Philosophy Behind Bars provides an opportunity for philosophy professors to make a difference in their communities through ethics education. This curriculum is specifically designed to be offered to people being held in state prisons.
This is a young program that was initiated in the summer of 2008. If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know:
Dr. Matthew C. Altman (altmanm@cwu.edu).
 Washington State Penitentiary
Overview
In this ten-week course, inmates discuss a variety of writings that introduce them to different ways of reasoning about moral issues. Through readings and guided discussion, they talk about the strengths and weaknesses of various ethical frameworks as they are portrayed in works of philosophy, literature, psychology, and political thought.
Rationale
A number of studies have found evidence that ethics education, if done the right way, improves a person’s ethical orientation.1 I have designed the course so that the readings take the inmates progressively through the different kinds of moral reasoning, as enumerated by developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg.
Kohlberg’s stages of moral development Level one: Pre-Conventional 1. Obedience and punishment orientation (How can I avoid punishment?) 2. Self-interest orientation (What’s in it for me?) Level two: Conventional 3. Interpersonal accord and conformity (The good boy/good girl attitude) 4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation (Law and order morality) Level three: Post-Conventional 5. Social contract orientation (Morals follow from agreement under fair conditions) 6. Universal ethical principles (Principled conscience)
 Course schedule
The class meets once a week for ten weeks. Inmates read the material in the time between classes. The readings are accessible — they do not involve thick philosophical jargon — and yet they provide readers with a chance to discuss the different moral points of view in a way that helps them to see the reasonableness of the higher stages of moral judgment.
Week 1: Introductions, description of the class, pretest (DIT-2 [see below]), etc. Weeks 2-3: William Golding, Lord of the Flies This novel, about a group of children stranded on an island, portrays the chaos that results if people are only concerned with not being punished. Week 4: Thomas Hobbes, selections from Leviathan; and the Prisoner’s Dilemma Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature (where there is no law) and the thought experiment known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma demonstrate that being motivated by self-interest ultimately implies that we ought to work with one another to establish shared standards of behavior. Week 5: Milgram Experiment ("The Perils of Obedience") and Zimbardo Experiment The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments tested to see how people would behave in response to assigned tasks given to them by researchers — with shocking results. These experiments show how only looking for others’ approval or conformity to designated roles leads us to violate our most deeply held moral convictions. Week 6: Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" This short story about a town that engages in ritualistic killing reveals the ethical shortcomings of the idea that values are relative to culture. Week 7: Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech The political documents and King’s famous speech show how a social contract functions — that is, how social norms result from agreement among people who have equal say in their formation — but also how such norms are limited by a concern for rights that transcends any kind of conventional agreement. Weeks 8-9: Plato, The Apology The Apology is Socrates’s speech in his own defense when he was put on trial in Athens. Socrates defends a commitment to justice even when it violates the norms of his culture. Week 10: Final thoughts, posttest (DIT-2), evaluations, etc.  Course objectives
There are three primary goals of the class:
1. Through reading and discussing the works with others, participants will become more confident in their ability to learn from and engage with the material. They may become more interested in continuing their education. 2. Hopefully, as prisoners progress through the class, their moral reasoning will become more sophisticated. Although we will not have the time to engage the issues as deeply as students do in a typical college class, studying this material may help them to change their ethical orientation (as the evidence suggests). Participants are not being lectured on how they should act — such a strategy would fail to accomplish anything. Rather, they are discovering on their own what kinds of moral views make the most sense. 3. Ideally, this would lead to lower recidivism rates among the participants — although I realize that this may be too optimistic.
Assessment
In order to assess the value of this program, participants take a pretest and a posttest, to gauge their ethical orientations at the beginning and the end of the class. The test is called the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2), from the Center for the Study of Ethical Development (http://www.centerforthestudyofethicaldevelopment.net/). The test involves answering questions in response to a number of moral dilemmas. It is not graded — there are no right or wrong answers — but their answers are interpreted by the Center for the Study of Ethical Development.
The instructor also obtains information about the participants’ future court convictions, which are part of the public record. Their recidivism rates are then be compared with the average rate of recidivism in that state.
When you complete the class, please send this imformation to Dr. Altman so that data from different prisons can be compared and the effectiveness of the curriculum as a whole can be evaluated.
Course materials
All tests and reading materials (books and photocopies) should be provided free of charge by the instructor.
If you have any questions or suggestions, or you would like to teach this course yourself, please contact: Dr. Matthew C. Altman Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies Central Washington University Email: altmanm@cwu.edu |