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

[Music] it's always a joy to be at the sanctuary for independent media the work that the sanctuary does in troy i think is a model in many ways for the kind of grassroots community organizing and education uh and celebration uh of those voices that of course corporate media has locked out and corporate forces are attempting to subjugate um uh we really have to build from the ground up and and sanctuary is doing that i um in 2013 i've taught in the new jersey prison system now for a decade i first began teaching in the prison system uh before there was a college program now there is students can earn their college degree from rutgers university but when i went in it was that program wasn't there and it was composed of a handful of us led by the chairman of the history department of the college of new jersey celia chazelle we would teach semester-long courses we would buy the books for our students ourselves we had no academic accreditation so if people completed the coursework we would go home to our printers and print out certificates that said that they had done the work and put it in their files to hopefully help them when they reach the probation board to show that they had used their time inside prison uh wisely and and uh you know to try and develop their own their their own learning uh without the structure of a university in 2013 i had been teaching at a youth correctional facility called wagner and in 2013 uh rutgers began its program and i went to east jersey state prison in rahway new jersey and the first class i taught was one on drama and we read uh uh plays by august wilson and amira baraka and leroy jones this classic work dutchman uh we read panera we read uh uh the brother sister plays uh and unbeknownst to me one of the students in the prison uh whose nickname is kabir kabir in arabic means big and he was big uh was a devoted listener to wbai and had heard me on wbai the pacifica station uh in new york city and kabir uh went and recruited the best writers in the prison and when i first went into that classroom of 28 students i didn't know what level to expect and i began teaching i i like very much michelle alexander's great work the new jim crow uh i in every prison that i've taught i've taught in several prisons in the state of new jersey including the women's prison i bring in copies of that book even if i'm not teaching it for the course because i think the power of the book is that it explains to students caught up in a rigged judicial system that it's not just them it's not just their friends it's not just their neighbors but it's that the entire system has been gamed against them because of course most people in the american prison system never get a jury trial and that's not an accident that's by design 94 percent of the people in our prison system and let's acknowledge that we have the largest prison system in the world 25 percent of the world's prisoners and we are for 4.4 roughly percent of the world's population so they don't get a jury trial and they are coerced and i don't use the word coerced lightly they are coerced into be accepting a plea how does that work they stack you with a series of charges most of which they know you did not commit one of the favorite ones in the state of new jersey is kidnapping which is 25 years and that's the one they're always willing to lift and so you have a kind of negotiations between the public prosecutors who never spend more than 15 or 20 minutes on a case and the defense attorneys the public defense attorneys and people even if they are innocent of the crime to which they are charged are forced to plea out because if they don't then all of those charges are leveled against them and one of the tragedies in the prison system is that and i've now taught that hundreds of several hundred students in the system is that those with the longest sentences invariably did not commit the crime because they still believed because they were innocents they could go to court and get a fair trial and in fact when you go to trial because the system is designed to make sure that you don't go to trial because if everyone went to trial the entire system would break down it's not capable of carrying out that number of jury trials they have to make an example of you and the example becomes they give you these horrific sentences enhanced sentences life plus 50 kind of stuff um and and then they use you they say oh you want to go to trial well look at john or you know look at sabir or look at whoever and it works the other issue of course are rico laws which were done to round up the mob so one of the students in the class a guy named boris franklin who was the first student who got out from that class i met him at the gate with his mother and his sister he was in a room there was an altercation it was a drug deal went bad somebody got shot he didn't shoot the guy he didn't know the guy who got shot he was not but because he was in the room if you don't immediately call 9-1-1 everybody in that room gets charged and he was basically a single dad raising his son and he goes off to prison and when he gets out his son is in prison because he had no structure in fact tragically his son was in prison and was beaten to death by his cellmate and so i walked into that class and i didn't know what to expect most people in the class had very little experience with drama and this of course is part of the tragedy of a country that refuses to fund its arts so that august wilson arguably perhaps the 20th century's greatest playwright certainly one of the top two or three when he produces fences or joe turner come and gone or any of these other great plays that he wrote these students don't have 150 to go on buy a ticket on broadway and see it so i i taught just because i want people to understand first and foremost how the system works i taught michelle