Andy West on teaching philosophy in prisons: "It's in the small moments that freedom comes"

The author of The Life Inside discusses the catharsis of writing memoir, teaching in prisons and the philosophy of revenge. Photography by Tristan Bejawn

Author Andy West. All photography by Tristan Bejawn

In October 2021 I received a proof copy of The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning to Be Free by the philosophy teacher, Andy West.

Andy’s brother, father and uncle were all in prison when he was a child. Part-memoir about navigating this family dynamic, part-philosophical handbook brought alive by accounts of his classroom encounters, the book’s chapters pivot around themes like shame, truth and love. They build into a moving, delicate journey of self-realisation and reconciliation with the past. Its pages are at once deep, serious, light and funny, amounting to an empathetic portrait of those who become entangled in the criminal justice system’s web.

The Life Inside was published in February 2022. It has since received widespread critical acclaim, whilst Andy has continued to teach philosophy in prisons for The Philosophy Foundation. In the past, he concealed his personal history and relationship with prisons from his students. Now, many of them enter his lessons having read his book. Teaching as an author thus presents renewed opportunities and challenges.

Earlier this year, I joined Andy to lead a workshop with a group of young men at HMP Feltham YOI. I used Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a prison design that relies upon the threat of surveillance to nudge prisoners into conforming — a popular prompt in political philosophy. I drew a diagram on a white board which inspired reflections about rules, morality and social media from members of the group.

I’ve delivered this workshop many times with teenagers in schools and youth clubs. I thought I’d heard it all before. But when I asked participants at Feltham to come up with examples of surveillance, one said: ‘Aunties who call your mum when they see you out with a girl.’ It was the type of interaction, a moment of light relief, that one’s memory clings onto while teaching in such fraught circumstances.

I recently met up with Andy at the BFI on London’s South Bank to catch up about life as an author, the powers and barriers of teaching in prisons, and how philosophy might be applied to the topic of revenge — a common preoccupation in my youth work.

Ciaran Thapar: You’ve been teaching in prisons for years, but your presence in the classroom must have changed since The Life Inside was published. Now, your students potentially know about your life, and your personal experiences of prisons, because your book’s out in the world. What’s that like?

Andy West: It plays out in lots of different ways. My brother, dad and uncle were all in prison when I was a kid. It maybe indicates the kind of background I came from: east London, Liverpool, poverty. I went to university and have blended into a more middle class world now. And what that means is that there is a distance in my social life here in London from my history. Before, when I was teaching in prison, I made a point of never talking about my history, sometimes just for privacy or security reasons. But also, if I’m chatting to a load of guys in Belmarsh or Pentonville, I don’t want to be trying too hard to ingratiate myself with them by saying, you know, ‘My uncle was jailed here, and I was a visitor,’ or whatever. And maybe I was a bit afraid of projection from them, an intensity from them. If I say my dad’s in prison, a lot of the guys have got kids. And that’s when prison hits them hard, they’re not with their kids. They can do jail, they can do a six-by-eight cell, they can do the shit food, they can do the violence. But being away from their kids is where they feel pain, remorse. So I felt that it would bring up stuff for them, and be quite intense for me. So I taught in prisons for five years without telling anyone about my background, and now all of that’s out there. It’s out there in the public; my book’s in prison libraries. There’s a young man sitting at the back of my class at the moment who is reading my book during the sessions. I taught a class at HMP Brixton earlier this year and everyone in the class had read it. The book had got on to the landing and they’d passed it around. So sometimes, now, I’ll be talking about free will and determinism, and the anthropological lens turns one-eighty, because someone says, ‘Oh, well this is a bit like you and your brother.’ The book has changed the power relationship in the room.

It sounds like you’ve entered a new frontier in your work.

