You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Life Inside provides a thoughtful, poignant, yet frequently humorous account of prison, shaped by the author's experience of teaching philosophy to inmates. This intricately woven work of memory, autobiography, and gentle philosophical inquiry is a deeply personal meditation on life inside the mind as well as inside prison.
The early chapters of the book centre around the philosophy classes taught by West and are loosely organised by philosophical theme. Fragments of discussions between inmates about topics such as freedom, guilt, and salvation provide a fascinating insight into the perspectives of prisoners’ lives. For example, an early exchange on a debate about freedom is framed in the context of a passage where, in Homer's Odyssey, the hero sails by the rocks where the Sirens live. Odysseus puts wax in his ears to avoid the fate of the other sailors, who, intoxicated by their song, swam straight into the jaws of the devouring Sirens. Aptly one of the prisoners compared the Sirens to the effect of his addiction to the drug, “crack”, quipping, “They even live on the rocks!” Another prisoner felt that the person with the wax in his ears is most “free”, as he avoids the need to make choices that living “fully” in the world imposes on him. A third inmate thought Odysseus was the most “free”, as he was the king to whom everyone else must listen.
There is an obvious tension between the fundamentally ethereal nature of philosophical debate and the harsh physical limitations of living in a prison, and the mean-spirited yet ultimately necessary restrictions of a prison regime. Classes are held in bare rooms with barred windows and heavy metal doors. Obvious teaching materials, such as pens, are disallowed, as these could be turned into weapons. Yet the interest of the inmates in topics such as Pandora's Box or Locke's thoughts on “Cogito ergo sum” are palpable and their contributions often original and insightful, p