alexander's book and i could see these were older i had taught in the youth correction facility but older students in the prison people who've done 10 15 years already who are in their 30s 40s even 50s that's a different class very wary very careful one of the things we are all aware of when we teach in the prison is that the prison authorities put snitches in the class to report on the teachers to report on the students and the students were very careful very few of them had even seen a play and on that first class i said well when we finish with michelle alexander i think we spent three or four classes on it we're going to begin to write plays and it was not premeditated but i suggested that they write in dramatic form so that they would begin to have a kind of understanding of how playwrights write and i said you know write scenes from your own life whether before you were in prison when you were in prison and think how people speak to you when someone how do how do how does someone speak when they are feeling grief or how do you speak to someone who is grieving do you speak to a corrections officer the same way you speak to a fellow prisoner do you speak to a white person the same way you speak to a black person how do you speak to someone when you want something from them how do you speak with someone who you know wants something from you all of that has to be captured in dialogue and so we began reading the plays and i got those first set of 28 dialogues 28 they weren't scenes but three or four pages of dialogue and in the prison there's that musty kind of smell so when i take these took these stacks of papers home i would always carry that musty kind of smell of the prison home with me and i read through them and there were maybe four to a half dozen absolutely stunning scenes by people who really clearly knew how to write and understood the musicality of language and indeed although i didn't know it at the time what i had were poets and even people who had written books this went on for two three weeks and my wife is an actor graduate of juilliard classical actor in new york she's acted all over the country and i showed her the scenes and i said maybe they could write a play it wasn't premeditated at all and i went back and proposed to these students that we take their writings and form them into a play i was working on a book at the time which i had to put aside i'm allowed to add another class uh to the weekly schedule if students need remedial help and so uh being a bit of a tyrant i didn't get permission from anyone in the classroom i signed all 28 students up for remedial help they did whinge and groan a bit but they all showed up so we were doing two classes a week and we had to find a narrative i was running at the time a weekly meeting on saturday mornings for formerly incarcerated people out of a church in elizabeth new jersey and had run into a young man who had been targeted by police and i think this is something that people who don't live in these neighborhoods grasp that young especially men of color are are preyed upon by police predators over a period of years so that this young man was told by a certain police officer that he would be the first person to throw him in jail and how do they do it they do it by fabricating usually evidence in terms of drugs planning drugs that's very common i had a couple years before when i was with the new york times after i'd come back from overseas written an investigative story about the elizabeth police department where there was a secret group within that police department known as the family largely white officers i think they finally admitted a black officer because everybody even in the police department realized they were just another iteration of the clan it was bizarre headed by a lieutenant who had a he reportedly had a giant collection of nazi memorabilia in his house they had to swear allegiance on a yosemite sam flag you can't make this stuff up they used to go into the housing projects with loud speakers on their squad cars playing wagner's song of the valkyries and they had a 98 conviction rate because their trunks were filled with drugs that they planted on those they arrested and i was able to build a relationship with the courageous police officer in the department who funneled me all sorts of internal investigations grand jury reports and when i published the story that lieutenant and several of the people in the family were removed from the force none of the false convictions by the way that they had been visited on hundreds of young men were changed or investigate indeed in this class there was a student from elizabeth who was falsely charged he'd been the golden gloves champion of the state of new jersey been an army ranger and he actually brought that article with him to that first class so this young man who i interviewed was tackled by police charged and they planted drugs on him and he had a jail sentence he even he to this day wouldn't name the name of this police officer who is now a detective because he feared retribution and then there was a robbery and he was coming out of i believe a wendy's or a mcdonald's or something he's a large black man with dreads and they grabbed him the the the person who was robbed said it's them it wasn't him but as he said i fit the description i was a large black man with dreads he was haitian uh one of the uh very uh difficult things for him was that his mother who was dying he was taken care of who had cancer believed that because he was arrested he was guilty even though he wasn't and he who was the sole breadwinner for the family he was working raising his little brother taking care of his very ill mother who was about to die suddenly disappears swallowed up inside the system of mass incarceration so the jail system the prison system the finances of the family collapse of course because it's always so precarious to begin