I want to keep boundaries. You know, I’m at work, sometimes I’m dealing with some very dangerous people. But also, it’s like: they’re asking the questions now. I know who they are, I know their history, it’s written into the context, where I’ve always been this absent participant, but now my whole psyche is laid bare in the conversation, and it makes for a much more crackling philosophical engagement. The other side of that, actually, is that in writing a story about a working class family, I think shame is such a big part. It’s such a part of what we show and what we hide, and what we can tell and what we can’t, and how much we try and stay respectable or not. My uncle, who is one of the characters in the book, who I call Frank, he was in and out of prison his whole life. He managed to stay out for the last few years, but had lived a very wild life, had a wild existence, so he was never going to be living that long on the back of that. Drugs, adrenaline, violence, all the rest of it. He died earlier this year, he was diagnosed with cancer. He kind of said, ‘That’s my lot’. He didn’t want any kind of treatment. He was living in his mother’s house, in the spare room. He had a mattress on the floor, an ironing board as a bedside table, a few Haribos, a bit of weed. An existence that’s very different to the one he had when he was living on his toes; when he was ‘at work’, as he would say, when he had Armani suits, Rolex watches, and the best of everything, in these very short bursts, and then would get nicked and start over. So it was a very unglamorous, lonely passing, in a way. And yet, because I’ve written the book, and because he’s one of the characters in it, I’m getting messages from people I don’t know saying, ‘I’m sorry to hear your uncle’s dead,’ and people giving long, heartfelt messages about how they connected with this character. And yet, this character in real life is living in a certain ruin, and a very disconnected one. So having a book out there when writing about this particular world, and the revelation, self-revelation, that comes with it…I wasn’t prepared for those layers.

What’s been your biggest surprise since The Life Inside was released?

In the book I talk about going to visit my brother when I’m six-years-old, when he’s in prison. It’s Christmas Eve, and my mum tells me, ‘your brother’s away working,’ which is a common trope that you say to kids, ‘daddy’s at work, he’s joined the army’, or whatever, explaining why he’ll be away for six months. And here I was, going through security into a prison, people in handcuffs, prison officers, and the message still was that my brother was just at work. Now, I don’t blame my mum for that, because that was the script at the time, and sadly that’s still the script today, in terms of how you communicate this reality to children. But the message I received is that this is all unspeakable. This is unspeakably shameful, and violent, and horrible, and it cannot be uttered. Then you write a book, and you do speak it. And that feels…that has a lot of gravity, a lot of fear. You’re afraid of pissing people off, alienating people, and the truth is that it’s no big thing, it’s something that happens in the world. People go to prison, people move on from it, people survive. And so it’s taken a lot of the weight and stigma out of that for me.

The Life Inside by Andy West

So writing The Life Inside had cathartic value for you?

Yeah. I think before you write a book, all the preoccupations that will become the book, all of the obsessions, ruminations, are so massive. And then you write it, and it’s just a little thing, and it’s on a shelf with many other little things, and you’re just a member of the human race now. It’s not that big. There is a relief in that.

Why is philosophy a worthwhile tool to bring into a prison?

I always fail at answering this question. I’ve never understood why, because it’s such a basic question. I feel like I want to be able to say, ‘Ah, it’s good for people who are caught up in violence or gangs or addiction to consider these philosophical questions.’ But it’s good because I think philosophy is a good thing to do as a human. If you’re alive, if you exist in this world, questions about justice, time, luck, power, they’re all going to be pertinent to you at some point, and how great if you can give those questions room to breathe, if you can learn what other people have thought about them. So I suppose that’s kind of why I do philosophy in prison, because it’s a space that needs humanising. So that would be the special reason I would take it in, because it’s such a human thing to do, and you’re so at-risk of losing your humanity in prison.

What impact does teaching it have? Do any examples spring to mind?

