Aristotle's Prison - A Review
Aristotle‘s Prison: A search for humanity in tragic places By Prof. Alison Liebling, PhD Oxford University Press, pp 472 £ 39.99
This is a crucial book. A masterpiece of penal theory. It fights the managerialism of the new penology: “we are running a business now . . . managing prisons not prisoners” …”we don’t have time for luxuries like moral philosophy” with its own weapons: incontrovertible findings created by the system itself. These prove nearly all prisons today are sub-standard and damaging. And that we must return to the old penology which was prisoner welfare oriented.
Professor Alison Liebling is Director of the Prisons Research Centre at Cambridge University. Her career as a prison researcher spans nearly 40 years and has taken her to more than 150 prisons. She created MQPL, Measuring the Quality of Prisoners’ Lives, adopted by HMPPS and now self administered by them. It has created data from surveys in 50 to 70 prisons per year, taken over the last 20 years. Since the very damaging cuts to prison resourcing in 2013, MQPL surveys and related statistics have shown the Prison Service’s moral collapse. Safety and humanity have declined, suicides and homicides increased and order disintegrated. Professor Liebling notes it’s baffling that politicians and the Prison Service have allowed this when they have decades of publicly funded research available to them on the ingredients for good, or at least survivable, prisons.
The latest MQPL survey in Wandsworth was administered in November 2025. It was obtained by WPIC under a Freedom of Information request and shows a bleak picture: Wandsworth Prison is still performing very badly against its peers.
‘Aristotle’s Prison’ is a very skilful meditation on that lifetime of research, leading the reader through the methods and building, in a page-turning way, to its devastating conclusion.
Along the way it is deeply personal, not flinching from Professor Liebling’s early trauma or existential doubt. The personal demoralisation for prison researchers caused by the tragedy of the Grayling cuts is faced full square. The author notes that fieldwork can lead to exhaustion, fragility, anger and burnout, particularly given universities’ primary focus on output and increased research income. She notes “the cumulative emotional exhaustion I was barely aware of when I started this writing project was repaired, in part by having the opportunity to think, read and talk with others.” The research is intense and personal. She shares: “I gasped briefly when a Governor cried in a research feedback meeting. My cry meant, ‘Oh no, I am so sorry that this is hard’. The Governor in question was grateful and relieved, I think, that we had seen the impossibility of her task just at the point when this became clear to her. We bonded via the truth, as it trumped her senior manager public performance.
”It’s informed by the widest reading of moral philosophers, particularly Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Scruton and Bernard Williams, and of course sociology and psychology. Literature from Goethe, Zola, Blake, to Camus and Sartre sustains her, as does George Eliot’s marvellous ability to bring grace to the fallen, for example the fraudster Bulstrode in ‘Middlemarch’.
The book takes its title from Aristotle’s question in his ‘Politics’ “what is a good state?” He “and members of his Lyceum compared and classified 158 city states in order of descending goodness, in order to determine their relationship to the fullest form of human moral and intellectual development.” Professor Liebling adapts this question for prisons, essentially using a similar technique.
An overarching framework is Martin Buber's 1923 ‘Du und Ich’: that treating people as ‘You’ in an attentive, respectful way will allow wounded personalities to grow into a fully formed ‘I’, enabling a process of rehabilitation to begin which should stop reoffending. This is contrasted with the ‘It’ treatment meted out by many prisons under the new penology.
Part of the fascination of the book is the explanation of MQPL and the development of this sophisticated tool. It usually takes at least a week of intensive fieldwork by an outside team, a combination of interviews and surveys co-designed with and applied to staff and prisoners, using techniques of appreciative inquiry across many dimensions. Much of MQPL was created in dialogue with the then Head of High Security Prisons Phil Wheatley, later Director General of the Prison Service, who wanted answers to questions such as ‘what makes some prisons more survivable than others?’ The book is completely transparent about the three decades of key research projects it’s based on, and who funded them, in what amounts. MQPL is also now widely used in at least 20 other penal systems internationally.