with and his brother who he had tried to protect from the streets goes out and starts to hustle and raises the money to get a lawyer that frees his brother who is eventually freed which as his uh lawyer said is uh in the american legal system the equivalent of haley's comet moment and he got out and i thought well i brought that i i interviewed him i taped an interview with him and and uh typed up the transcripts and brought them to the class and said well maybe we can build a story around this uh which we did uh and then uh we be we had to begin to flesh everything out so i remember one class i said um we need people to write a dialogue about a conversation with your mother and it doesn't have to be anything dramatic it could be just a very quiet tender moment something you remember and when we finished the class one of my students timmy came up to me and said well what if we're a product of rape and i said well timmy that's what you have to write and so in this play everything that eventually was produced in the play happened to someone in the classroom and what timmy wrote and he used his legal name anyone who's been in a prison system will tell you everybody's got about three names um his legal name was terence um what he wrote was set in the county jail and he had been arrested with his half brother and his half brother had a weapon and timmy told the police officers that the weapon was his and he wrote this phone conversation from the county jail with his mother and you don't hear his mother's voice you only hear him you don't understand ma you're right never mind what do you want me to say ma ma they were going to lock up bruce the chrome was in the car everyone in the car would be charged with murder if no one copped to it i didn't kill anyone ma oh yeah i forgot whenever someone says i did i did it i told them what they wanted to hear that's what the n-word is supposed to do in newark i told them what they wanted to hear to keep bruce out of it did they tell you who got killed did they say it was my father then you should know i didn't do it if i ever went to jail for anything would be killing him and he ain't dead yet rape done brought me into the world prison going to take me out and that's the way it is ma come on ma if bruce went to jail you would have never forgiven me me on the other hand i wasn't supposed to be here i'm sorry ma i'm sorry don't be crying you got bruce you got him home he's your baby bye ma i'll call you later he went to prison as he says to make sure the son his mother loved stayed home and at the end of this long process of writing the play i knew we couldn't read it in front of the other prisoners there was too much incendiary stuff in there and so i invited cornell west and the great theologian james cohn to come be the audience but when we got to the lobby of the prison i was with james and cornell the warden the administrator came and said you're not going to your classroom you're going to the chapel and they escorted us to the chapel and the back of the room was a phalanx of white corrections officers so when my class walked in they knew immediately what had happened and they all huddled in the front of the chapel to decide what parts of the play they could read because retribution would be taken out against them and what part they couldn't and i wanted to listen but i consciously backed off so that i couldn't hear the discussion because at that moment after four and a half months of work i realized it was theirs they owned it and timmy got up and read what i read to you and when the reading was finished he wasn't there and i said to everyone my students where's timmy and they said i think he's in the bathroom and i went and found him huddled weeping in the corner of the bathroom now one of the things that's important to understand about the american prison system is that the creation of units of isolation mcu's was a decision carried out in the early 70s as a way to isolate politically conscious people within the system especially from the black liberation movements so that they would come into the prison and immediately be isolated from the rest of the prison population not for any deletion that they had committed in the prison because they hadn't even had time to commit any but because the prison authorities were terrified of radical black figures instilling a kind of consciousness within the rest of the prison population so all of the members of the black panthers nation of islam five percenters black liberation army were immediately segregated from the general population and i knew about one of them audrey letullo who's out lives in elizabeth new jersey a member of the black liberation army arrested in his words for expro expropriating money from a capitalist bank for the movement got on a shootout with i believe it was newark police officers i asked him how it felt he said i felt like the freest black man in america they put him in isolation for 22 years and even now when you're isolated that long he's obviously brilliant incredibly well read he has trouble communicating because for so long normal human interaction and communication was denied to him and yet he resisted he refused to wear the uniform he'd walk around naked he told the other people on the tier they have runners these are people who work on behalf of the administrators who will bring food or distribute or bring the phone down or whatever he said stop you don't do that the guards do that when they found snitches there would mysteriously be fires set in their cells until on his tear there were no snitches left and he told me that in order to keep sane he would have conversations with great revolutionaries like george jackson and he said i reached a point where i was sitting alone in my cell and i felt like george jackson was sitting there with me and i knew that we had to incorporate that story into the play and so i spent six hours