenther, 2013). This is consistent with the idea that humans become who we are through our interactions with others (Brooks, 2011).

Third, participants began to feel ‘worth’ something because they were treated as someone worth listening to. On being asked what it meant to have the opportunity to be able to ‘speak out . . .’, Duncan, a white student in his 40s in prison for around eight years explained:

You don’t know how much that’s worth in prison. You don’t get a voice in prison, you don’t get a chance to speak your mind. You do behind your door to your mates but you don’t feel like a person and doing a course like that, you felt that you had an opinion. You felt you could speak. (Duncan, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

A younger, Black student, inside for a similar amount of time, expressed similar sentiments on how the experience alleviated feelings of worthlessness brought about by the institutional experience and the felt absence of care for one’s thoughts, opinions, rights or humanity:

. . . just you lot doing the course itself shows that people actually care . . . In jail you get lost, you just feel like no-one really . . . We’re locked up and no-one gives a shit . . . We’re still the same, we’re still part of society. That gets lost, especially when you’re doing a long time, you become like a jailhead . . . you become institutionalised . . . So that was experience for me that yo, I can still interact with normal people and not just people in jail, I can still communicate, talk. Every single person, any of the prisoners I’ve spoken to they’ve said the same thing . . . (Oz, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

. . . you’d have to be in prison to understand how a little thing makes a big difference. It’s not the big things, you can do something little like that but it will make such an impact on someone. You will give them hope for the next five, six years to get through it. (Oz, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

When a contribution is treated as worth listening to, this transmits to the speaker, and to the group more widely. This encouraged contributions from people who had hitherto been reluctant. The approach communicated something of the dignity and mutual respect towards each other in the space, and was recognised in feedback:

So the class itself was perfect, there was nothing wrong . . . you dealt with us properly and so you felt respected and you felt like a normal student, you didn’t feel like a prisoner. (Dwight, HMP Lifer, 2018)

I do not think I anticipated that I would relax into the session as quickly as I did. I really enjoyed the starter activity of being in a pair (one prison student with one university student) and having to introduce your pair to the group. (Elisa, DMU student, 2019)

The idea of feeling seen, and having a chance to be heard, was particularly powerful for the prison students, and derived from interaction with university students. The interactive, person-centred approach helped reduce anxieties and nerves that built-up prior to the first session, and became empowering. The impact of seeing and treating prison students as humans with the capacity to learn, and contribute to the learning of others, should not be underestimated. As Mason explains,

You talked to us, you weren’t talking to us like we were second class citizens, you talked to us normal like we were human beings and I appreciated that a hell of a lot. That helped me a lot in my own real self. (HMP Lifer student, 2019)

It is not commonly made explicit in academic literature, but treating people in prison as human had a considerable impact on the experience of the classroom. In writing about his experience of education and learning during a long prison sentence, Warr recalls how a teacher impacted on his self-esteem and sense of self-worth as a learner:

Much of what you experience as an inmate is negative and that affects your self-image; the longer the exposure to that negativity, the more your self-image is affected. You start to feel as if you are a person of very little worth. Teacher S had the ability to make you feel as if you were a person of worth again. In his classes you never felt like a ‘con’ because that was not the way he treated you or saw you. (Warr, 2008: 20–21)

Some of the men in HMP Lifer also recalled a former prison teacher fondly. This teacher was mentioned on several occasions by different people as a source of information and conversation that inspired their passion for learning. The significance of this in creating a comfortable, humane space, in which people can begin to express something of themselves, cannot be overstated. It is difficult for non-prisoners to understand the profound nature of long-term detention on every aspect of an individual’s being, their limited choices and their sense of who they are. This fundamentally important ‘situational’ aspect needs to be appreciated before engaging with the prison classroom.

