There are few things more corrosive to the moral life than what might be called 'false necessities': the idea that things just have to be a certain way, that there are no real alternatives. Such assumptions often represent an impoverishment of historical memory, not to mention of moral imagination. And they can permit forms of injustice to become entrenched as mere givens in our common life.



Modern life, we fear, is littered with false necessities. And so each month, throughout this our fifth year of The Minefield we plan to devote one show to scrutinising some of these 'necessities', to ask whether they may not be necessary at all, and if it's time to consider alternatives.



To kick off 2019, we’re considering whether prisons can any longer be morally justified? Can we find a moral equivalent to incarceration? Is it time to commit ourselves as a society to the abolition of prisons, in the same way that slavery was abolished?