interviewing ojeri he was wary of course i went back to my class several of my students knew him most of my students had been in trenton which is the super max prison before they went to the maximum security prison in railway i said i don't i don't think oj trusts white people and they said no don't worry he doesn't trust anybody and he became what we call the old head that figure who has been in prison for decades and will probably die in prison and yet embodies that spirit of resistance i have visited the great mumiya abu jamal and on one visit i took cornell and james cohn if you don't know james cohn you should father black liberation theology the only theologian worth reading since maybe reinhold niebuhr author of the cross and the lynching tree martin malcolm in america the man who condemned the white christian church as the antichrist i took them up to see mumia and cornell who's amazing had his hands on mumia's shoulder shoulders and said to him you have frederick douglass in you brother romeo with the tears were running down with his face august wilson writes that the greatest blacks the greatest warriors in the black community are in prison because when everything was denied every avenue was closed they went out and got for their families what their families needed i taught the play and i love august wilson as a writer of course i admire him just sheer his sheer talent the lyricism of his writing which is completely musical and he he uses words in such a way that when you read them off the page they become a kind of blues anthem he wrote a play we read called joe turner come and gone and august wilson wrote a cycle of plays began in 1910 all the way up to the present his last play radio golf was about a slick well-educated black politician like barack obama who did the bidding of the white power elites but joe turner come and gone is set in a boarding house in pittsburgh almost all those series of plays are set in pittsburgh you may have seen ma rainey black bottom and if you haven't you should with the great violet davis and after slavery in the south the southern authorities set up a system of convict leasing which was slavery by another name except it was worse because when a human being was property and worth tremendous sums of money then it was in your interest to at least keep them alive but with convict leasing you seized black bodies and it didn't matter if you worked them to death and they were worked to death in the turpentine camps in florida on the plantations in mississippi and there was a figure there's a great book by the historian leon litwack he wrote two great books uh been in the storm uh and uh but one on reconstruction one on jim crow and he writes about a figure named uh tourney who was the um i believe it was tennessee i may forget the state uh who was the brother of the governor who would uh put convicts in cuffles long chains uh chained together in pairs uh and march them through plantation country and then for a fee white planters could buy those convicts and work them five seven years if they live that long and there's a blues song called joe turner's come and gone and so august wilson writes about a character in his play who had a young daughter and a wife and was seized and of course they were all seized for ridiculous crimes not that there aren't ridiculous crimes now uh that are imposed in poor neighborhoods uh mostly to fine poor people to fill up budget deficits uh my favorite being in in ferguson uh obstructing pedestrian traffic which means standing on a sidewalk and the play is about the arrival of this character who has been enslaved by joe turner and comes looking for his wife and he brings his daughter with him he is the woman had gone north and left the girl with her parents and in that brilliant play by august wilson there's a conjurer in the play and he he keeps talking about finding your song he keeps saying you must find your song because if you don't find your song you're lost and that's the song of your own history your own identity your own experience your own suffering and he talks about visions of lakes of bones bones skeletal remains of figures that have not found their song have not put the flesh back on themselves and it was very clear as i worked with my students on this play that what we are doing what we were doing in that classroom was writing that song that song that the wider society even members of their own family members in their own community do not want to hear much less validate and all the pain began to pour out and there's a lot of pain i had a student usually they say five years that's when the visits stop that's about as long as those on the outside can sustain them relationships crumble many of my students when they got to prison immediately told their wives or their girlfriends not to wait for them to think of them as if they were dead and my student one of my students wrote a scene about visiting his wife and son on a visiting day and suddenly his little boy who's about six starts talking about uncle jimmy and he realizes that his marriage is over and the last thing he says to his wife is i understand but at least bring my boy to see me and he never saw his boy again and i said how old is your son and he said 24. there are big guys in that room they called the 400 club that's all the guys who bench over 400 pounds and those exterior shells which are necessary to protect themselves physically and emotionally as they wrote this play as they wrote their song crumbled into dust and they would stand in front of that classroom with their hands shaking reading their truth a truth not only about them but about us a truth that condemns us as a society for the suffering we have visited upon them and their families and their communities the question was how would we end this play there's a code in prisons don't be a snitch don't cheat other people don't lie one of the things