Situational domain

There can be many situational challenges to curating a trustworthy prison classroom. Identified here are two found to be important for the development of ethical pedagogical praxis: first, mitigating prisoners’ inherent wariness of the power of the written word (or scriptural dominance) in a ‘total’ institution (Goffman, 1961); second, mitigating the effects of prisoners’ often poor prior experiences of formal education to create a relatively informal discursive space in which learners are willing and able to share their thinking. However, this alternative experience taking place beyond the normal boundaries of their educational institution was also experienced as pedagogically formative for the university students. This was not an initial focus of the work, but it became more important to consider how this was such a different pedagogical experience to being taught on campus.

Prisoners’ diffidence and the scriptural dominance in prison

The logics of imprisonment have the effect of converting individuals subject to it into units of risk and dangerousness, with associated profiles to track their supposed journey to ‘rehabilitation’ (Warr, 2020a). These profiles comprise a written record, an official narrative built up over time through interactions between prisoners and staff, typically prison psychologists and officers working on the wings (Warr, 2020b). A prisoner’s humanity becomes occluded by the institutional processes that produce a record of decontextualised examples of things said and done, or interpreted to have been said and done. This has a chilling effect on prisoners’ self-expression and general conversation, particularly with authority figures or people with institutionalised power:

when you are in the prison . . . you are not free to talk. And you believe that every time you talk things are always getting written down and taken out of the context of what you meant by them. Like an officer could just write something, you are talking to them about something else and the way they will perceive it is what they will write which is completely different; opposite to what you meant or what you want to talk about. So you are always going to not want to get too involved with them, do you understand? Because you don’t want no trouble . . . you keep everything basic . . . (Laeon, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

A form of self-censorship develops, limiting the interactions prisoners feel willing and able to enter into as themselves. Over time, this can even lead to confusion about who they are, who they are ‘supposed’ to be. This narrative confusion is particularly pronounced for Black and brown men required to perform extra tasks of ‘narrative labour’ (Warr, 2020a) in order to convince (white) authority figures of their supposed rehabilitation (Warr, 2023). The prison, and the operation of its disciplinary systems thus engender a state of diffidence, which influences the nature of interactions. Diffidence here refers to a state of ‘. . . generalised insecurity and a consumptive wariness’ that exists between those with whom one is compelled to co-exist (Hobbes, cited by Crewe et al., 2013: 58). Prisons are places of hostility, competition for limited resources, dynamic matrices of power, feelings of mistrust, interpersonal suspicion, psycho-panoptic surveillance and, therefore, justified paranoia. Open, honest dialogue becomes the exception; something to be cherished. Diffidence is the norm; fostered and reproduced in the dank prison. It shapes one’s interactions with the world, and one’s place in it, creating a distance from the ‘normality’ that exists, or imagined to exist, beyond the stolid walls. Dwight, a creative, sociable Black man in his 30s, explained the impact of feeling released from his own state of diffidence:

. . . after being in jail for so long you start to worry how the people outside, normal people in the public, how they will take to you . . . I wonder how I would do in a work setting or even like gaining new friends or even girlfriends, anything, because they might think – they might hear – of what you have done and then might shy away from you or . . . be a bit negative. So, it was nice to know that people can see that you are in prison for a serious crime and they can still basically talk to you normally. (Dwight, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

Bringing in students from the outside, who were not part of the institution and its disciplinary apparatus, was important in creating a novel space for interaction to mitigate against diffidence. Yet it also brought with it a potential threat of exposing prison students to feelings of pedagogic discomfort such as ‘being stupid’, not ‘keeping up’ or not ‘holding their own’ in discussions and debates (Dave, written reflection, HMP Lifer student, 2019). Laeon, an articulate youthful Black man in his 40s, a strong social connector for the group, explained further:

So prison is like a whole new country, it’s like you have travelled away . . . When someone from the outside comes it’s like you are two different worlds so you think that you know a lot or you think ‘yeah, I am on point’ or ‘I know this, I know this’ I am up-to-date. I listen to the radio and the TV, but it’s just a false sense of knowledge a lot of the times you have. But when you talk to people that are in the know you get the real perspective of things, how it really is outside, what has been happening . . . the beauty is it broadens your own horizons. (Laeon, HMP Lifer student interview, 2019)

