cash prizes and you have a shot at winning the grand prize. entries must be received before january 20th. for competition rules, tutorials or how to get started, visit the website and student cam.org. .. o he is also the author of numerous folks in the circle finalistst. war is a force that gives us meaning. the new book we will be discussing tonight. drama, literature philosophy and history and the college degree program offered by rikers

university at east jersey state prison and other correctional institutions and our state since 2013. students read and discussed plays and set out to write a play of their own. you can hear more about that process. a core part of the book. the title of the book is art class. transformation in american prisons. a place in a voice to our society that too often demonizes . a reporter and producer for wlr and which he covers various issues and state politics. he was an investigative reporter and producer in the television series and a digital reporter.

danielel is also an alumnus of miami-dade college. with that, here comes chris hedges and daniel labelle. [applause] >> hello. how is everyone doing. thank you for that intro. before we get started, i think just to set the tone, make light of something that i think a lot of us forget. a lot of us in this room have probably done something that could've put us in the prison system. we may not have been caught, we may have been caught, a lot of

us including myself have done things that could've put us in the prison system. i want to just lay that out there. i think that there are a lot of times where people talk about the county jail or the state prisons, federal prisons, no, no , on the same thing. different things happen to us along the way. >> and i just comment on that. very important point. i won't go into it, but one of my students in prison was in a bar and his girlfriend was offered a line of coke in the bathroom and the guy who offered her the coke tried to rape her. she ran screaming out of the bathroom and he killed the guy.

and he spent 32 years in prison forr that. i told him the story of my own experience. i think that it completely addresses that point. very smart. i ran a small church in boston when i was a seminary student. i was also a member of the greater boston ymca boxing team. there was only one air conditioning unit that was on the first floor this very dilapidated house. it was a small alley between the church and the house where i heard screaming. i lived in the neighborhood so i knew what was happening. i also knew that they had knives in their pockets. i had to disable them as fast as i could before they could get their hands in their pockets and pull out their knives. there is no heroics with this. anyone whoee has been around the

heroin addict knows that they are just bones. i am throwing them against the brick wall to immobilize them and get the girl out. i could have easily killed one. my sole goal was to essentially disable them physically and remove thel girl. i always tell that story to my student. it could have easily gonet the other way. what i was trying to get out, by opening with that, it comes down to whether you are in the system are not in the system. just may be an inch, a matter of one small decision or not. there are other factors that play. the other reality is, the people that are in prison generally do not look like the people in this room.

myself included. so, chris, to start talking about your book, you have one student in your book who becomes obsessed with something that a judge told him upon sentencing. the judge said that he is irredeemable. this character really, you are getting to know him take that to heart and really makes it almost a life lesson to try to prove othe judge wrong and to prove that he is indeed a person of dignity, despite everything he has done in his life. and i think that general feelinu is one of the themes of this book. can you. just speak to us about that? >> i look at mass incarceration as the civil rights issue of our age. 2.3 million prisoners, 40% of whom are not charged with

physicallyly harming another hun being, drug laws, sentences are three-four times longer than they are anywhere else in the world. of course, they don't get a jury trial. railroaded into the prison system, coerced into accepting a plea. it as a bargaining ship. we will remove this, we will remove that and you are forced to accept the plea. those are the longest sentences with thoseho that are inevitably insisting on a jury trial. the reason they insisted on the jury trial is in most cases, and my anecdotal experience, almost all experience, they did not commit the crime. they thought the system would validate their innocence.

chit did not remove any. they have the longest sentences. you are speaking about one of my students. i teach through rutgers university. these are exceptional men. i have also taught exceptional women in the university. they are serious scholars, serious intellectuals. one of them is lawrence bell. lawrencehe bell, his father died when he was two, his mother died when he was nine. he was living as an orphan in an abandoned building in camden new jersey. the poorestic city in america. year after year, usually per capita has the highest homicide rate in america. there is a wait and a murder.

