Drew Leder is a professor of Eastern and Western philosophy at Loyola College. When he decided to teach a course in philosophy at Maryland Penitentiary, he hardly expected to find such eager, impassioned students among the hardened convicts, most of them serving life for murder. "The convicts cared about ideas, more than many of my Loyola College students, sentenced to serve out their required curriculum."

The dialogues the class had were so good, in fact, that Leder and his students started recording, transcribing, and publishing them. Forty-five class hours over a year and a half were edited into this book.

Each of the six parts of the book is devoted to a theme: power, architecture, space and time, sex and race, journeys, beginnings and endings. Within each part, two chapters contain transcripts of the class' dialogues, using a specific work--including those by Nietzsche, Malcolm X, and Joseph Campbell--as a springboard. In the remaining two chapters of each section, Leder reflects on how the class is going, what he's learning about his students and himself, what they're learning, and so on.

In the chapter, "Fields of Force," the class discusses a passage from Simone Weil's essay "The Iliad, Poem of Might," which examines "the rule of force in human affairs." Tray, who is serving time for first- and second-degree murder related to drugs, says, "It's like when you come through this penitentiary door, if you have a reputation of being soft, people will take your commissary stuff and kick you in the butt. But if you draw the line in the sand, you can live peacefully. Even for the judge in his courtroom, the president of the country, the business man--for anyone to enjoy their life anywhere, they have to embody some kind of force."

In fact, the defining trait of these dialogues is that the prisoners almost always discuss how the philosophy applies to themselves. This takes philosophy out of the abstract realm and the ivory tower, injecting it directly into the harshest areas of the real world. While discussing Michel Foucault's thoughts on discipline and punishment, the students talk about how they are kept under control. German philosopher O.F. Bollnow's essay "Lived-Space" leads to a talk on whether a prison can be a home, and Heidegger triggers a discussion on the various, sometimes contradictory ways that the inmates cope with life on the inside. The class also debates black male sexuality, prison sex, race relations, heroes, rehabilitation, violence, guns, self-examination, and personal transformation.