Having one’s mind opened, or horizons broadened, were common metaphoric deployments in interviews and feedback. The opportunity to participate in a ‘slice of normality’ from beyond the prison walls in which discussions could be entered into without being polluted by the past was valued greatly. Furthermore, the absence of written consequences for oral utterances helped overcome prisoners’ diffidence in the space. In essence, here was an opportunity to be ‘educationally seen’ by fellow humans who have no role in controlling or managing prison affairs. Rhys, a white man in his 20s, describes how important this new opportunity was for him, contrasting it with prior frustrations of feeling pedagogically ignored:

. . . I never went to university, that’s where my education stops. So, everything I wanted to do in prison . . . its been quite hard to get in . . . I have been discouraged over time because whenever I have been at a prison I have put the forms in and I have then got moved and then straight away you are back to square one. And then you do that again a second time and . . . I thought ‘I am not doing it again’ kind of attitude. Because it seems so much time and effort you are putting in and you weren’t getting anywhere with. That was the way I was discouraged. (Rhys, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

Instead of being treated as a human with educational abilities and interests that matter, prison students felt ignored by an uninterested system. Worse still, Dwight had come to see the education department, or his absence from it, as actively working against his chances of being rehabilitated, or being officially seen to be rehabilitated:

I just feel like sometimes if you can’t go to education they will make comments in your file . . . I have just had too many bad experiences with them and its over petty things. Like I can’t come this time because I have got to go gym or do something else, and then because I am not in education. Because I didn’t put that priority, put that first, then there were negative comments in my file. It’s just like ‘come on’, you know what I mean? So some of the teachers are actually really good but it’s not down to them it’s just the way the system is structured . . . (Dwight, HMP Lifer student)

His written reflection expressed similar sentiments, that ‘. . . the pedagogy of the Education department is very systematic and robotic’ with ‘written warnings and threats of being kicked out the class’ if ‘you don’t fall in line’. In stark contrast, ‘. . . the whole vibe . . .’ of the course ‘. . . kept me positive . . . it gave me something to look forward to, it really did’. Dwight recalled feeling infantilised by the classroom environment, such as being expected to ask to go to the toilet by raising one’s hand, and the narrowness of the curriculum. Arday et al. (2021) consider the impact of narrow, restrictive curricula, particularly on ethnically minoritised students in the way they omit diverse histories of multi-cultural knowledge canons and privilege some ways of knowing over others. In his writing, Dwight reflected on discovering the work of Paolo Freire, which we had discussed in a session. He quickly identified that he had been subject to the ‘banking’ method of education for many years (Freire, 1996), indicating a preference for this new, more liberating, approach to learning.

Dwight was not alone in articulating such sentiments. Prior to the course starting, I observed a discussion between a senior staff member and a small group of Black prisoners. The meeting was initiated to find out more about why the men were so reluctant to attend education classes. The discussion was wide-ranging and I was not able to record it, but at its heart were a series of inter-related issues with how the men felt ignored, belittled and stigmatised by a system that did not understand them, their life stories or prior negative experiences of formal education. The field of critical pedagogy, from Freire onwards, has for many years called for teachers and students to abandon a banking approach to education and move towards one that is less institutionalised, more dialogic and emancipatory, particularly with the most oppressed in society (Kilgore, 2011; Kirylo et al., 2010).

