Our Class

May 1, 2021

Since 2013, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedges has taught drama, literature, philosophy, and history in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison. Here, he returns to his first class there, where 28 students read plays by authors including Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, then wrote scenes crafted over the years into a play. Called Caged, it is credited to the New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative and expresses the inmates' suffering, frustrations, and dreams. In 2018, it had a sold-out run at Trenton's Passage Theatre and was published in 2020 by Haymarket Press. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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August 1, 2021
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.

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August 16, 2021
Journalist Hedges (War Is a Force) delivers a raw and intimate chronicle of his experiences helping a group of inmates at East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, N.J., to write, act, and stage an original play. Describing mass incarceration as “the civil rights issue of our time,” Hedges notes that the U.S. “imprisons a larger percentage of its Black population than did apartheid South Africa.” He sketches his students’ backgrounds to explain how “the social hell of urban America” can lead to incarceration at a young age, and documents stirring classroom discussions of plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson. Throughout, Hedges’s frustration with how U.S. society treats inmates and the formerly incarcerated as “second class citizens” shines through, and he persuasively argues that after his students completed their play and performed it in the prison chapel for an audience including philosopher Cornel West, “it did not matter how the world looked at them. It mattered only how they looked at themselves.” Combining searing, well-informed critiques of the U.S. criminal justice system with sympathetic character profiles and inspirational accounts of intellectual and emotional breakthroughs, this is a powerful look at how creative expression can provide “a taste of freedom.”

September 1, 2021
Pulitzer-winning journalist Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour, 2018) documents the efforts of his drama class students in East Jersey State Prison to write Caged, a play consisting of scenes from their lives. In the first few chapters, Hedges explains his call to service by means of both ministry and journalism, through which he could amplify voices of oppressed people. The narrative then shifts to precarious relationship-building with his students, mistrustful of do-gooders, as they study plays about prison experiences and the works of Black playwrights. Social critiques from James Baldwin, Michelle Alexander, and Black revolutionaries frame the men's story of liberation from social stereotypes that erase their identities and a prison system that discourages community among them. Their writing becomes a liberatory act of agency and resistance through which they reclaim their identities. Their writing process and discussions of class materials show them as vulnerable, scholarly creators with their own body of knowledge. Through the men's labor of love, Hedges calls on us to question our view of incarcerated people and our understanding of education's purpose.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.