Professor Liebling explains: “My vision of social research is about observing, encountering, and describing complex human worlds, and doing this as closely, intelligently, humanly and yet systematically as possible. These encounters can be translated into measurement, but the qualitative should stay in at every possible step.”
“It was never intended to be used as a performance tool, because scores might differ between population groups, for example, but has been adopted in this way. More would be gained from less frequent but more informed, curiosity driven use of it. On the other hand, regular feedback on prisoners’ evaluations of the moral dimensions of prison life feels like an important antidote to organisational wishful thinking.”
“The main aim is to describe the moral quality of the prison, in terms that offer helpful insight, leaving the local senior management team to decide how the findings and report might be used.”
MQPL had its roots in suicide prevention, showing that the ‘I’ or self Is fragile and unstable in an unsafe environment. It disintegrates further in this climate. And that poor MQPL scores from an unsafe environment correlate to suicide rates.
In a study between 2001 and 2004, the introduction of the Safer Custody strategy to reduce suicide was evaluated on a before and after basis involving 10 prisons. Only one of the 10 high risk prisons, Eastwood Park, became survivable over the course of the two year study; ironically Wandsworth got worse in some areas.
An exploration of the roots of violence and anger in prisons confirmed that in prisons characterised by I - It relations the I is enraged in a brittle environment full of injustice and disregard. The I becomes alienated and violent and retreats to a form of survival self.
A sustained comparison of other characteristics of a failing regime versus a tolerable regime in two high security prisons, Full Sutton and Frankland, is then made. This shows again the correlation between MQPL scores across the dimensions of respect, humanity, staff prisoner relationships, trust, support, power and authority, and fairness and the outcomes in terms of violence, self harm and suicide. Summarising, Professor Liebling notes: “I showed what happens when prisoners are treated, and offered skilled help, as persons: that is, as experiencing subjects. They may, under the right conditions, become fuller selves: personated or morally directed. This kind of moral climate, a You environment, helps some prisoners grow away from violence and towards reflection, meaning and agency.”
This is contrasted by the author with a Full Sutton prisoner quote: “If you’ve got a dog and you keep kicking it, it might be a lovely mannered dog, but if you keep kicking it, eventually it’s going to bite you. You know, it’s how you treat somebody. If you want somebody to go out of prison, back into society, if that’s your ultimate goal, then you’ve got to show them how to behave properly, but do it in a way that’s humanistic, you know, and allows them to not be resentful of where they’ve been and how they’ve been treated, you know? I don’t mean mollycoddle them, but I mean it’s just such a horrible cold environment. It kills any person’s creativity or potential or anything.”
The role and contribution of PE, art, horticulture and education are all noted in this context but seem sadly to be on the decline. And it’s noted that “Feeling accepted, being helped and feeling attuned to, are often more important aspects of the individual struggle out of crime than ‘programme fetishism’.” (The tendency of HMPPS to tick boxes with poorly designed, one size fits all programmes.)
Thankfully Frankland has continued to do well judging by its 2024 HMIP report, although the appalling assault by Hashem Abedi, brother of the Manchester Arena bomber, is noted. Full Sutton is also now improving.
To this non-statistician the most astonishing development came in 2024. “This exercise could almost be described as a kind of ‘moral mathematics’.” the author notes. Working with Katherine Auty, Professor Liebling carried out a detailed analysis of MQPL data from 518 surveys in prisons over an 11 year period 2009 to 2020 to develop a method for identifying moral quality thresholds. This started from publicly available MoJ data on five violence outcomes: homicide, suicide, self harm requiring hospital treatment, serious assaults on prisoners and serious assaults on staff.
Whichever one or combination of the violent outcomes was used lower MQPL scores were associated with higher levels of violence of all kinds. Ms Auty and Professor Liebling then explored minimum and maximum scores and distributions for each MQPL dimension before identifying higher and lower thresholds expressed as ‘odds ratios’: the points at which there was a step change in the frequency of each type of violence at both lower and higher ends of the distribution. These were tipping points: scores below or above which prisons became significantly more or less violent. Prisons that did not reach a threshold of 3.05 for their “staff prisoner relationship” dimension score were 23 times more likely to have a serious prisoner on prisoner assault, 7.5 times more likely to have a serious assault on staff, 7.9 times more likely to have a serious self harm incident, and 2.3 times more likely to have a self-inflicted death, compared to prisons that did meet this threshold. Only 43 of 518 cases of prisons surveyed reached the safe enough threshold on their “humanity” dimension. This research also explored dimension trends over time, with the mean scores on “humanity” dropping significantly from 2013.
