Philosophy is, above all, conversation. Not just any conversation, but conversation that engages with some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves, moving easily from the abstract to the particular and back again. That conversation can be face-to-face, virtual, through the written word, or we can engage with thinkers of the past, whose best ideas have come to us in books and essays, and more recently in audio and video recordings. Philosophy values reasons, arguments, refutations and evidence above rhetoric and power games. At its best, studying it can be transformative. We see the world differently after thinking from different perspectives, examining the best arguments in favour of a position, or responding to a counterargument.

Some well-known philosophers have themselves spent time in prison – these include Boethius, Niccolò Machiavelli, Antonio Gramsci and Bertrand Russell; Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote much of the Tractatus while a prisoner of war, and Jean-Paul Sartre was briefly imprisoned in occupied France. But, despite the fantasy of a prison cell as providing quiet time to reflect and study, the reality is rarely like this. Prisons can be noisy, frightening and disorienting places, and some people survive only by keeping their heads down and their opinions private. Yet many people within them still do find ways to reflect philosophically and to discuss ideas with fellow prisoners and staff.

What happens when a sensitive teacher facilitates this kind of conversation in prisons? Here, Kirstine Szifris describes her experience as a philosophy teacher working with groups in two very different institutions – Grendon and Full Sutton. In the first, her students are long-term prisoners who have opted to take part in this therapeutic community, and who have already had extensive experience of talking in groups, respecting others’ opinions and building up trust to reveal psychological vulnerabilities. In Full Sutton, in contrast, an aura of distrust and suspicion prevails, and for many prisoners the primary motivation is survival rather than growth, a motivation that can make them wary of revealing too much, and distrustful, too, of the motives of the teacher. Szifris is a participant observer in these two very different environments – a teacher facilitating discussion, but also an ethnographer noting the complexities of the assumptions, roles and masks that prisoners adopt towards one another, and towards her.