Prisons

Mountjoy Main Campus, 2017

We set up a Philosophical Dialogue group with male ‘lifers’ or long-term prisoners in Mountjoy Prison in 2017 for 16 weeks. We met every Friday afternoon in the Education Center on the main campus of Mountjoy Prison. Attendance was consistently between 12-18. The long term aim was to train the resident teachers in the methodology of philosophical dialogue, and they have since sustained this program to this day.

Sessions were led by Prof. Aislinn O’Donnell, Dr. Robert Grant, Dr. Elizabeth Meade, and Sabrina Keenan, with support from June Edwards and Paula Egan and Anne Costello of Mountjoy Education Centre.

Key Aims:

  • Provide an alternative dynamic to the overly-controlled environment of the prison, traditional educational institutions and behaviour-change programs. 

  • Create a sense of genuine equality between all participants, including facilitators.

  • Create space for all voices to be heard and taken seriously. 

  • Guide the conversation toward the philosophically relevant issues. 

  • Avoid any sense of changing people or showing them the ‘correct’ way to think. 

  • Encourage participants to be unafraid to be wrong, to be open to changing one’s mind, to give reasons for one’s beliefs, to embrace states of confusion and uncertainty

  • Support permanent teachers to facilitate their own philosophical dialogues into the future. 

   

‘With these few classes that we have done, if philosophy was brought into inner city, and at a young age, and even after the few weeks we did here, it does change your way of thinking, and helps you not get frustrated with politics and the news cause you can look at it this way and that way. So philosophy is one of the things that could help smaller communities to give them the confidence to understand the world’ – 29 year old prisoner, serving life-sentence:

Prisons

Mountjoy Progression Unit

Following on from the success of the previous project, the following year we were invited to establish a group in the Progression Unit in Mountjoy Prison for 12 weeks. The Progression Unit houses prisoners as they are being prepared for the outside world. We ran weekly sessions with groups of 10-12 prisoners exploring a range of philosophical issues. There were some challenges due to staffing shortages resulting in Prison Guards being unavailable to supervise. 

Sessions were led by Prof. Aislinn O’Donnell, Dr. Robert Grant, Dr. Elizabeth Meade.