the camden city police attacked this dragged into the police station. nobody is watching out for him. there is no guardian, no legal representation. coerced into signing a confession. he does not know what it is and it. he attempts to protest. you are right. the judge in his sentence, remember, he is on trial. cause him irredeemable. that does not mean you get out at 70. the first time around. he like so many of my students just decided to be the best person he could become.

notha what you do with what life gives you. he rose to get into this program i taught of course after this. the revolution, the haitian slave herbals, the only successful in human history. haiti has been paying for it ever since. he waits until everyone leaves the room and he says to me, i know i will die in this present. one day i'll be a teacher like you and walks out. the quota to the story, which

you know because you have read the book is a wonderful public defender in new jersey jennifer's colletti, not paid for this spent two years working on this case. he won't release him unless he has an address that he can go to . the garage was filled with household items donated by other formerly incarcerated and i am, i don't wear it on my sleeve, i am an ordained presbyterian minister and for that court date i put on my clerical collar. i was all he had. they did not at least give those of us in the courtroom a schedule.

i am waiting for lawrence to be brought before the judge. the court room is empty. their shares deputy would open the side door. he sees that i am therefore lawrence. that is my pastor. almost all of my students are muslim. as somebody who comes out of the left-wing tradition of the church, my father was a presbyterian minister, very involved in the antiwar movement . very involved in the civil rights movement. his youngest brother was yay and my father had a particular sensitivity tof the pain of beig a yay man in america in the 50s and 60s.

it is about the great theologian writes standing with the crucified. the bureau chief for the new york times. i spent seven years in the ndmiddle east. tremendous respect for as long.o he graduated summa comb audi from rutgers. they have admitted they have done violent things. we look in a violet society. i know several people.

they surround us in this culture that we are in. writing this book in particular. it really calls for empathy. i am curious, we always confront the justice system, prison system, just a scale of it. in one case it is pervasive in every part of the country. when you think about empathy, a lot of times they admitted they had done pretty bad things or they were in cross country in close proximity to it. how do you think about the potential of sympathizing in scaling it up.

>> they are not there crime. that is what is important to remember,tw number one. number two, they pay. not with money, but with their life. separated from their communities, family and children i always tell my students, i don't know who you were 20 or 30 years ago, and i don't care. i know who you are now. i believe in the possibility of transformation. i believe in the possibility of redemption. i am not naïve. spent 20 years abroad. killers frighten me, but in fact , very few killers and a prison. finding and enjoyment.

those people are ostracized within the prison. once telling my students i cover the war in el salvador for five years. most of them did not want to get shot. when there was an ambush, they would take their m-16 and crouch down and fire it over their head my student said it is just like a drive-by. they have powerful weapons. especially if these automatic weapons that you can buy. they are not trained to use them . in an impulsive moment, a moment of fear, killings take place. remember, they are often very young. reason why the army and marine corps recruit kids 18 years old. their brains are not fully developed. they are subject to peer

pressure. so, you know, how do you deal with that? my students where there crime like a scarlet letter. not inadvertently, but i know that it is there. it is obviously for those that were killed and their families, but it is also a burden for them because they have a conscience. there is an expression that you age out of crime. i am teaching at a maximum security prison. i think that that is kind of rights. they age out of crime. when you are in an industrialized community and you are working in the illegal economy, you cannot go to the courts. all illegal economies depend, for those people that function within them, on enforcers.

on people that will carry out acts of violence. it is a kind of predatory environment. i deal with a lot of students who were big dealers and there is an entire subset, according to them of groups that just pray on drug dealers because they have drugs and they have money and they won't call the cops on you. i had a few points in the book. you draw from parallels between the deprivation you have seen in inner-city america, especially the northeast and some of the scenes that you confronted as a war correspondent. if you grew up poor, prison is not a culture shock.

