>> guzman is your unfiltered view of government funded by these television companies and more including media,. >>. >> giving you a front row seatto democracy . >> middle and high school students it's your time to shine, participate in this year's cam documentary competition . in light of the upcoming midterm elections that you yourself as the newly elected member of congress. we asked this year's

competitors what is your top priority and why. make a 5 to 6 minute video that shows the importance of your issue from opposing and supporting perspectives. don't be afraid to take risks with your documentary be bold. among the $100,000 in ch prizes is a $500,000 grand prize. videos must be submitted by january 20, 2023 . visit our website at studentcams.org for competition rules, tips, resources and a step-by-step guide . >> from virginia, the store manager and the book fire at labyrinth. it's an honor to celebrate chris's new book our class: trauma transformation in an american prison. our class is about the drama class taught in prison and about the dynamics of teaching and learning about the prison and people who have to live e in it and around it and who are trying to

survive its violence and trauma. the play caged was begun there with the full participation of the class and realize in a series of public performances. we hear the voices of the students in this book, read over their shoulders as they talk about these great plays by the likes of august wilson and amiri baraka. this book is full of hard stories. there's every itcomplacency about what atsociety does to people. on the title page i see copies of the book around the room so you should look at that book, just grab it. you've got copies all near you. there's a photograph of all the students in the class and i find it really good to see their faces.

another thing i want to point out when you pick up yourcopy of caged , there is in addition to the wonderful introduction by boris franklin who is on our panel tonight don't miss the section called playwrights on the inside and playwrights on ht the outside. as of 2013 there are bios of every one of the playwrights. there are also astonishing stories. i hope this book will serve as a call to action and that we have time to include these ideas in the discussion to follow. we're pleased to offer welcome author chris hedges, author of many books and an ordained minister. he's joined by boris franklin, playwright, scholar . the first of chris's former students to earn hisdegree from rockers.. currently assistant director of the directions program for prisons .

were also proud to welcome russ owings who also studied with chris, scholar and veteran of new jersey prisons and honor graduate of rutgers university. also another graduate is here , ron pierce, very happy to welcome him as well. we spent some time selecting books for this little library around us and i know you want to be part of helping these scholars rebuild their .ollections and just before i came up here i read the latest piece by my friend who wrote this great book the copper neck effect among many others. he writes about radical action with such fire and joy and he gave me something i needed today. he justdropped a piece in the nation and i just wanted to share a little bit of that with you .today, people are depressed about the election and all the other stuff. he said i never thought yesterday that picking up my

dogeared copy of beloved and reading it in a northern virginia coffee shop would count as an act of resistance but here we are. i do know that here in virginia and across the country there are metric ton of people who c either didn't vote or are under 18 and that are going to turn the lives of the toni morrison book burners on their heads as they demand accountability for the past present and future. and on that note let's get going. please give it up for boris, chris and russ. [applause] >> thanks virginia and thanks to labyrinth books which donated over 700 books to the library at east state prison where my students and you're about to meet three of my most remarkable students worked on and in the case of russ finished their college

degree summer come loudly. and there are several people here, jim jill and others, jennifer who have been so important in the lives of those who have been demonized and forgotten and so yes, it's a special night. boris and ron were in the class that wrote the play. ron and russ were in the class where i traumatized them by dragging them through all of sheldon weldon's politics and vision. i've taught and russ was not in the class but i thought russ. russ just got out in july after 32 years. and so they've all read the book, rhonda morris helped edit the book.

but i'm going to set it up and pass the mic to them and they can begin to pull out enfrom that experience in the book what they think is salient and cimportant. i went in to teach this class and east jersey state prison through the nj step program which is run out of rockers and allows people on the inside to earn their associates and their ba. and i wanted them to read the great playwrights amiri baraka, a red dutchman, the great august wilson. miguel pinero. mccranie, others. and it was clear when i got into the class that very few members of the class had much experience with theater and drama. so just as you get them

familiar with dramatic dialogue because everything in a plate of course is conveyed through dialogue i suggested they write a scene as an exercise. what i didn't know is that one of the students in the class come here in arabic means big. he knew who i was listening because he heard me on wbr ai out of new york and he gone around and recruited arthe most talented writers in the prison. so when i got those first scenes back i had 28 students and i brought them back to princeton with that kind of musty smell all hand written on lined paper, the notes, the prison i ran into several scenes that were just remarkable. a miracle, powerful and this happened the next week and

week after that. and i said to my wife eunice who is a professional actor, graduate of julliard, i showed her this stuff and suggested that maybe i could help students write a play . and went back to the class and proposed this that we take these scenes and i would kind of serve as the editor and melt some scenes andbring them and everything had to be cleared with the class . but it was not premeditated. it was completely organic. and i don't think i or anyone in the class was prepared for what happened because in prison you have to build these emotionally protective walls but when people began to write about their trauma, their suffering, their loss, theirgrief , those walls melted. and as you can see, the 28 students they call it 400

club which means they bench over 400 pounds. big guys, prison tattoos ending up there. their hands shaking, in some cases crying and it just became this explosive experience where everything that poured out and people began to speak about experiences that they never spoken about in prison and then sometimes done decades in prison has been arrested at the age of 14 in camden and their parents were dead. he was living in an abandoned house with a 12-year-old drive into a camden city police station, he weighs 90 pounds and is functionally illiterate forced to sign a confession. he's not eligible to go before a parole board until these 70 years old. convicted as an adult but for the great jennifer who

sitting back. but like boris, ron and russ, he decided he was going to be the best person he could be despite the circumstances in which he found himself. so i taught history class, it was called conquest. we read bury my heart at wounded knee and cl james classic work on the haitian independent movements, the only successful slave revolt and he's been paid for it ever since he waited until everyone left the room and said i know i'm going to die in this person but i work as hard as i do because one day i'm going to be a teacher like you and walked out.