I’d love to tell you a story about someone turning their life around after doing philosophy, but prisons are dysfunctional and unstable, so it’s very difficult to work with someone long enough to see big turnarounds. It’s often in the small moments that freedom comes. Maybe that tells us something about prison. But there was a guy who was 17 years into his sentence, and he wasn’t near the end of it — which tells you a lot. He’d been in many prisons, he’d done many transfers, he’d seen people doing very heavy sentences come and go, and he’s still there. And I think for him, like many people who are doing that amount of time, you just sort of grey-out people’s faces. You learn to not get excited about new people. It’s like living in an airport. That transitoriness. You detach. You leave your cell in the morning and you look over the top of peoples’ heads. And he lived that very detached life, but coming to a philosophy classroom I saw him lean forward in his chair, want to say something and get drawn into a discussion, follow a line of enquiry. It was very nice. Then at the end of the class, he wrote a note and left it on my desk, and it just said, ‘Two hour holiday.’ Now, a ‘two hour holiday’ is what you normally call a visit in prison. Your wife comes, or your family, and you’re with them, and you’re not on the landing for two hours. And for him, that engagement with big ideas was a holiday from where he was. For me, it’s an escape attempt, philosophy. It’s a way of going somewhere else. 

Recently, you tweeted that you were interested in designing a workshop about revenge. I think it’s a powerful idea that would resonate with young people I’ve worked with — who end up in cycles of violence because of feeling the need to take revenge. Have you made any headway with that?

Tentatively, I have. The way this occurred is that I’ve been working with a group of men in a prison for a while, and there was a guy there in his mid- to late-twenties. Very smart, always bringing in insights, always reading. And then there was an older guy in his mid-fifties, who has been in prison a long time, knew his way around, really looked after himself physically, had his routine down, and read a lot as well. It was during the tea break that the subject of revenge came up. Because the younger guy was saying, ‘If I get out and I’m in my neighbourhood, and I see this man or that man, and I get disrespected, I can’t show weakness, I have to hit back. It’s out of my hands, that’s the game.’ And the older guy was saying, ‘Well, then we’ll be seeing you back in here, so let’s think about this for a second.’ I watched them and I thought, I don’t know what I think about this, because obviously revenge keeps people in negative cycles, to some degree, but also, so can forgiveness. You can get into abusive relationships where forgiveness is a part of perpetuating that abuse. I know that places where revenge is very central to morality are often places where people do not feel protected by the police, for example. Look at the Wild West, you know. Your name and the status of your name isn’t gonna be intact if you don’t hit back sometimes, if you don’t show revenge. I live in the world as a middle class white person, so I don’t trust the police fully, and I’ve had plenty of bad experiences with them growing up, but I know that I would be listened to by them. I know that they look at me and see that I’m someone they have to protect, rather than prosecute. For the guys in my class, they hadn’t had that experience. So, where I might be able to forgo revenge because I can rely on a system of justice, they can’t do that, necessarily. It’s psychologically complex. So I went away and did some research. I looked at the Stoics, Machiavelli, the Ancient Greeks — all these different schools-of-thought.

What do anti-revenge thinkers say?

Figures like Nelson Mandela will support a more forgiveness-based approach to moving forward; that forgiveness is personally important as well as politically. The Stoics are quite against revenge, because they think that shows a lot of self-control. Taking revenge means you’re giving a lot of power to something outside of you. Then you get these schools-of-thought that are somehow about going beyond forgiveness and revenge. So, living well is the best form of revenge; being happy is the best form of revenge. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer, says, ‘Speak not to me about forgiveness or revenge. Forgetting is the best form of forgiveness, and it is also the best form of revenge.’

And what about pro-revenge?

Machiavelli isn’t so much interested in morality as power, and how to maintain power as the head of state, as the prince. And he says that people should either be treated very well or they should be crushed. ‘They should be caressed or they should be crushed,’ is the exact wording. Because if you take revenge on an enemy, you mustn't leave him in any position where he can come back on you. So he advocates for full scale revenge or not at all. And we see this in The Iliad, where Odysseus and the Greeks are storming the city of Troy, and they’ve killed the general, and then they find the general’s son, and they say, ‘We must throw him off the wall.’ And his mother is pleading with them. But the logic from the Greeks is that this child will try to avenge his father, and then they’ll be vulnerable. So, in this view of revenge, you have to plan ahead and think about the next generation. And this is the kind of thinking you get into once you’re in the revenge economy. You have to go big, you can’t dabble. So I’ve been putting that to people.

