Chris Hedges on "Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison"

A powerful account of a journalist and teacher among American prisoners.

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Hedges and Eskow on The Zero Hour.

The US criminal justice system imprisons nearly 2.3 million people. They are confined in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails. That’s not counting military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.[1]

2.3 million people is more than the population of New Mexico, or Nebraska, or Idaho, or West Virginia, or Hawaii. It's more than the populations of Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming put together. Those states elect six members of the United States Senate.

The political world would look considerably different, and almost certainly better, if the imprisoned population of the United States had six senators representing them in Washington.

Chris Hedges has written a powerful and gripping book about teaching, and being taught by, prisoners in this massive and brutal internal penal colony. The book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, documents his experience teaching college courses on drama, literature, philosophy, and history in several New Jersey prisons.

In my conversation with him, Chris noted that

Sentences in the United States are three or four times longer than are in the rest of the industrialized world, including horrific drugs, sentences, three-strikes-you’re-out laws ... I have taught people in the prison who have life (terms) who have never physically harmed another person. About 40 percent of the people in our prison system have never been charged with physically harming another person ... "

At  7 minutes and 22 seconds in, one of his answers unexpectedly touched on the student debt crisis. "Especially when the program began, (we) weren't well treated by the corrections officers … Many of them don't like the program (because) it's free college education. They didn't get free college education."

With some reservations, I told Hedges that his book brought up some strong emotions for me – about my spiritual life, and about the numbing pain I sometimes feel dwelling day after day on poverty, death, inequality, climate harm, and all the other destructive forces around us. Most of the time, as the Bob Dylan song goes, my head is on straight. But sometimes, not so much. I asked him if that made any sense to him, and I appreciated his answer (at 23:15).

Well, I learned a long time ago that you can't allow oppression to become an abstraction. That's about knowledge of oppression without relationships to the oppressed. Because at that point the despair can overwhelm you. But when, as I did, you spend months of your life in Gaza and you develop relationships with Palestinians – and Gaza is the world's largest open-air prison – those relationships become real. Then it engenders a kind of anger, anger at the injustice that's been carried out against these people that you care about, which is certainly true in the prison.

You can't walk out of that prison and not be angry. If you're not, you don't have a heart. ... (but) I draw a line between anger and hate, anger over injustice. Anger, (over) what is done to human beings who you admire and respect and care for propels you forward. And I think that's why you never want to turn the oppressed into an abstraction. You always want to keep those relationships. Augustine said, Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage: anger at the way things are and courage to see that they don't remain the way they are. So those relationships, and I talk about them at the end of the book are, are in many ways what keep me going.

You can buy the book at your local bookstore or on bookshop.org. Chris Hedges’ essays and video interviews can often be found on Scheerpost.com, and he has a TV show on RT. You can see our entire conversation here.

[1] Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html