David Egan Philosophy

This autumn will be the second time I teach a course on the theme of freedom. I first conceived of a course like this in the summer of 2017 when I signed up to teach at Stateville Correctional Center.
 
Stateville is a maximum-security prison about an hour’s drive from Chicago, where I was living at the time. I was scheduled to teach a seven-week course to fifteen of the men incarcerated in the prison. Teaching is always an opportunity to learn and the love of learning feeds my love of teaching. If I was to teach in a prison, I asked myself, what’s a topic on which I stand to learn as much from my students as they stand to learn from me? The answer announced itself at once: freedom.
 
I drove out to Stateville each Thursday with three other teachers working with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Chicago’s suburban sprawl gradually gives way to open farmland. The prison stands in the middle of a vast and immaculately mowed field. From the road, one sees only a featureless concrete wall about thirty feet tall punctuated by guard towers. The entrance building for visitors is a red brick affair that could pass for an old schoolhouse were it not for the imposing wall looming on both sides of it.
 
I passed through three security checks on the way to our classrooms. Once I had checked in and received my day pass, I was ushered into a windowless room where a guard patted me down. Then the four of us passed through a pair of heavy security gates—the kind of thick barred gates that open with a harsh buzz and a guard shouting “clear!” The guards flipped through our teaching materials. We could bring only paper into the classroom with us, and written materials had to be submitted in advance for inspection.
 
My classroom looked like a classroom, but one in very poor nick. The blackboard was rough and hard to erase, the bland linoleum floor and low ceiling didn’t exactly invite the mind to explore, and the chair-desk assemblies were cheap and too small for the men who squeezed into them. This was the Illinois summer, so hot and humid. No air conditioning—instead a single large standing fan blasted us with such a roar that we had to shout to make ourselves heard.
 
Mine was one of four classrooms off a wide central hall. A prison guard with a view into all four rooms lounged at a desk. The classroom door stood open at all times.
 
In the room with me were fifteen men: eleven Black, three Hispanic, and one white. They ranged in age from twenty-something to fifties or sixties. Despite their hardened looks—a necessary survival tactic in prison—it was clear from the start that I was working with a tremendous grant of goodwill. The prison routine was tedious and degrading. These classes were about the only occasion where the men could relax, think and speak freely, and feel like human beings. No one wanted to blow the opportunity. They were all on their best behaviour.
 
Class discussion was vigorous. I was used to teaching University of Chicago undergraduates who were afraid to take a strong stand on anything. The men at Stateville disagreed with each other loudly and openly but almost always in a friendly spirit—only once or twice did a disagreement become heated.
 
One topic that recurred in the discussion was the question of whether a person can be free in prison. Some of the students argued that freedom is a state of mind. If you can rise above the constraints of prison life, you could be free even there. (Epictetus says pretty much the same thing—and he had experienced the bondage of slavery.) Others responded that this view was complacent. The only proper response to incarceration was resistance, they said. The day you come to accept your incarceration is the day you give up the struggle.
 
What is freedom? The question felt concrete and urgent in the prison classroom in a way that it doesn’t in a university seminar.
 
My journey to and from the carpool pick-up point took me by bus and train through Chicago’s South Side, a part of the city scarred by poverty and crime. The demographic make-up of the trains resembled the one in my classroom. Most of my students came from these or similar neighbourhoods. If you’re a young man in a rough neighbourhood, joining a gang can give you a sense of belonging and friends to watch your back. Gang membership brings its own perils, though. Hundreds of young men are killed in Chicago each year. Hundreds of others do the killing—and some of them end up in Stateville.
 
It was hard saying goodbye on the last day of class. I’d spent fifteen hours in conversation with my students at Stateville. In class discussion and in written assignments, they were brave and forthright. I learned a lot about their past and about the challenges they faced in the present. We’d shared our thoughts and our experiences and now I was going to walk out of the prison, as I had every week, and they were going to stay behind.
 
That last day in the classroom was my girlfriend’s birthday. As we exchanged handshakes and hugs, one of the men asked what I’d be doing later that day and I told them I’d be taking Priya out to dinner. “Tell her happy birthday from me.” “You make sure to treat her right.” The idea that I could walk out of that prison, get in a car, and have a nice dinner with the woman I loved later that day—all this felt impossibly precious. As the car headed back into Chicago’s suburbs, I texted Priya with my students’ birthday greetings. I’d never felt so free.