Everyone in the program was pretty excited to see a couple of our instructors, Drew Leder and Mikita Brottman, featured in an article – a cover article no less – in the Baltimore City Paper this week. It’s also wonderful to see some of our students, like Mr. Hardy and Mr. Fitzgerald, being named and given a voice, even if the Department of Corrections still reserves the right to restrict who may speak to reporters. And the article did a fine job of capturing the variety of those specific voices, rather than presenting the incarcerated men as an undifferentiated mass of “prisoners” – several of the unnamed students were immediately recognizable, just from the way Mr. Woods reproduced their cadences and attitudes on the page. One of our goals is to help humanize incarcerated individuals to the wider world – among the first questions we get from new people we tell about the program is usually some variation on “aren’t you scared?” (no) – and painting such a nuanced portrait of some of our classes is something a journalist is far better at than we philosophers
But, since I am a philosopher, I wanted to talk a bit about the philosophy that I bring to teaching in and helping to coordinate the program, with respect to one of the issues that the article raises.