I should clarify that some staff in HMP Lifer were actively trying to ameliorate the situation, in difficult circumstances. As people working in the prison as outsiders, we were less affected by such institutional problems. As Kirchhofer and Richter (2012) have noted, teachers working within the prison tend not to be so fortunate, frequently caught between the competing logics of the prison institution. Pedagogical principles and the aims of imprisonment are inherently contradictory. Pedagogical techniques are usually intended and deployed to empower and liberate individuals (e.g. Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1994) while prisons contain technologies, techniques and processes to confine, dehumanise and punish (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982; Mathiesen, 2005). Similarly, Behan, writing on the Irish prison education context, notes the significance of teaching provided by those from outside the prison system: ‘The use of non-prison staff contributes to the creation of a different atmosphere and culture . . . Prison teachers lack the disciplinary rationale of prison officers or the correctional goals of programme staff’ (Behan, 2014: 24). Having some distance from the prison is helpful in that it allows staff to also be more distanced from systems of punishment, and being seen to be distant. It can also help with creating education provision that more closely resembles provision beyond the prison walls, an important foundational principle in Nordic systems of education in prison (Langelid et al., 2021).

Consequences of poor prior educational experiences

It has long been recognised that people serving prison sentences are very much more likely than the rest of the population to have had disrupted, or poor, experiences of formal education earlier in life (Coates, 2016; Council of Europe, 1989; House of Commons Education Select Committee, 2022). One way of mitigating such effects is to offer meaningful and appropriate learning opportunities later in life. For example, men who participated in adult education tended to see their lives as more ‘full’, worthwhile, rich and interesting than those who did not (Tuijnman, 1989, cited by Jarvis, 2004: 55). Consistently, some prison students said the course experience had encouraged them to enhance their approach to study:

I’m more . . . critical of when I’m reading now. Because at the end of the day it’s an opinion, it’s a theory of someone being put forward, it’s not gospel in that sense. So it’s open to criticism, it’s open to interpretation, it’s open for discussion, and you balance it with other opinions, other things. So you don’t take it for granted what you’re reading, you analyse it more . . . (Diaz, HMP Lifer student, 2019)

Or seriously consider further study:

. . . well the only thing it makes me want to do is continue my education . . . it makes me know I can speak to students and at a level where I can do whatever they are doing. (Mason, HMP Lifer student)

. . . it made me really question a lot of things and it made me, having sat there and being able to hold a proper discussion the whole morning, a discussion with you guys, it made me realise that I do have the skills and the ability to do this sort of thing. (Duncan, HMP Lifer student)

Similarly, Dwight considered that the course ‘refuelled my desire to learn’ (written reflection). The novelty of the experience for prison students was clear, and to some extent, unsurprising given what we know about the prison environment. The effect on the university students was though rather less expected. They reported experiencing the prison classroom as very different to on-campus teaching:

I felt so comfortable, I felt like I could speak to anyone . . . It was nice as well that even if someone thought you were wrong, they’d argue against you, and you’d just have like a free-flowing conversation and other people would join in. It was a completely different experience from being in a lecture room. Like it’s different when we do seminars because we’re in smaller groups and people will challenge you. But in a lecture, you can’t really sit there and have that argument . . . [instead] it . . . just flowed and you felt comfortable in the situation. (Alanis, DMU student, 2019)

The relative informality of the learning space contrasted considerably with the students’ general experience of campus where a sense of pedagogical comfort and belonging was often absent:

I know some people on the course, but whenever I come lectures, most of the people I know are never there . . . it’s just awkward sometimes to actually talk. And even in seminars, when you’ve been asked a question, and there’d be silence for so long, you don’t even bother saying anything. (Toni, DMU student, 2019)

The prison classroom was recognised by students as a beneficial learning space, a place where interactions with fellow humans could generate new insights, different understandings and fresh perspectives in relation to a familiar subject.

It seems like everyone involved has had a positive experience and it has helped them in a way, whether that’s just to see that they’re not as different as they think they are, or they’re not as alienated as they think they are . . . (Misha, DMU student, 2019)

Importantly, the space was co-produced with the students, not imposed upon them, and they were not subject to formal assessment. In drawing on research from the Irish prison context, Warner (2018) points to O’Donnell’s Unfamiliar Voices report which details the effectiveness of non-accredited courses for many long-term prisoner participants.

