This week, we're asking what’s it like to teach in prison, and what’s it like to study in prison. Our guest isJennifer Lackey, a professor of philosophy from Northwestern University who also teaches philosophy in her “spare” time atStatesville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison, near Chicago.

Jennifer is someone I greatly admire. She is a person of fierce intelligence, deep compassion, with a deep commitment to justice. I am pleased that she agreed to talk to us about this issue. We’ve done several episodes on our prison system – in its total cruelty, absurdity, and wastefulness. One of my favorites was an episode we did a few years back calledDignity Denied: Life and Death in Prisonwith Edgar Barens, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary film,Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall, about prisoners who take it upon themselves to provide hospice care for dying fellow inmates who have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Both the documentary and our episode with Edgar Barns were deeply moving and thought–provoking. I expect this week’s episode with Jennifer Lackey to pack a similar philosophical and emotional punch.

American prisons are, for the most part, overcrowded warehouses, devoted to the punishment and daily humiliation of their inmates. As such, one would expect that they are probably not very conducive to either the teaching or the studying of philosophy–or any other academic subject matter. We know that it doesn’t have to be that way. Check out this side-by-side comparison of a prison cell in Norway and a prison cell from the US. Guess which is which!

虽然我不想在任何地方——包括挪威——看到监狱的内部，但很明显，监狱不必如此无情地荒凉。它们可以是重建和修复的地方。

当然，我们美国人痴迷于惩罚，倾向于认为惩罚和改造是相互矛盾的对立面。但以这种方式看待问题就是接受了错误的二分法。这不一定是改造还是惩罚的问题。我不想一直唠叨挪威，但我会的。挪威人认为失去自由和被囚禁已经是足够的惩罚了。他们觉得没有必要每天对囚犯的尊严进行更多的侮辱。这种态度使他们能够更专注于康复和教育。

当然，挪威就是挪威。这里是美国。虽然我们可以从挪威人那里学到很多东西，但我们可能不会。并不是有些人没有尝试。他们中的一些人正致力于州和国家层面的大规模监狱改革。在最近一次全国大选之前，他们的努力取得了一些进展，并在左翼和右翼之间就刑事司法体系改革达成了新的共识。让我们希望选举的意外和令人不安的结果只是暂时的挫折。选举没有改变的一件事是，像詹妮弗·雷基(Jennifer Lackey)这样在战壕里努力工作的人的数量，试图一次接触并教导一名囚犯。It warms my heart that a surprising number of those folks are philosophers, like my own former student, Damon Horowitz, whoseTed Talk on Philosophy in Prison, you should check out.

Now even a person not skeptical about educating prisoners in general might still have doubts about the importance of educating prisoners in philosophy. If you’re going to teach prisoners anything, shouldn’t it be something more practical and job-oriented? Besides, a philosophically educated prisoner is probably an unruly, questioning, skeptical prisoner.

Or a more sober and reflective one, more prepared to take stock of his life. Which would we rather have? Prisoners who are sober and reflective or prisoners who are embittered and angry?

If it were a perfect world, we might give one answer to that question. But unfortunately, it’s not a perfect world. Education dollars are scarce in this country. Who can blame people for wanting to spend more money on our high schools and universities and less on prisoner education? After all that will help keep more people out of prison in the first place. Or so the skeptic will say.

But I insist in response to such skepticism that this is just another false dichotomy. We can educate both the free and the incarcerated. Saying that might garner pushback from financially strapped inner city school districts or middle class parents struggling with the cost of college tuition. But the fact is we don’t lack the resources for these things. We are an extraordinarily wealthy country. There are plenty of resources to go around. We lack not the wallet, as George Bush I once mistakenly said, but the will.

Besides, when it comes to our wallet, our current prison system is much more expensive than it needs to be–partly because the door to the prison cell is a revolving door. Our recidivism rates are by far the highest in the world. If we focused more resources on education and rehabilitation, recidivism would be a lot lower and the prison system would be a lot less costly and there would be a lot more education dollars to go around everywhere.

现在我希望我的谩骂能让你相信我不仅仅是一个软弱的，自由的行善者。我希望它能帮助你认识到真正的问题根本不是经济上的。而是我们没有能力或不愿意去欣赏被监禁者的人性。当你把囚犯关起来，运行一个旋转门系统时，最好的情况下很容易忘记被监禁的人，或者在最坏的情况下完全妖魔化他们。我认为，造成这种情况的部分原因是，监狱里棕色人种和黑人的比例不成比例。这是挪威没有的问题。也许是他们社会的种族同质化，使得他们在对待囚犯的问题上如此具有前瞻性。无论是好是坏，我们都无法奢侈地生活在一个同质化的社会中，这个社会使得广泛的同情和同情更容易实现。但我们需要找到一条通向那种同情和同情的途径。我们需要找到一种方式来看到和庆祝被监禁者持久的人性。 If we don’t, we are headed for more tragedy and disaster.

所以我衷心希望我们这一集能尽一点微薄之力，让人们看到被监禁者的人性。