you find about prisons is that of course no one touches and if you if you touch or bump into someone by mistake you're immediately profusely apologetic unless you want to fight in fact prisons are probably one of the politest spots on the planet and so in the trajectory of this play the boy who goes out into the streets to hustle to get the money for a lawyer to free his brother doesn't make it because my student said if he went out into the streets when he was 16 he would have been eaten alive and so he's killed and the killer in the play comes to prison now the code of the prison is that it's the duty of the brother to kill the man who killed his brother that's the code my students said that in fact that code is ignored more than it's enforced and that you each pretend that the other doesn't exist and so it came down at the end of that play they were writing to a decision on the part of his name as omar to take out the killer because it's what the code demands in the mess hall the mess halls along with the yard are the most volatile and potentially dangerous places in a prison and he has this discussion we left audrey's name as it was an audrey the old revolutionary who's making him read george jackson has this discussion with him peace brother you all right omar it come up how do you know omar the transfer log name on the list on his way push that's his nickname push is being a nickname for being pushed into the other world push be in this prison soon and he got my brother's blood on his hands audrey your mind made up omar i got my shank and you know who was four omar nods gravely audrey nods gravely audrey shank and push ain't bringing back quan i wish you'd bury that shank and keep your eyes on getting out besides most of that prison code of fiction lots of guys in here look the other way omar i decided this a long time ago audrey audrey well son i'll tell you what to prepare for when they come and get you because they're going to get you have your hands out in front of you with your palm showing you want them to see you have no weapons don't make no sudden moves put your hands behind your head drop to your knees as soon as they begin barking out commands omar my knees this ain't a debate i'm telling you how to survive when you get to the hole you ain't going to be allowed to see nobody or have nothing why because they don't want you sending messages to nobody before they question the brothers on the wing internal affair is going to come and see you're going to want a statement the pig's going to let the cold in going to mess with your food going to wake you up every hour so you can't sleep going to use the dogs going to put a spotlight in front of your cell going to harass you with all kinds of threats going to send in the turtles give you beat downs maybe a dry cell no water unless they feel like turning it on how long until they break you until they don't three days three weeks if you don't think you can take it that don't start putting yourself through this hell tell them what they want to know from the door you're going to be in the mcu for the next two three years you're looking at a life bid they wait for you to self-destruct self-mutilate paranoia panic attacks hearing voices hallucinations i've seen one man swallow a pack of double a batteries then you get restraint hoods restraint belts restraint beds waist and leg chains i've seen a lot of men break you ready you sure this is what you want i ain't living in this prison with push i feel you son i feel you but if you think you're going to regret it don't do it i may not see you for a while audrey yeah quite a while you do this malcolm george jackson they coming with me audrey i had long talks with brother jackson could almost see him sitting in the cell stay strong omar now the end of the play became that moment when omar goes into the mess hall to shank push and boris student who got out first the big guy benches about 4 15 while he was in prison wait outside the mess hall to stop someone going in from shanking another prisoner and he wrote the scene and he assumed the role of slash one of the older old head prisoners who waits outside the mess hall so slash sees omar coming he knows that there's a shank hidden inside his uniform what's up youngin omar what's up slash let me holler you for a minute omar walks over to slash omar what's happening slash whispering i know you're going in there to stab that boy they say killed your brother omar yeah slash yeah the whole prison know it oh my word slash you don't think he know what's up homer i don't give a what do you know slash well i give a what do you know because them n n-word he'd be eaten with ain't sitting with him for nothing they with him because they watch in his back i watched him put his team together the moment he walked in there because in his mind he got to kill you before you kill him omar you right he gotta kill me that n kill my brother and i don't give a who he with they can get it too the two stared each other intently slash yeah i can dig it i know you want to kill that n-word and that feeling like and that feeling ain't promised to ever go away but i know one thing you're going to want to get out of here one day and if you kill him you ain't never leaving this prison omar i don't give a slash you don't give a now omar that's right how you know i got a shank audrey slash i'm doing this for your pops who isn't here to do it himself he done lost one son that's enough slip me the shank any shank and to be done be done by me i'm gonna die in here one way or another but neither of us shank in that boy enough blood and hate as it is i ain't saying you got to forgive him but you got to let him live he'd be dying in here with me and it's uncle bib's job to see you get out one of us gonna have a life omar quan wasn't cutting into his game he could barely sell anything once i got locked up push took quan out because of me