Pedagogical domain

Multiple elements combined to create ethical praxis in the pedagogical domain. Here, three illustrative examples are identified: First, levelling the field to create a more equitable learning space for participants. For example, using abstract questions and discussion opened the dialogic space, allowed equitable participation among the different students, encouraging active listening and non-judgemental responses, and enabled the production of pedagogical capital. This is explored in more detail elsewhere (Little and Warr, 2022) and will not be duplicated here. Second, recognising that producing and sharing knowledge is a fundamental human activity. Third, facilitating a context in which students can ‘see’ and recognise themselves, each other and teaching staff. These two elements will be discussed together, particularly with reference to the university students.

A reflection by university students on the course was that it had contributed to knowledge about themselves as individuals, and their confidence:

I have learnt a lot about myself. I knew I was a fairly open-minded person and pretty confident. However, this experience has led me to understand the importance of being open minded and how important confidence is. (Mia, DMU student, 2019)

Do you know what I think a big benefit would be? Confidence . . . if I was in a lecture I wouldn’t put my hand up whereas there, with a select few, I was more likely to get involved. (Marley, DMU student, 2019)

Mia went on to describe how her new-found confidence had expressed itself in relation to an assessed presentation at university, the type of task she previously expected to perform poorly in:

. . . I was fine . . . which completely shocked me. I’ve never been like that before . . . normally I stand there and I stutter and I forget what I’m saying, but it just flowed. And I feel like it massively impacted how I spoke in front of people. (Mia, DMU student, 2019)

Alanis reported a similar experience, explaining the difference made to her by a different learning context and pedagogical approach. The prison classroom encouraged her to contribute to group discussion in a way that would have been unimaginable to her in a lecture theatre or large seminar group: ⁷

. . . university is so daunting and you’re in such big groups, you don’t feel as comfortable . . . it [the prison classroom] put you in a different environment, where you had to speak or you wouldn’t get your opinion across. It made you feel more confident because you know you had to push yourself to speak . . . We weren’t forced to speak – I think it just, it was the fact that it was topics that we were interested in as well. That you just felt like you wanted to say something and it just changed how you felt. (Alanis, DMU student, 2019)

The classroom space enabled human interaction and exchanges of information that could not be easily facilitated in the large lecture theatre environments on campus in which people are ‘too afraid to let their opinion out’ for fear of ‘judgement’ (Misha, DMU student, 2019) or when there is ‘such a big number of us’ (Alanis, DMU student, 2019). A strikingly similar observation is made by King et al. (2019) in their article about a prison-university partnership between Durham University and three English prisons. Their university students reported experiencing the prison classroom as safer, and less threatening, than their regular university classrooms ‘. . . away from the pressurised and competitive nature of an elite academic seminar room’ (King, 2019: 75).

Relatedly, one reported benefit of the interactions that took place in our classroom, was the way in which they humanised the people involved, dissolving boundaries that serve to restrict empathy or understanding:

When I speak to people, I now notice I am more understanding, and I listen a lot more, I know this is from the course, I just do not know when it triggered it – but I am glad it did. (Mia, DMU student, 2019)

The informality of the space helped with this:

I liked that it was quite informal. Like even though we were learning together, there was a lot of time where we just got to sit and talk and like discuss things and I feel like you learn better, I do anyway, by talking to someone about something than just doing the readings or just listening to someone talk at me. I liked that as well because you realise that the people you’re learning with, they’re not actually that much different than you . . . it kind of highlighted it being in there. (Misha, DMU student, 2019)

This facilitated a sense of comfort in which the students were willing to engage in exchanging information and perspectives, at an appropriate construal distance, that allowed them to control the level of personal disclosure (Little and Warr, 2022; Trope and Liberman, 2010):

