Abstract

Imprisonment in America has become a form of civil death that blocks the capacity of ordinary people to develop intellectually, creatively, and ethically in ways more harmonious with the polity. Prison paideia in the grain of the sophists reconnects the imprisoned with the polis by challenging all assembled to inquire freely about the nomos that has shaped their perceptions of things; to make the weaker cases about those things, including themselves, stronger; and through dissoi logoi, to discover a culturally diverse aretê animating the demos they could become.