basically, the conditions outside prepare you for the conditions inside. j just in terms of the social contract about whether you abidc by the rules that we have in place, the laws we have in place, then you feel that country is letting you down, you are less likely to abide by those rules". it is a pretty harrowing picture of america. a lot of us like to pretend it does not exist. t can you show me a little bit about the parallels that you do drop, what you are seeing in parts of the united states. >> i covered five years and central america, i was in gaza, i was in xhosa vote. what you have is a breakdown of social systems. you rupture what the sociologists would call social

bonds. the gradebook on suicide. my last book was calledto america's farewell to her. arguing that when you are no longer integrated into a society, a sense of place, dignity, all of that is taken away from you, then he writes that you engage in self instructed such as violence, opioid use, suicide, hate groups because he said those that seek the annihilation of others are driven by self annihilation. that would characterize war. in a war environment, if you think about it, every system that nurtures and protects life is targeted and destroyed.

they turned it into a bonfire. so, that was a parallel, i think the kinds of activities, remember, in order to function, they are forced into the illegal economy in one way or another. the constant evictions, they have been in the parcel system. constantly changing schools. no stability. the social bonds are destroyed. i think that that is a parallel to what i have witnessed in war zones. with the same kind of result.

the place where a lot of the book takes place. the x-ray machines for different layers of barricades and they go into excruciating detail about what a strip search actually means in a prison system.

>> by the time you get to the epicenter you are strip to all of humanity. in order to survive in that environment you have to build these emotionally protected walls. you see it as a sign of weak as. he buys contraband for $200. sending them to solitary confinement for a year. the psychologically quite robust people start screaming and there is feces spirit all over the wall and you crazy. yet that 25% of our prison

population that is severely mentally ill. eventually you get the shakes. you are as a homicide. that was, i think what was so unique about their classroom. people began to write scenes about their life. performed at the theater in trenton, sold out at night and then publish. all about these invisible walls.

they are trapped. people of color. it is meant to be, you are turned into an object. you settled on what this will do . what was running through your mind. running through your heart when you saw it start to calm down. w

it was miraculous. because when the door closed, it was as if the prison was not there. it was accidental.en i did not plan on it. maybe because it was organic that is why it works. i had 28 students in that class. they had listen to me and knew who i was. listening to the station in new york. he recruited the best writers in the prison. a half dozen very, very talented writers of people that wrote poetry, one had written a book. when i started teaching, i was teaching august wilson, baldwin, the brother sister plays which i think are set in miami. especially the middle one. >> yes. >> he is also the playwright.

they had"m never seen a play because they did not have $150 to go to new york. little familiarity with drama. i want you to get used to the dialogue so that you understand the engine of how theater works. so why bring home the first set of 28 scenes. all handwritten on lined paper. i am not a playwright. a full-time editor for my class. teaching the class.

i needed more time. i could sign up students for remedial help, on a friday night , just without asking, the ctierney of being a professor,i sign-up the entire class and then announce it. a little grumbling, but they all showed up. by writing about their loss, their trauma, their grief, everything that they had undergone, they could not hold back these emotions that were buried inside of them. they are big guys. they call it the 400 club. benching over 400 pounds. these big guys, you know, would get up, some of them covered with prison tattoos and their hands would be shaking in their eyes welled up with tears.

there is a story in the book. trying to work on the scene with the mother. everybody for the next class got to write a dialogue. one of my students came up and said what if we are a product of rape. i said, well, that is what you have two rights. everything in that play happen to someone in that classroom. locking into the prison in trenton. on the first night the guard comes and tells him that that was ahe cell his father was in e he is from paterson new jersey. he was in the car with his half-brother. the weapon belongs to us have brother. if no one takes responsibility for the weapon and they are all charged with weapons possession,

but to me says is mine, the conversation is i was never supposed to do this anyway and you have the sun you love. >> after the play is done, one of your students come out and you guys rework it. it is ultimately performed in trenton new jersey for a full month, i understand. amazing. before it was ran for the public, you all had a night where you brought the families of your students and, and only them. can you tell us how that was? why it was important for them to get a special audience? >> we had read august wilson's

