Teaching ethics at San Quentin
When I tell people that I taught a college course on ethics at San Quentin Prison, they pause, waiting for the punch line.
There is none.
My curriculum was standard fare: Socrates and Plato, Kantian and utilitarian ethics, social contract theory, virtue ethics, and contemporary issues. The students were not standard fare; all were convicted felons, about half of them in for murder. Their ages ranged from mid-thirties to seventy.
One might expect that in a class of convicts, their crimes would constitute the elephant in the room. Not so. Most were forthcoming — sooner or later-and they emphasized two things: they had done terrible things that hurt people, and they were responsible for what they had done. The phrase “bad choices” was a mantra in their self-revelations.
But choices are never made in a vacuum, and in my seven years of teaching humanities courses with the Prison University Project, I have learned that many of these students grew up in rocky soils: absent, abusive, or addicted parents; failing schools; a scarcity of jobs; deterioration in housing and public space; mean streets; the ubiquity of drugs and guns.
Still, they were right. They had made bad choices. Others who grew up in similar circumstances had found ways to live straight. My students accepted the idea of free will and the moral responsibility it implies. They knew that for their bad choices they were paying the price.
The rocky soil issue came up when we studied social contract theory. The students liked the idea of an implicit contract between the individual and society. It made sense to them that their end of the bargain was to obey the law, but they were hard pressed to articulate society’s pledge to them. Some came from neighborhoods that resembled war zones. Some had been denied rentals in better neighborhoods because of their race. Many jobs lay beyond their reach. They had known police who lied under oath, prosecutors who would stoop to anything for a conviction, public defenders too overworked to be of much help. Where was society’s covenant to prevent life from being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?”
Though the students discussed the readings with committed interest, their engagement was turned up a notch when we read Cornell West’s essay, “Nihilism in Black America.” Its explanation for the plight of black America transcends both the Great Society-like programs proposed by liberals and the revival-of-morality exhortations of conservatives; instead, it focuses on a loss of meaning, hope, and morality in real daily life. The essay gave voice to something my students had sensed but never articulated: life in America is being lived as if the most important values have lost their value. The essay was written in the early nineties but seems even more resonant today. The white students felt its truth as much as the students of color. In what kind of society do we find ourselves having to insist that lives matter?
I have never found teaching in prison depressing. The classroom energy has always outweighed the grimness. But the afternoon we discussed the nihilism essay I drove home mired in despair.
My mood — and theirs — rebounded when we read an article about restorative justice. They had heard of the idea, some even participating in restorative justice programs at the prison, but the article brought their sentiments into sharper focus. This is how philosophy frequently works; when we find one we like, it feels more like recognition than discovery.
Restorative justice, as we discussed it, means that a person who has done wrong can work to make it right. He can sincerely repent, apologize, and make restitution to his victims or their families. He can also work to restore himself — to become a person less broken and more whole, one who truly renounces his crime and who would not do something similar again. It also means that if released, he would work to make the world better, not worse.
It is a tragic truth of the human condition that we cannot undo the past. No one knows that as poignantly as the students I taught at San Quentin, many of whom live daily with regret for crimes committed decades ago. But beyond the immutable past lies the open future. Though crimes cannot be erased, they can serve as springboards for restoration. Not everyone will succeed. Not everyone deserves the chance. But some do.
If there is an American exceptionalism, surely it includes a pioneer spirit by which we believe in change. We have faith that we can improve ourselves and our society, materially and morally. As a nation we have done plenty of wrongs, but in our better moments, we have admitted our mistakes and made amends. We have become better. In other words, we have practiced restorative justice. What is good for the nation can be good for the individual.
If there is a punch line to my teaching ethics at San Quentin, it is that teaching ethics there is not more difficult but easier. How often do the “successful” people in society become so habituated to achieving and performing that the moral dimension of life — the value of everything we do — is lost sight of? The San Quentin students do not lose sight of it. It is with them, and that is why discussing ethics there is easier. It is easier because so much is at stake for them and they know it.
