CJC Calendar of Events 2025-26

Alison Liebling, ‘Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic, Punishing Places’

Guest Speaker: Professor Alison Liebling, University of Cambridge Faculty of Law
Chair: Amanda Wilson, University of Warwick Law School

Abstract: Dostoyevsky described his experience in Omsk prison camp in Siberia as ‘morally unbearable’. Prisoners in some contemporary long-term, high-security prisons have started to use similar, deeply meaningful language. What makes prisons unbearable? In what way are they experienced morally? What might ‘morally bearable’ punishment look like? In this seminar, I talk about my new book, Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places, drawing on data from some least and most survivable prisons, and a few exceptional best practice outliers, to explain why prisoners are so adamant in their descriptions of the best and worst kinds of prisons. They contrast ‘deserts’ with ‘oases’. In a striking parallel with Aristotle’s thinking about city states and their relationship to the human soul, research shows us that only when prisons can become ‘morally intelligible’ – fair, decent and humane enough – do they become ‘morally enabling’. Most are not, but instead increasingly generate gratuitous and destructive forms of suffering. Can there be such a thing as ‘just punishment’ when we create such prisons?

Lunch: 12:30 pm in S2.09
Seminar: 12:50-2:00 pm in S2.12