Years ago, when I first heard about the Clemente Course, pioneered by Earl Shorris, a social critic and author who believed in teaching  the Humanities to the poor and the vulnerable, I was intrigued.  The concept aimed to offer classics such as Kant, Plato, Socrates and Tolstoy to people who traditionally have no access to such work — the homeless.  Since the program began in the 1990's, the Clemente Course has expanded and now prospers world-wide.

In that vein, a fascinating venture is Lisa Guenther's work reading philosophy with prisoners on death row.  Guenther wrote a wonderful op-ed piece about solitary confinement in the NYTimes in 2012 where she said "There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged."

Guenther brings a bit of light into the dark hole of solitary.  On a blog called,  "New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science" she says "Last semester, we read Plato’s dialogues on the death of Socrates. The Apology was a great success. 'I want my lawyer to read this!' said one prisoner. 'Socrates is a badass,' another said approvingly. The Crito was another story. Socrates went from bring a principled badass to a spineless bastard, not just for refusing Crito’s offer of escape and exile, but mainly for his defense of fidelity to the law and the state, even when it has clearly committed a grave injustice."

Guenther's students on Death Row are in Tennessee. They are concerned about community and they are concerned about living a meaningful life– however much they have left and even though they live on Death Row. One student, Abu Ali Abdar Rahman, in a newspaper called The Maximum Times, published at the prison itself, wrote an article about the experience with Guenther and her grad students called "Transformative Justice: A Pilgrimage to Community Building and Conflict Resolution."  He says that the group appreciates the opportunity to learn, to think, to discuss and to "nourish our defects." 

Another student, Derrick Quintero in the same paper, said outsiders are often surprised that on Death Row, prisoners get to participate in programs, but Tennessee's Death row allows them such participation for "good behavior." The educational opportunities are transformative, he says, for the participants, both those inside and outside of prison.  He quotes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his article, citing his book A Saint on Death Row, and saying that they all have the potential to be "indispensable agents of change."

Guenther writes that the philosophy course used Plato's Phaedo, "the dialogue that recounts Socrates’ final hours before he is forced to drink the poison that will numb his body and stop his heart."  She recounts how some students "found Socrates’ arguments for the immortality of the soul compelling, and others thought he rejected the knowledge and pleasures of the body too harshly." One prisoner argued that state execution "twists the meaning of life and death."  In many ways, these kinds of insights are no different that students in any other part of the prison, or for that matter, in most classrooms.

Guenther says insightfully that "there are countless prisoners on death row who are working harder than we can imagine to transform themselves and to build a meaningful sense of community. We could learn a lot from these people if we weren’t so determined to kill them."