kwan's death my fault this is the least i can do i don't matter no more slash you got your son you got your sister they don't hardly come and when they do my boys sit in sulk he tired of me preaching to him from behind a plexiglas wall or on a phone i wasn't able to be a father to him i tried but he sees i'm powerless he do what he wants he angry and he got every right to be angry slash you do this you'll never get out you'll never be a father omar zaire be a man when i get out that don't mean he don't need you omar i know the code says you gotta shank him that's the public code there's another code it says he stay away from you you stay away from him he a phantom you a phantom and there's more people than you think playing by this code i can't be living in here with push you know how i got my life sentence and slash explains that he shanked and killed another prisoner and then he talks about being sent to ads ag seg that's where you go while they judge whether you're guilty or not for you get sent off to an isolation unit i spent over a year and ag said before i realized he says uh he gets to add seg and he hears in his head this voice screaming what the did you do what the did you do i spent over a year and ag said before i realized that voice was mine i watched a lot of dumb people come and go but i've been here ever since listening to the same sounds wearing the same clothes and finally home our hands the shank over and most of my students are muslim and slash says come to juma come to prayers with me friday it don't matter what you believe when you line up in a row with the other brothers you're going to get their strength feel their spirit and you're going to need it you're going to need a lot of it because you've still got a while before you get out of here and i'm going to make sure you get out of here hear me give me the shank omar everything in that play happened to someone in my classroom including the moment when one of my students is locked in a cell in trenton and the guard tells him that that was his father's cell that last night of the class i held that script in my hand their song and i told them i don't know anything about producing plays but i'm going to take it to every theater director i'm gonna i can find to make your song heard and it was in 2018 produced by the passage theater in trenton new jersey and every single night it was sold out because people in trenton understand the montrosity and have suffered from the monstrosity of mass incarceration and we had one night for the families of my playwrights and four minutes into that play i heard sniffling and weeping and finally sobbing for the entire 90 minutes their song is our song it's a song about us as a society a society that has failed the most vulnerable among us a society whose protean forms of racism and slavery have never changed prisons or plantations they are run like plantations with white overseers and people of color enslaved because no prison functions unless the work is done by prisoners and that's why to close finally i believe the only solution to mass incarceration our nationwide prison strikes that demand that those inside prisons earn the minimum wage instead of in states like new jersey 22 cents an hour or in states like georgia nothing over 1 million american prisoners work for for-profit corporations and indeed in states like california they are telling labor-intensive employers you don't need to produce your products in bangladesh or vietnam we have a bonded labor force and they can't strike and you don't pay them for sick days and you don't have to pay social security and if they're unruly they disappear dostoevsky understood that if you want to understand the heart of any society you must go inside its prisons that is where you will see the true face of america because what they are doing to them they seek now to do to the rest of us it's been certainly one of the greatest honors of my life to be with these students i do not believe that i could have undergone what they underwent and become who they have become men and i have taught in the women's prison and women of dignity brilliance and integrity and integrity formed in the chains that we put around them thank you [Applause] so is there anyone in the audience who would like to ask chris a question right now about the writing of the book the process of the class and expect this first of all thank you for the work that you've done in schools and your contribution to everything that i know that those prisoners cherish while they're in there in that world i'm a formerly incarcerated individual uh i can't say about 17 of my 39 on this planet um here in new york state i'm wondering i probably know the answer is but i know that a lot of other people might not know what were the challenges that you had were you did you face any backlash from security guards correction staffs for and and what was it how bad did it get that's a good question you understand the system they hate the teachers and that they know that if they treat the teachers the way they treat the families they won't have teachers in the prison so it's been a constant battle um and it's a constant battle for us to retain professors because uh you don't get rewarded in academic apartments for teaching in a prison you get rewarded for writing books or papers or attending conferences and of course logistically you have to be there an hour before this was a common occurrence in wagner where there'd be lockdowns because of altercations in the prison so i could be sitting in that classroom for an extra two hours until there was movement in the halls so yes there there's an anger on the part of the guards that we're giving a college education to people they demonize and despise there's a constant expressions of hostility um and you know we have to i always feel like when i go in the prison i'm just i have to put on my step and fetch it act