Public Guest Seminar - Professor Alison Liebling with respondent Andy West

In this lecture – the local ‘launch’ celebration – Alison will talk about her new book, Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places. She will describe how doing research in prisons over a long period of time led her to the two poles of human experience: the desert (which is morally unbearable) and the oasis (where the life force is affirmed). She shows how these qualitatively different poles of human experience, starkly visible in prisons, shape outcomes, like suicide, violence, survival and moral growth. She shows how staff in outstanding prisons have different dispositions, practices and intentions from staff in other, more typical prisons. They operate with clear attention to security, order, and the use of authority, but hold these values in creative tension with positive underlying assumptions about prisoners, punishment and rehabilitation. They know when to use ‘intelligent trust’ and ‘intelligent doubt’. Aristotle called this kind of value-balancing ‘practical wisdom’. 

Alison found a striking fit between her research findings over a professional lifetime, which effectively consist of the careful organisation of what prisoners and staff had to say, and the insights of traditional, religious, spiritual or indigenous wisdom, as well as recent social theory. Human beings need presence, connection, resonance and meaning. These ingredients of the good life are literally a matter of life and death, and yet they are being undone in prisons and in our lives outside as both harden into a world of It. What can we do about such a harshening criminal justice world?

Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge. She has been the Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre since its inception in 2000. Her books include Prisons and their Moral Performance (2004) and The Effects of Imprisonment (2005, with Shadd Maruna). Alison was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2000-2023 to carry out the project, ‘Moral rules, social science and forms of order in prison’. Her new book, Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places, was published by Oxford University Press in April 2026.

Andy West has taught philosophy at over thirty-five prisons. He is the author of The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning to be Free (Picador 2022) and was an executive producer of the acclaimed BBC One adaptation of that book Waiting for the Out. He is currently training as a psychotherapist and is Philosopher in Residence at the therapeutic prison HMP Grendon.

Please click here to register to attend in-person.
Please click here to register to attend online.