OUR CLASS

Activist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Hedges recounts his time teaching in a New Jersey prison.

Hedges, the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, The Wages of Rebellion, and other hard-hitting books of politics and current affairs, originally set out to become a minister. He was denied ordination after turning to journalism, spending years reporting on the U.S.–sponsored war in El Salvador and other conflicts around the world. When he accepted an invitation to teach at a state prison in Rahway, New Jersey, the work “returned me to my original calling as a minister working with those who lived in depressed urban enclaves.” It was hit or miss at first, he recounts: “I was from the outside. I was not poor. I was white. I was educated. These were not assets.” Some inmates were disengaged, and some acted out, to which he reacted by sternly removing them from the roster. In time, protected by prisoners who commanded the respect of their peers, he broke through. Hedges is unsparingly critical of a carceral state that exists, it seems, only to warehouse those who have fallen afoul of it. As he writes of a state prison in Trenton, he was able to teach only noncredit courses there because, said one official, “They will die in there anyway.” In the case of East Jersey State Prison, though, Hedges was able to build a body of students who actively engaged in texts by a range of writers and in writing texts of their own—especially, inspired by the play Fences, which explores “how the white-dominated world crushes the dreams and aspirations of Black men and women,” collectively produced dramas. In the end, Hedges reports, 27 men and women who entered the prison system’s “transformative education” program finally earned degrees, an inspiring result that one hopes will be repeated in penal institutions everywhere.

An affecting book in which every page urges more humane treatment of prisoners.