Mathem-Ethics in prison: how mathematics can enhance social skills

The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential power of mathematics in a socially difficult environment, as a high-security prison. More, we ask whether mathematics can enhance social skills (ethic skills, in particular), not only in prisoners: we present a mathematical experimentation involving prisoners, as those who, by means of mathematics, first learn ethic skills and then teach ethic skills to people from outside the prison, with a methodology we call “Mathem-Ethics”. The theoretical framework we work with is Horizontal Teaching, which provides a way to learn for both learners and teachers. We briefly discuss some results of the experimentation, in terms of its efficacy on people from inside and outside the prison.