Did you take these discussions back to the two men who first inspired you?

Well, interestingly, the older man is a little bit more open to the idea of revenge than he was before. Sadly — and this is a downer for me — when I went to do the workshop, the younger man had been transferred to another prison because of a violent incident. So I didn’t get to have that conversation with him. But he was the one I most wanted to speak to. Maybe there is an irony there about not being able to have the conversation about revenge with someone because he had avenged himself.

Since the publication of Cut Short, Jhemar, one of the main characters, has found more of a language to explain his feelings about his brother, Michael, being murdered back in 2017. Jhemar was 15-years-old at the time, and he chose not to take revenge for what happened, even though he was being encouraged to do so by his friends. Now, nearly six years later, Jhemar and I reflect on his decision a lot. It was obviously very brave. He says that he took it because he had enough adults around him who valued him. Knowing that was part of what stopped him. I think a lot of young people who get dragged into violence don’t have that.

The thought that they’ll be disappointing someone…

Yeah. ‘Nobody cares about me, so I’m going to take this into my own hands, and I don’t care what happens to me.’

And if your sense of belonging comes from being in a gang, then you’ll be pleasing them, too.

Jhemar can now go into workshops as a youth worker, talk to young people in schools, youth clubs or prisons, and he’s got the trump card of personal experience. Because he can show them the path he’s trodden. He can say, ’You don’t need to take revenge with violence, you can respond in other ways, through self-development and making change.’

I don’t know how I feel personally about revenge. Dispositionally, it’s not me. I’m not built for it, it’s too consuming, it’s too busy, I don’t fancy the hours. But I do think there may be a role for it. We obviously want to build a world, a social system, in which men don’t have to feel like anything that is perceived as a loss of status is a humiliation, you know? We need people to feel more confident, healthy and robust in themselves. And then there’s a whole background of social injustice upon which things happen, to do with how people gain a sense of belonging and validation in society. Sometimes, belonging to a gang is more appealing if it’s not possible for you to have gone to university. But I think the distinction between justice and revenge is not a clear one, because one of the ways I’ve heard prison described is a form of ‘regulated revenge.’ If you left it to the public to deal with people who committed crimes, it would get pretty nasty. There would be public humiliations and executions. But what the state does is try to temper that, and take the heat out of that, and mediate a bit. If you close down all prisons and open therapeutic centres, the public would be outraged. So the state regulates the revenge. And that’s what we see in prison. People being banged up for 23 hours a day with rats and cockroaches, no meaningful activity, no input into their moral growth. That’s state-administered revenge, you know? I don’t know if it can ever leave the system. It feels very human, to me. Many great dramas have been written about it through time and they will continue to be. But can we temper it? Can we turn it into something else? Like an alchemist who transforms a base metal into gold. Can you call Jhemar’s youth work and success in the world now a form of revenge?

I don’t know, but I do think he feels a powerful duty to his community because of what happened to Michael. 

I wonder what elements in a life allow someone to access that part of themself? You mentioned strong relationships and not wanting to let other people down. It was quite a mission in my younger life to break the cycle. I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t take risks, I never lost my temper. I always had to be the good boy. And I think a lot of that is because I was the youngest. I was the last hope. I felt that responsibility. If I was the oldest, I would have had a different set of preoccupations. I would have been having to protect mum, deal with the abusive step-father figure, be man of the house. I don’t know if I would have had the same opportunities. I may have been in the revenge game. That’s what can turn a life, this is what I am saying. My brother went to prison 12 times. I’ve only ever been to prison with a keychain on my belt. These small details, really incidental, we wouldn’t even think about them — they can turn a life. 

A Life Inside is out now. You can follow Andy on Twitter.

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