Stoicism in Prison

How the Ancient Philosophy is Rehabilitating Offenders in Modern Britain

I was moved and inspired by this video by the Aurelius Foundation, a not-for-profit in the UK that promotes and applies Stoicism for social benefit. The Foundation is supporting the teaching of Stoicism as part of offender rehabilitation programs.

The idea is thanks to the work of Andy Small, a prison officer and physical trainer, whose mentorship and training program, “Stoicism and Self-Mastery”, for offenders at HMP Huntercombe, a prison in Oxfordshire, England, has had such excellent results in rehabilitation that the program will be expanding to more prisons in the UK.

One prisoner says of the program, “I wish I’d learned this [Stoicism] at school, I wouldn’t have come to prison.” Offenders are not only finding the philosophical and psychological tools for healing problems like aggression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, but also applying Stoic principles to benefit their own communities. So the program not only improves the lives of prisoners, but has a wider benefit to society by helping reform offenders as better citizens and saving expenditure on continued incarceration.