Summary
Prison breaks loom large in both literature and pop culture. But how should we evaluate them ethically? New Generation Thinker Jeffrey Howard asks what a world without prison would look like. His essay explores whether those unjustly incarcerated have the moral right to break out, whether the rest of us have an obligation to help -- and what the answers teach us about the ethics of punishment today. Jeffrey Howard is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Dept at University College, London whose work on dangerous speech has been funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. You can find him discussing hate speech in a Free Thinking Episode https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006tnf
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics who can turn their research into radio.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello, I'm Shahed Abari, and welcome to this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, |
| 0:42.1 | in which we'll hear an essay from one of the 2019 New Generation thinkers. |
| 0:47.1 | They are early career academics who work with BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council |
| 0:52.9 | on a scheme that turns their research into radio. |
| 0:56.7 | I was one of the first ten people chosen for the scheme nearly ten years ago. |
| 1:01.7 | In this year's essays, you'll hear topics ranging from cleaning, clean energy, satire in Egypt, |
| 1:08.6 | anti-Semitism, the disappearing skills of Britain's textile industry, |
| 1:13.0 | Renaissance art, racism in techno music, and rethinking facial disfigurement. |
| 1:18.7 | Jeffrey Howard from University College London considers our attitude towards crime and punishment |
| 1:23.7 | in his essay called Prison Break. |
| 1:27.0 | Our story begins in the Sao Paulo state of |
| 1:29.8 | Southeast Brazil, where inmates at a number of prisons were looking forward to the Easter |
| 1:34.0 | holiday. Easter meant that family and friends could visit. For some offenders, it even meant |
| 1:39.3 | to prove trips home. Then the news came. Easter festivities, much like everything else in the world, were |
| 1:45.2 | cancelled thanks to COVID-19. Prison authorities didn't want all that towing and froing, all that |
| 1:51.0 | spreading of germs. Like so many of us whose holidays have been cancelled, inmates took the news |
| 1:56.2 | poorly. According to one source, as many as 1,500 of those Brazilian prisoners escaped. |
| 2:02.6 | This wasn't an isolated event. During the worst weeks of the pandemic, prisons around the world |
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