Teaching Philosophy to Men in Prison: A Family's Story

A man stands beside the author in a lift. He is short, his fingertips are yellowed, and the sleeves of his oversized suit jacket brush his knuckles. The author recognises the clenched jaw and the wheeze in his breathing, and for a moment he is certain this is his father, a man he has not seen in years since the day he was sent to prison. Then the man does not answer in a Scouse accent, and the author knows he is not his dad. The lift climbs five more floors in silence. The doors open, the man steps out, and the author thinks about tomorrow: his first morning going into prison, to teach philosophy to men. That scene opens Andy West's book, and it is the way into this conversation, recorded for the London Buddhist Centre and titled The Life Inside: Men in Prison. What follows is less a discussion of penal policy than a portrait of how prison runs through one family, how stories about it are passed down or withheld, and what happens when a man who grew up on the wrong side of a locked door stands on the other side of it with a question for the room.

Why does a book about prison start with a stranger in a lift?

The reading that opens the conversation is short, and West is careful to frame it as a doorway rather than a thesis. The man in the lift is not a character who matters for his own sake. He is a reminder of a figure who appears throughout West's life: the man in the station, on the bus, at the urinal in a pub toilet, in London, Manchester, Berlin or Rio de Janeiro. Each time, the resemblance to his father is strong enough to stop him, and each time the test of a single detail, an accent or a face, proves him wrong.

That repetition is the point. West is describing a lifelong habit of looking for the father, and the book is built around the stories that grew up in the gaps. Early in the conversation he explains the impulse plainly: prison "was always kind of stories to me." Whether the stories were told to him or kept from him, there was a hunger to describe them. Writing the book, he says, felt logical for that reason. The material had been waiting.

What did a prison story sound like at a family table?

West draws a sharp contrast between two relatives. On his mother's side, from Canning Town in the East End, an uncle would be telling him about HM Brixton before the kettle had boiled on a Sunday. The uncle was gleeful and shameless, and the prison years were the great drama of his life. The uncle appears as one of the characters in the book.

His brother's prison history was a different kind of story. He went to prison about twelve times in total, in the grip of a long and chronic heroin addiction, and West's first visit came when he was six or seven. His mother told him that his brother was "going to do a bit of work," and the boy found this strange, because his brother had never had a job and never would. At HMP Gloucester, the visit took place across a table with prison officers in the room. Where the uncle was forthcoming, the brother was protective and did not want his little brother to know.

West reads this silence as a common feature of what he calls the prison visitor's world. Families, he suggests, do not know how to tell a child something that big and that frightening, so they reach for a cover story: the father is away at work, in a factory, in the army. But a child always reads the cover story as a message. West's own reading of being kept from the truth was that "this world is not for you. You don't belong here." He is blunt about the consequence: "which can only make you more curious, of course."

How does a father's violence shape a son's relationship to prison?

The hardest part of the conversation is West's account of his father. He describes him as violent, domineering and difficult, and he is clear that his feelings about prison are knotted together because of him. His brother's repeated sentences were painful and harmful to watch. His father's sentence, in contrast, is the one that let him breathe. He says that people often ask him why he took such a different path from the other men in these stories, and his answer is uncomfortable and honest.

"My dad being in prison may have been something that allowed me to become the person I did, so it's very mixed. It's very it's extremely complex, yeah." — Andy West, London Buddhist Centre conversation

West does not soften the point. He says he knows prisons to be deeply troubling, deeply harmful and shameful in the state they are in. He holds both truths at once, and the conversation does not try to resolve them into something neat.

The dramatisation of this period is one of the most vivid moments in the talk. West describes a scene from a television adaptation in which the actor Gerard Kearns, known to many viewers for playing one of the Gallagher brothers in Shameless, played his father. Off camera Kearns was, in West's words, "the sweetest man you ever met." When the cameras rolled he became the father. A child actor played the younger West, and the production used signals for the child to tap in and tap out of the scene, because an adult shouting aggressively at a child is frightening even when it is pretend. West's father, by contrast, "did not tap in and tap out." He was not regulated. He was easily slighted, humiliated and undermined, and he had to reclaim power in the moment. He had awful mood swings.

One ritual from the childhood home stands out. Whenever West's mother put on make-up or did her hair, his father called her a tart, and he tried to draw his son into the game. "What is she? What is your mother?" The boy, frightened of his father's masculinity, would answer the way he was told. West calls it a call-and-response, and the ugliness of it is in the repetition.

What does philosophy do in a room full of men who have been in prison?

The conversation turns, around the middle, from family to classroom, and this is where the title's promise of philosophy comes into focus. West describes teaching groups of men in prison, and he returns several times to the questions that arise in those rooms. Questions about morality come up constantly. So does the plurality of ideas, the fact that a person's thoughts can be examined and worked through rather than simply accepted or rejected. West talks about asking the men to suspend judgment a little longer than they are used to, and he links this to the figure of Socrates, whose method of questioning everyday assumptions the men already know something about, even if they have never studied it.

He also notes that the men come from many parts of the world, which means the room carries a range of traditions and experiences rather than a single script. That matters for how a teacher listens. West is not describing a lecture delivered to a passive audience. He is describing dialogue, in which the men's own experience of violence, family and the justice system becomes material for thinking.

There is a practical humility in his approach. Teaching in a prison means preparing for the way a class can go, and West admits that the work is demanding. What he is after is not moral instruction handed down from above but the slow building of a habit: examining a thought before acting on it.

Why is it so hard to talk about men, masculinity and prison?

Near the end of the conversation the discussion widens to culture. West points to what he calls a very deep instinct that men succeed, acquire wealth and win, and he suggests that this instinct works against the kind of reflection a philosophy class asks for. In a society that measures a man by what he gets, prison becomes an easy place to look away from. There is, he says, not much cultural sympathy for men in this position, and not much of a reference point for other ways of being a man.

This is where the book's family stories and its larger argument meet. The father in the lift, the uncle with his war stories, the brother who would not tell the truth, and the man who called his wife a name every time she dressed up are all men shaped by the same cultural script. West's work is to refuse to treat them as only their worst moments, and also to refuse to let the violence in his own family be softened by nostalgia.

Where to go from here

The conversation is worth watching in full, because its power comes from the way it moves between the personal and the structural without announcing the shift. If you want to go further, read the book the conversation was built around, which West has described as beginning with the lift scene. Pay attention to how he handles the difference between a story told to a child and a story kept from one, and how that difference shapes what a person later wants to know. Then consider the question the classroom poses: what would it take for a man in prison to examine his own thoughts with the same care that West, as a young boy, was never allowed to see? The London Buddhist Centre's own classes and courses are a place to explore the wider questions of ethics, attention and compassion that run beneath this discussion.