great play. where wilson writes these plays every decade. this one is set i think around 1910. the turn-of-the-century. if you have not seen black bottom, watch it. it is dunning. i had taught, actually, i had taught two great works in the storm on reconstruction and trouble in mind on jim crow. after the civil war, with emancipation, suddenly, black bodies were criminalized. especially when they needed to pick the cotton or spent time in

camps in northern florida where we do not know. >> the mortality rate, we don't know, staggering. because it was slavery by another name, but they did not buy them. they did not have to pay for them. it did not matter if they died. they would pick you up for some fictional crime. today it is loose cigarettes or obstructing pedestrian traffic. and they would put you -- in march you down the river and people would pay a small fee. a seven year. you would be a slave. this character with all of that bitterness is coming north to try to find his wife who has come to pittsburgh.

a conjurer in the play. the ancestors, the voices are extremely important. i think for august wilson, the piano and others are about because the dominant society is never going to tell you who you are, where y you came from. they will give you the fictional narrative for those that we have power. this character, which means he has to find out where he came from, who he was, in order to behold. that was for me what that becamr their song. that last night when i left the prison, we were morning, really, what we had was so powerful and so unique.

i read that in the first paragraph of the book. the bond that we created exists to this day, especially as my students get out, some of them. it was making that song heard. the writer got out and when i first said who wants apart, only seven students said that they wanted parts. by the end, we had to write a play with 21 parts. but then to put it on state i promised them i would work as hard as i could. we had to play with 28 characters. my wife helped and a theater director in new york workshop date at his expense which was key. so that we could create a

central kind of core, you know, half dozen or eight characters that we could build the play around. that was their song. our goal, my goal was to make that heard outside of the prison walls. we did not want anyone else.te we only wanted the families. it is interesting when you talk about the strip search. we had a fair number of formerly incarcerated. t in the play there was a strip search. they are constantly strip-searched. they are strip-searched every time they come out of the cell. every time you care to visit, you are strip-searched every time you come out of the visitingl room. you pulled a curtain between the prisoners and their families.au it is quite dramatic.

they are being strip-searched. staff writes about it in the book that you open your mouth, lift your nut sack and then the guards would make you redo it so after you touch your genitals, you put your fingers in your mouthyo again. it is to humiliate you. it was the most traumatic for both the families and even people that triggered stuff for people that had been incarcerated. but after about four or five minutes into the play, i heard sobbing and just weeping for the entire 90 minutes of the play. but we wanted a space, one of those nights where those families could hear that song. of course it was incredibly powerful.

>> the process of you writing the play and you getting to know your students, not just writing the play itself, but you introducing them to a lot of drama and books and intellectuals and whatnot, just through the course of the book you see people grow into themselves and grow into what they may be never thought they could have been. you strive against a monolithic evil. it is the prison system itself. resistance mattered. it seems to me that even by saying that the prison system is evil is just calling attention to the moral imperative of

resisting it. it is not a small thing. especially for those on the inside. it doess not bring, because your writing is very moralistic. you flaunt your colors. the broader society, so many of us do not pay attention to what happens in the criminal justice system. do not think about it. onxp a broader scale, considerig your experience on the inside, your relationships with the people in their and on the inside, what is a state of the morality of this country. it seems to be an open question. >> well, within the lives of individuals and societies, we live in the deaf saturated

culture. we live in a culture that does not invest in people, but invests in systems of control. the fact that we have abandoned huge numbers of people, including the white working class which has led many of them into the embrace of a demagogue like trump and trump is not going away, whether it is trump again or not, i don't know. remember, if you are black, you are disenfranchised from this society. you are thrown into a criminal caste system. i don'tn' know what the status s in florida. proposition four or p something. >> yeah, amendment four. >> you can't vote, you lose your passport, you can't get public housing. my students are, many of them,

