Prison Experiments with Stoicism Courses for Inmates; Results Unclear
“Violence has plummeted in a Norfolk [England] prison where inmates have been learning Greek philosophy,” the Eastern Daily Press reports. But violence has not plummeted in the prison, and it’s unclear whether whatever changes have occurred there have anything to do with inmates learning philosophy.
The article, authored by Chris Bishop and reprinted at Yahoo! News, is highly misleading.
Nonetheless, the correlation it imagines may be worth investigating more generally.
Here’s what’s actually the case, according to the 2023-2024 Annual Report of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) at the prison, HMP Wayland (published in March, 2025):
- Some inmates at the prison have taken a course “heavily influenced by the Greek philosophy of stoicism”
- The course is taught by prison staff
- The course is voluntary, “well-attended and well-received” by inmates and offered regularly
- The IMB sees the initiative “as an expanded weapon in its war on the evils of drugs and to improve the rehabilitation chances of its prisoners”
- “Drugs are readily and easily available, prisoners tell us, in every wing and unit of the prison—even in the ‘drug free’ unit”
- “Assaults on staff are lower than comparator average and have shown a gradual reduction over the year”
- There has been an “uptick trend seen in the last 12 months” in prison-on-prisoner violence.
So there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that, as the article suggests, philosophy courses in the prison have led to a significant drop in prison violence. Even where there has been a “gradual reduction”—in inmate assaults on staff—we have no idea about the cause; the report’s findings are compatible with all of the remaining cases of such violence being the students, in Socratic frustration, assaulting the staff teaching them philosophy.
That said, there is an interesting question here about the effects of teaching philosophy in prison. There are a number of such initiatives (see some of the posts listed here). And there is some data about the benefits of prison education programs in general, for which “the effect sizes have ranged from modest to relatively large” (Brookings). But has there been any work attempting to explore whether prison instruction in philosophy specifically is correlated with desired outcomes on things like inmate and staff violence and safety, earlier parole, reduced recidivism, reduced drug abuse, better post-imprisonment employment, and so on?
Related: Philosophy as Anti-Terrorism Tool
I don’t know how you would design a study to measure a correlation between reduced inmate violence and philosophy courses (I suspect there isn’t any direct correlation). That said, I know that teaching philosophy courses in prison the past several years has been the most rewarding teaching experience of my career, and I the positive feedback from individual students leads me to believe that philosophy can have a direct positive impact on students’ lives. That said, part of me would resist the implication that controlling inmate populations is a goal of philosophy courses, even though prison administrators generally don’t care how inmates mark time as long as they do so in a way that isn’t disruptive.
Here’s one possible design:
Offer free courses. Randomly assign some of those who sign up to take the course and the rest to the control group. Follow participants over time to see how many of the treatment group commit violence and compare that to the control group. Compare both to the general population to measure selection bias.
Might not be a high-powered study given the small numbers involved, but still pretty good, I’d say.
Sceptical questioning is fine in its place but this question – ‘has there been any work attempting to explore whether prison instruction in philosophy specifically is correlated with desired outcomes on things like inmate and staff violence’ – feels out of place. For one thing I suspect a lot of prisons outreach is done on a shoestring, so who is supposed to fund the detailed evaluations which would be needed to answer this sort of question? But for another, who cares? Suppose you give a child a cuddly teddy bear and the child is delighted. ‘Ah yes’, says the philosopher, ‘but how do you know it’s the fact that it was a bear that delighted it so?’ Well, we don’t know, and indeed the child might have been just as delighted to receive a cuddly walrus. Similarly, violence against prison staff might have reduced just as much if inmates had received classes on history or poetry. But until there is a queue of philosophers, historians and poets competing for prisoners’ time and attention, we don’t need to know. There is in fact woefully little educational provision of any sort in UK prisons. If teaching philosophy goes some way towards filling the gap, we should park our worries as to whether philosophy is the active ingredient.
For more information on prisons outreach by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, see
https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/outreach/our-work-in-prisons/