I think our course is quite cliquey. There are these groups of people . . . you sit with. The first group you sit with from your first year is where you stay. And I guess it is because it’s not a very social environment sitting facing each other’s backs. So, to actually get to know people, I think the way it was set up in the prison where we were in that horseshoe shape really helped everything because you are actually looking at people. Whereas in lecture halls you are looking the back of their heads so there is no social interaction . . . (Lizzy, DMU student, 2019)

This also had the effect of enabling university students to see their lecturers even as ‘more human’. One of the university students commented, after the recorder was switched off, that a benefit had been getting to know university lecturers as people. She contrasted the experience of speaking with us one-to-one or in small groups off campus, where she would get snippets of our personal lives interwoven with our discourse, with the more distant professional relationship when stood alone presenting to hundreds of students. University students also reported changing where they sat on returning to their lecture theatres, reflecting their new social bonds.

This connects with the first domain of praxis, facilitating a person-centred pedagogy that recognises the uniqueness of the context and invites the group to work towards learning from each other in a way that recognises shared humanity. This is consistent with the pedagogical ethos of hooks (1994), who argued that ‘the classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility . . . [where] we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand . . . an openness’ (p. 207). It also aligns with the principles of care ethics. Care ethics argues for practice shaped not by rules and processes, but by people and their circumstances in all their diversity (Dominey and Canton, 2022). The approach also resonates with the discussion here of ethical praxis in the prison classroom in the way it recognises that equitable treatment requires an understanding of the context of the learning space. As with the pedagogical approach detailed here, context is intrinsic to care ethics praxis, which provides methods of, and standards for, accessing and applying this information (Coverdale, 2021). At the heart of both is a prioritisation of the dignity of the learner. This is fundamentally important in an institution where this is routinely and habitually undermined. The experience offered crucial relief from the regime, served as a catalyst for hope, offering possibilities for being recognised as learner, in the present and the future. Eight weeks is though relatively brief, and could not offer a full university degree experience that the prison students aspire to.

Conclusion

This article explains how forms of ethical pedagogical praxis were deployed to enhance moral sight in the prison classroom. Three domains of ethical praxis are identified, for the first time, based on the reflections and feedback of participant learners in the space: person-centred, situational and pedagogical. Illustrative examples of ethical praxis for each domain are provided based on feedback and reflections of participant learners. These demonstrate how participants felt ‘seen’ and thus encouraged to ‘see’ each other as individual learners with perspectives worth listening to. The classroom space became a human sensory experience recognised by participants as trustworthy, where they felt comfortable to share their perspectives, opinions and experiences with reduced fear of judgement, because they felt morally and ethically ‘seen’.

The prison students reported feeling recognised as learners in the space, as people treated with dignity, and enabled to participate in educational discussions in ways that were not generally available to them in the prison, even in the education department. They felt seen by people from the world outside, which helped them to see themselves as learners and contribute to the learning of others. Here, the learning process was effectively deinstitutionalised by the creation of a novel, creative informal dialogic space free from the more formalised, institutionalised educational offer in the prison. The space became socially distinct, a separate zone, away from the disciplinary infrastructure of the prison imbued as it is with diffidence, underpinned by the power associated with the omnipresent threat of being ‘written up’.

This novel classroom space served to mitigate some of the situational challenges to learning as a life sentenced prisoner. Bringing people and pedagogy from the outside alleviated some of the depth, weight and tightness of the prison experience in order to facilitate the creation of a comfortable classroom space. It alleviated, temporarily, the degradation associated with imprisonment; one of the fundamental challenges to prisoners’ dignity identified by Snacken (2021). The findings also find support for Munoz’s assertion that education in prison needs to be understood more ‘as an imperative in its own right’ (Muñoz, 2009: 2) rather than a simple tool for change with apparent, yet unquantifiable, impacts on recidivism, reintegration, and employment outcomes. The approach here counters institutional challenges to recognising prisoners’ ‘. . . humanity, their potential and their human rights’ (Muñoz, 2009: 7). This goes to the core of recognising the importance of learners’ dignity in the space.