because if even if they're provoking you you can't respond which is also true for my students and they will seek to provoke you so yeah there's a hostility to the program i will say that it's gotten better because for instance in east jersey state prison we have 140 students in the college program but we have several hundred who want to get in it you have to it's quite a rigorous admission process and you can't get in if you've got charges if if you're you know if you've had problems within the prison if your record isn't clean and so in fact behavior because people want to get an education has improved and therefore the work of the corrections officers has been uh or you know or the corrections officers don't have to carry out as much draconian force because people are trying to get into the program but yes and we have in the uh i have taught in the super max prison but they won't put the college program in there because in the words of a corrections official they're all going to die in there anyway which for me is is fails to understand the importance of the system because in many ways what what i'm trying to do what we're trying to do is create teachers people who build an education are within that system and in my last class that i taught i had two students who graduated from rutgers summa laude who were my teaching assistants had a student he's out thank god i had a student he was arrested at the age of 14 in camden new jersey for a crime he did not commit his parents were dead he was living in abandoned house he was 90 pounds barely illiterate accused of a murder and a rape and taken into a room by three burly large camden city police detectives forced to sign a confession which he couldn't he didn't even know what was in it he gets to court he hears it he tries to protest its uh uh his uh i think very true claims that he didn't know what was what he had signed his name to are dismissed by the judge and he was sentenced as a 14 year old boy to a term where he could not go before the parole board until he was 70 years old and he is one of my best students if i would even mention a book and these people have very little money and resources he would try and get it and read it i taught a course called conquest a history course we read open veins of latin america bury my heart at wounded knee and clr james's black jacobins on the haitian slave revolt the only successful slave revolt in human history which haiti has been paying for ever since and at the end of the class the class left and he came up to me and he said i know i'm going to die here in this prison but i work as hard as i do because one day i'm going to be a teacher like you and he walked out and i people often ask me about hope that's hope for me i can live off of that for a long time does it change the world does it overthrow the system of injustice no and through courageous a courageous public attorney we got him into a re-sentencing hearing because of his sentencing as a juvenile and he has no family and so i went and i am an ordained presbyterian minister he's muslim and i put on my clerical collar which i never wear and i went to that courtroom and they don't tell you what case or we didn't know those of us in the watching the hearings trials none of us knew who was coming next and i got there 10 in the morning and i sat there until late afternoon until i was the only one left and the sheriff's deputy would open the door to let the prisoner into the court shackled of course and at the end of the day he opens the door to let lawrence in and sees that the only one there's this white guy in a clerical caller he said who's that minister and lawrence goes that's my pastor and that for me is what ministry is about i'm not trying to bring anyone to jesus i'm trying to show them what a life of faith is about and that means standing with the crucified of this earth and if necessary you must be willing to be crucified with them i once asked daniel berrigan the great radical priest how he defined faith he said the belief that the good draws to it the good even if empirically everything around us says otherwise and lawrence is out and he had no family or money and so we raised money to get him an apartment and my garage was filled with donated furniture all from formerly incarcerated people and he graduated in december summa laude from rutgers okay does anyone have any more questions how do you think you achieved like that level of vulnerability it wasn't easy because in order to survive in that environment you have to have a very thick protective shell my friend ron pierce who was in for 31 years said you know when a family member dies when you suffer grief you got to do your grieving alone he said you can't put any more grief on these brothers this is a house of grief i think because i was honest because i didn't pretend to be anything i wasn't because i didn't try to be cool because i didn't pretend that i knew where they came from and i think because they sensed that i truly cared and i do care i mean to be honest every class my last class in every prison i cry and nobody ever cries in a prison except me i cry because i leave them behind people sometimes say how do you keep going what keeps you i said anger if you walk out of that prison and you're not angry you don't have a heart but it was a gradual process which i write about in the book that those walls broke down slowly but of course it's trust and in a prison environment people are very wary of trusting but i think they knew that i was real that i was genuine that i cared and that i wasn't afraid to show that i cared all right well thank you and thanks sanctuary do great work keep it up i'm really honored to be here thank you [Applause]

Channel: mediasanctuary

Views: 48,180

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Id: rlVPCK8lHCI

Length: 64min 52sec (3892 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021