Can we learn anything from the horrific “joyriding” crash that took place recently on the M9?
In its immediate aftermath, many people felt conflicted. Demonising the five teenagers who died seemed callous and counterproductive. Yet trying to understand why they would engage in such reckless behaviour, which caused serious harm to three women and a boy, risked being perceived as naive or insensitive to the injured victims.
For Andy West, who has spent more than a decade working in the UK with both young offenders and adult prisoners, there is a balance to be struck when talking about criminality. “It’s really tricky because you don’t want to condemn, but you also don’t want to collude.”
West’s interest in the subject is deeply personal. Three members of his family – his brother, his father and an uncle – each served jail time during formative years of his life.
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A teacher and researcher in philosophy, West uses his academic background to host classes with prisoners on everything from ethics to the meaning of life. His memoir The Life Inside was adapted into a BBC drama Waiting for the Out which was broadcast earlier this year to critical acclaim.
When prisoners learn of West’s family history “some of these young guys ask me: How come you’re legit?” There is no straightforward answer but a crucial factor was “the first part of my childhood was very chaotic, unstable, bailiffs at the door, hard drugs, violence”. Whereas, “in my teens, I lived with my stepfather who was a double-glazing salesman who paid his bills and was very prudent ... so I could eat, I wasn’t poor, I wasn’t living in a kind of undignified way.”
When you do philosophy with offenders “you’ll meet their many selves ... their contradictions”, he says, but a common view of masculinity – a certain idea of manhood – is never far from the surface.
Prison populations are overwhelmingly male, and men commit violent crime at far higher rates than women. Against this backdrop, West confronts prisoners with the question: “What is a man?”
He explains: “There’s that Norman Mailer quote: Two men walk down the street and nod at each other; one of them loses.” It captures “the sense that masculinity is a zero-sum game. I don’t believe that but prison is a place where you can be persuaded of that theory because, you know, pride, shame, status, humiliation, it’s all very high stakes. So I discuss that with the men: Is there any difference between being a good man and a good person?”
Some academics and activists oppose the notion of a “male” set of values but, West says, “there’s a theory in sociology and criminology that in our culture we don’t regard masculinity as the problem, we regard failed masculinity as the problem ... and that sometimes, without wanting to sound too conspiratorial, the difference between success and criminality is whether you failed or succeeded”.
Convinced
West’s work in detention centres with teenage boys has convinced him that we need to investigate male self-image more deeply.
“I’m 40. It’s been a long time since I was a 15-year-old in school, and I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in this world of tech and everything, but it feels like when I was younger we used to talk about the crisis of masculinity and how do we adjust? I feel like it’s beyond crisis now.
“There’s a kind of nihilism amongst young men sometimes of ‘It’s all going to shit ... the reign is over.’ Whether that’s the reign of men or just the reign of human beings on the planet, there’s this apocalyptic cloud. And I think young men, either in their own personal lives, in their family lives, or in the education they’re receiving, don’t have the moral tools to meet that. So they go in for a kind of nihilism, a kind of ‘I’ll just take what I can get now’.”
West is acutely aware of the limitations of philosophy in meeting this challenge. In cases where teens are lacking a secure home or other basic goods, “there is always a question of: How much is conceptual analysis helpful here?” But philosophy can be effective in shaking up belief systems. “The opportunity of philosophy is that ... whatever’s going on, however challenging [the situation] is, there’s another way of relating to it; there’s another perspective.”
On reform of the criminal justice system, West is unimpressed at plans in the UK to create thousands of new prison places. Prison fails to meet its “expressed” aim of deterring reoffending, he says, but it’s very good at meeting an “unexpressed” aim – “the aim of creating an ‘us’ and a ‘them’.”
Ireland is also investing heavily in prisons, with 1,500 more spaces due to come on stream here by 2030, according to Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan. Perhaps along with bricks and mortar, O’Callaghan could spend a few bob on philosophers to work in these prisons too.
Irrespective of that, there’s a job to be done on bringing hidden questions to the fore in Irish society. Debate on gender can be fraught and sometimes ugly. But standing aloof, or shutting down difficult conversation, helps no one. For the sake of lost boys, we need to ask, both generally and within different groups or contexts: What is a man?