Research on classroom spaces in prison has, so far, tended to focus on the effects of prison-based students. This is understandable, however the pedagogic approach discussed here also enables consideration of effects for university students. The learning space and process became deinstitutionalised for them too. In support of previous related research, on physically leaving campus they reported feeling more at ease and comfortable in this new classroom space and open to a different form of learning. Somewhat paradoxically, and yet understandably, this prison classroom allowed person-centred, ethical forms of pedagogical praxis in a way that is not possible teaching in large lecture theatres. Offering university students a different opportunity for reflecting on their subject was experienced as refreshing and empowering. They tended to report feeling differently about their subject, and their ambitions, with benefits for their confidence and their academic experience on returning to campus.

The effect of the pedagogical approach was not restricted to the students. As teacher-facilitators, we found this to be a more enjoyable pedagogical experience, freeing us from institutional technocratic and bureaucratic demands that have mushroomed in recent times. This further enhances the moral sight of teacher-facilitators, enabling them to spend more effort recognising the needs of student participants. Moral sight is a necessary pre-condition for the deployment of ethical praxis, and yet alone is insufficient for its realisation. Understanding praxis that facilitates equitable, trustworthy pedagogic spaces is vital. Illustrative examples include the benefits of abstract questions and dialogue, and the importance of informality, for reducing institutional weight in the space.

Engaging in, and reflecting on, the nature of ethical pedagogical practice in a shared prison classroom space allowed participants to ‘see’ each other as humans with associated skills and interests. There are wider implications for this work when engaging in the design and delivery of pedagogical activity in institutionalised spaces. Indeed, the findings here have implications for the way we see education and learning. Human societies are built on the exchange of knowledge, a moral endeavour. Whether intentionally or not, there are institutions, or institutional features, which undermine the free exchange of knowledge and understanding. Prisons are places where the free exchange of information and knowledge is impeded by the circumstances in which people are held there. In particular, the journeys of rehabilitation that prisoners are supposed to perform impact on the types of interaction and exchange they can freely engage in. The basic exchange of information becomes obstructed and the moral benefits of education become occluded in the pursuit of other agendas.

In addressing the European Prison Education Association (EPEA) conference, Warner (2023) re-asserted the need for ‘holistic education as a right’ (or HEAR perhaps) in prisons. This conceptual understanding seeks to safeguard the dignity and interests of the individual learner, by underpinning systems and pedagogies conducive to enabling comfortable, trustworthy learning spaces. The need for a ‘wide and deep’ concept of education in prison was previously understood, indeed promoted, by Director Generals of various prison services across Europe (Langelid et al., 2021). It was they, together with prison leaders, who provided the drive and leadership to establish the Select Committee which ultimately produced Education in Prison, in partnership with the Council of Europe.

By contrast, in the early 2020s, in England and Wales, education in prison ‘. . . is in a poor state following a long-term decline in both the quality of education and the number of prisoners participating.’. . (House of Commons Education Select Committee, 2022: 3). The HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales (2023) criticises failures of vision and leadership, which have produced a range of opportunities that is ‘. . . too narrow in almost all prisons’ (p. 48), with insufficient opportunities to study, including at higher levels. In the US, after more than two decades without federal support, there is now a dramatic expansion of education in prison following the reinstatement of federal grants from 2016 (Conway, 2022). In other contexts, most notably the Nordic countries, Norway in particular, the principles, practice and associated resources, have remained more consistent over the same period (Warner, 2009).

Ultimately, when considering how we enable learning in prison classrooms such as HMP Lifer, one must ask what it means to learn as an adult faced with the prospect of being incarcerated for the next ten, twenty, thirty years. To have some hope of creating a space conducive to learning with people in such circumstances, ethical praxis underpinned by moral sight is required, to foster a sense of dignity among learners. Implied here is a degree of co-production in creating such a space, ⁸ for there is no one fixed answer to this question.