The author's conclusion is that this exercise has taken us towards an empirically grounded description of what a good enough prison looks like. How can this now be ignored?
Throughout, Professor Liebling stresses that good prison work by good officers and governors is extraordinarily skillful. She cites an outstanding governor who worked out that in order to improve order and legitimacy in a traumatised prison following high profile escapes he had to maximise both security and staff prisoner relationships at the same time, not find a balance between them but realise the greatest achievable or workable amount of each. The most effective officers in his prison were very good at drawing boundaries, they could tell prisoners what to do without getting aggressive, they could challenge people in a non threatening way, and be consistent and confident and with good rapport.
She is very interesting on the subject of trust, stressing the essential need for scepticism in a secure environment, concluding that prisons should institutionalise distrust but enculturate trust. She notes the existence of new plans to train prison officers through the Enable programme, but of course we have no details of that yet.
Professor Liebling is no abolitionist and stresses that the problems of damaged humanity in secure settings are real, in the end boundaries must be formed as well as help offered. “Safety, justice …. matter more than endless tolerance however committed we feel to the concepts of treatment and compassion”. “Our psychology of the human should not be naïve, even when we can identify background causes. The well-intentioned call to abolish segregation units … or to abolish prisons altogether, are extremely difficult to fulfil in practice because some individuals pose vivid risks and cannot for the time being be reasoned with.” Lord Woolf’s call for smaller, 400 person prisons is also noted.
Some may question the relevance of research mostly around high security prisons to a reception prison such as Wandsworth, but the essential message that prisons will only improve if they go back to humanity, decency and treating prisoners as people must surely apply to Wandsworth as well.
At the end of the book, remembering a Home Secretary’s speech in 1910 urging: “tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if only you can find it in the heart of every person – these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”, but reflecting how very far we still fall short, I felt with TS rather than George:
“…. the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
The final problem is what to do about public opinion, which is now William Blake’s ‘Vicious Old Testament Nobodaddy’. There is a perhaps a glimmer of light in the public just starting to understand the scandal of the huge number of recalls. This book’s evidence, proving why current prisons can’t and don’t rehabilitate must play a major part.
Does restorative justice have some part to play in trying to change the course of the public opinion super tanker? Would restorative justice be amenable to the same sort of moral climate enquiry made in this book? Perhaps, and if it could be, perhaps more attention should be paid to the process that goes on in the ‘soul’ of a victim's mother than the almost exclusive concentration on the perpetrator in a play like ‘Punch’.
Professor Liebling notes that victims rarely feel pleasure in what courts call justice, and punishment does not repair the harm done. Families of the punished often suffer brutally in a process described as punishment drift. Unintelligible or excessive suffering creates denial and a sense of woundedness and fatality among offenders.She comments that the question whether punishment satisfies victims may depend on its effect in bringing about positive moral change in offenders towards the wrongdoing, as well as the victims’ own continued life experience. She logs the suggestion we need a philosophy of responding to wrongdoing, more than a philosophy of punishment.
The claim all this should have on public opinion is obvious: the staggering cost of the prison system, the terrible reoffending rate, the fact that some 1.2 million people in this country have had an experience of imprisonment and nearly 12.5 million people in the UK have a criminal record. We all have to feel responsibility for the social breakdown, ill thought through legislation, the care system (half of care leavers have offended by the age of 24) and poor education that caused this.
We as Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaigners need to bring the research out from The Academy/Lyceum and into public debate. If we can absorb the messages of this vital book and repeat that there is clear evidence that our prisons are not fit for purpose, but there is a clear standard they must aim at, that could help.
Justin Woodhouse