just the last few days, well, the guy who recruited all of the students for my class two years out, he is still homeless. he got a job at whole foods. during covid. the courts were closed. they ran a background check and he was fired. i went to the manager, i might as well been talking to a deaf person. it did not make a difference. >> hthat is why you had the recidivism rate within fiveow years.. because of all of the hurdles that were thrown up. it really gets down to making money off of the bodies of black and brown people. because, on the streets of adia industrialized city, they don't generate money for the corporate state. if you lock him in a cage they

generate 60 or $70,000 a year. everything. we talk about private prison. tthe bigger problem is everythg within state and federal prisons is prioritized. the phone service, money transfer, j pay, you know, in florida, cues sections of prison have been sectioned with food poisoning. you are making under the 13th amendment, you don't have to pay them minimum wage. in new jersey you pay them $0.22 an hour. not specifically. >> some states you don't get paid it all. so, i got the list of commentary prices for 1996. talking about deodorant., very basic items to survive.

all the prices have gone up by over 100%. when you are sentence, you are stacked with thousands of dollars of fines. if you are only making $28 a month, and 30 years, he had about 10,000 fines. when he got out, he still had about $6000. there is a warrant out for your arrested you go back in. it is all about money. it is all of these lobbyists. prisoners have been turned into warehouses. the vocational programs, educational programs, all of that is gone. in fact, people come out, people already had trauma when they went in. they come out with even greater trauma. it makes it extremely difficult for themff to reintegrate into this society, but also

everything that is set against them. and that, for me, if you really want to understand a society, look at the prisons. that is where people are completely powerless and honorable. you see how cruel corporations are. if people want to communicate with a family member in prison, you cannot just call them up. you have to pay in advance. we have to pay in advance. you are talking about the poorest of the poor. talking about people who have nothing. within the prison, all of the work is done by the prisoners. you could not run a prison without that basically bonded labor. that is why the free alabama movement a few years ago when they did our prison strike for 10 days, it cost the state millions of dollars to bring uncompensated labor.

i am in contact with them. my favorite story with them, by the way, the three leaders definite solitary confinement. it is so corrupt. you can get anything you want. one of them called me on the lycell phone once. of course you can only get it from a guard. that is where they got it. i said i will grab my tape recorder. he said i will call you back. i'll get the other two guys and will do a conference call. in and they said, okay, when are we going to publish this? we've got to get the phones out of the cell. you have to support the prison stripes. that demand minimum wage. if they paid minimum wage, the system would be economically unsustainable. that is a short-term goal. the long term is the overturn of corporate power. we configured the united states

into this entity. all of the institutions within the united states, essentially, worked to consolidate both the wealth and power. we forget when i went to tboarding school, my graduation speaker in high school was john d rockefeller. the oligarchs now, never seen money. 180 billion. i studied classes at harvard. aristotle got it. that when you create an oligarchy system, i am quoting aristotle, you have two options. tyranny org resolution. going towards corporate tierney.

i had to throw that in. if you have questions, you can line up at the microphone. we will try to get to your questions. one question per customer. >> i just wanted to commend you on your work. the washington state penitentiary. we have a halfway house in washington state and 1968. at the university of washington the two years towards their parole. they checked themselves out and

went to class and then came back. there is one of the playwrights where that person was named ron and he was in a couple of hollywood movies. owi know how those systems work. it is just interesting it ended with rockefeller because rockefeller is the one that stopped the whole system from doing any kind of education. you are doing some hard work. i appreciate what you are doing and keep it up. >> have you read blood in the water? >> yeah. >> the way she ends the book is the response. the white oligarchy. the internal documents of the nixon white house. they all think this is the beginning of a malice revolution had the foundation of this

draconian parcel state. as a response. one of the characters of the book who i interviewed for about six hours because i wanted exactly what you said this all consciousness from the 60s and early 70s by black radicals. a member of the black liberation army. kind of his old head in the present play. he is immediately put into solitary confinement for 22 years. twenty-two years.

i interviewed him. he did not want to be interviewed. i to move a lot of connections and i showed up looking like this, of course. they all knew him, he is famous in the prison system. i don't know. they go, no, don't worry. he doesn't trust anyone. he used to wear uniform. he stopped the runners. the people that carry the courier work for the guards. he saysjo that that is not your job. mysterious fires in that cell. i asked him, he was arrested, finally, for a shoot out after robbing a bank. exploiting money from the capitalist state, to exploit him. what was it like to be in a shoot out with the new york police? he said i feel like the freest black man in america.

[laughter] >> perhaps two questions. are there any successful reform efforts in various states that you suggest or mention? if you could imagine a politician addressing the issueu that you are raising, clearly, what would they be? >> to dismantle the parcel state you ruptured the social bonds. your two primary forms of social control andth military police tt kill with unity and create wanes of terror. i don't use that lightly. that is what happens when they y kick your door down at two in the morning for nonviolent drug

warrant. mass incarceration. those become the pillars of social control because the social bonds have been rupture. we have to re-create the social bonds. integrated and given a place for dignity and purpose and meaning in society. everything now conspires within chthe system. the school system gives you enough numeric literacy and i will stock shelves in a warehouse and work in a walmart or something and nothing else. no one ever called me the n-word. i said, okay, describe to me your high school. metal detectors, leaky roofs, there iseq no scientific equipment, et cetera. >> i said now i'm going to describe to you the high school in princeton new jersey where i live. the one million-dollar black box

theater. the olympic swimming pool. the 30 ap. that is racism. that is racism. the bigger project is about reconstructing our society so that it serves the citizensn rather than criminal organization like goldman sachs. [applause] >> i used to like the criminal justice system. hiding behind corporate law. even the politicians caring people bye vaccination and mask. we premeditated.

criminal family. it has been very ugly and very hard for me to see this. for the inmates. it seems like the justice system is only for the poor. >> map wrote a good book. looking at courts that prosecuto the poor and all the thieves and wall street who never had to pay a price for trashing the global economy and gaining in her horrific event massive acts of fraud. what is interesting about teaching in a prison, i taught at princeton, columbia, a few other schools, theory elite schools, the level of discussion begins at a place where these elite kids are want to be elite kids cannotey even reach. they understand white supremacy, they understand liberalism, they

understand how the system is configured to keep them where they are. dysfunctional judicial system. they get it all. let's not give biden a pass. biden and clinton in the early 1990s decided they would take back the law and order issue from the republicans. that is where you've got the vast expansion of the parcel state almost doubled under the clintonli administration. 300,000 people. and carson did it. what people do not often recognizes crime ratesav rates have gone down. and biden was at the forefront of this in the senate. so, that three strikes you're out, the militarization of police, the expansion of the death penalty for federal crimes. that was out of biden's office which went from one or two. to like 51, i think.

he bragged about it. half of my students at least would not be in that prison system but for biden and clinton so, naomi wrote of good book about this. the democratic party has been one of the, you know, the primary engine between the creation of both of these occupation armies and poor neighborhoods. their occupation forces. military forces in the parcel state.on that could be a contentious thing to say outside of prison, but inside the conscious at a whole another level. organic intellectuals. a barred present debate -- that

was national news. these are formidable intellectuals. we have arms the size of this. another one, i did not teach him he was in a college program. he has one of those guys that is so tall that he lies. he is bigger than 6 a. he gets out, graduates from rutgers. the first national fellowship of scholars for any students in over a decade. he goes to the university of cambridge in england and gets a masters in philosophy. walking down the street in princeton. what are those two black guys going? t they don't know what i know. you go home that night and read

and you are nerds just like me. >> great. thank you. >> we have run short on the time. i will ask you to take your question over to the signing area with the author. on this floor just down the hallway. let's give a round of applause. [applause] thank you so much. ♪♪ weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast did every saturday you find events on american history tv. on sunday, book tv gives you the latest of nonfiction books and authors. television for serious readers. learn, discover, explore.

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