you'll see with these three remarkable men the depth of the brilliance and integrity and the passion which i've never experienced in any classroom and i taught at princeton, columbia and also some places. it's sacred space because that classroom door closes and you are not a number. you are a humanbeing . and so we developed this play and it was the revelations were just unimaginable. something happened giwhen it was published although it was 20 plenty collaborative something happened to everyone in that classroom. whatever was in the play had happened to someone in the classroom so i think it was s

dollar, ghost is locked in a cell in trenton that first night and the guards tell him that was the cell that held his father . or timmy i said well, write a scene about your mother, and kenny came up and said what if you are a product of rape. and i said that's what you have to write. and he writesabout the phone call from the county jail . he is in a car in patterson with his half-brother, thecar iis stopped, searched by police . it's his half-brother's gun. but to me if no one claims this and everyone can be charged with a weapons charge and timmy takes ownership of it although it wasn't his and the conversation from the county jail is it doesn't matter mom, i was never supposed to be here anyway and you have to send me love. those are the kind of people that i taught. we eventually put the play

together. we can perform it in the prison.there were parts of it that the department of corrections would not like and the retribution would be carried out against my students. we brought incornell west , the great theologian james cohen to be our audience . and my first student to get out was boris. he'll tell you i was crying more than his mother. and boris and i spent t hundreds of hours because when i first said who wants apart when we began there were seven students who wanted apart and as we get into the play all 28 one of parts . we had a play with 20 parts and we had to consolidate those parks parts and worked with a great theater director. jeff wise and boris and i sat at the computer. it's where i learned what a baby mama was. and it was produced in the passage theater, sold-out

audience because in trenton the horror of mass incarceration unfortunately is quite familiar . to those who live in that city. and i'm going to let them pick out some of the ... of course ron and boris were in the class but i'm going to let them pick out themes that they think we should raise that were raised in thebook . >> i guess if i had to pick out something that was raised in the book it's in the early pages of the book and it had to do with the role of art . and to bring rtart inside of the, that is that institution it brought a little bit of humanity back into the institution. because what we're looking at is what you would call individuals who been taken out of society and there's some sort of a violent social

debt. i believe it was orlando patterson who wrote a quote on that. so by coming in and doing, taking our songs he put us in direct dialogue with all of this. he put us back into society in that fashion. and we were able to actually tell our stories in that way so to have that art to be produced and brought out into the world in conversation with 28 individuals who are trapped inside of a prison. and i thought that was a way of restoring some of the humanity that was taken away. when you get a social debt where everything is completely controlled by the threat of some sort of violence. so for me as a person who understands art and there's art throughout the prison. that's one thing the prisonis full of, it's full of art . it's unorganized, it's fragmented and it's flawed and it's perfect. that is the kind of art that

exists inside of a prison. and so when chris comes in and says i'm going to teach you guys how to structure e this in a formal dramatic dialogue, now we're having a conversation in the language of the genre. and that gives us a different level of credibility and respect. so rofor me that was probably the most important part and the reason why the conversation is still being carried today. >> i think for me what makes this book, this work important if we could just start from the name. where all understand what trauma is. it's you see .something that happens and it seems like it never goes away. and that part transformation we understand that transformation is not a single act but it's a process . and for me you had that right on thehead in the book .

and for me you talked about the code. in prison there's a code. for everything. and the code perpetuates being in human. it's you have to stick to the code. you can't show love. you can't show feeling, you can'tshow emotion . you can't behuman . and to go against that could get you her, could get you dead. so i thought you captured that very well and how that clash hpushed back against the code. and i thought that that was remarkable. we can talk about that further as we go on. >> to go with that because that's one of the things that i found so fascinating not

only about this book but about the play cage was how he described the humanity of various people for instance when he talks about some sincere and sincere having an in the species and he has to be looked at as a thought but he's no thug and when he tries to write it comes out to be like a fanciful t-shaped tv show and it doesn't work. it doesn't work in reality so that to me shows that there's various and then you have lawrence he speaks about, you spoke about lawrence earlier. he speaks about him as a child coming up in the system . ask having to be an adult. and in the cage itself we talk about and this was something that came to me where we were trying to do

the play. there was something missing out of the play while i was out here and doctor cohen started talking about how we couldn't really give depth to the black prophetic because we didn't understand. elderly white people do not know. they're just not perfect, they're just not there so it came to me but we do know about prison, people in prison that have been in prison over andover from childhood . .e call them state raised and so i came up with the concept that we needed to put somebody that came through the system as a child and worked their way up and that's where shebrown came from . he is, was a real person, but it showed in the play the depth of people that no longer have a a connection to the outside. when they go to parole they

don't want parole because there's nothing out here. out here you would just be another old black man with nothing but inside he was she brown. he was somebody. >> what he did and who he was. >> shaky brown was a blues guitarist. he played the blues in prison all the time. and he developed a narration around life outside so that he could explain his life inside. but the life he narrated hefrom the outside was not real it was in his head, it was real. he was this famous blues guitarist the first time we got him on stage he froze. but he developed into it and he played the blues.

i know, these self taught and he played the blues like you wouldn't believe. he was really amazing blues guitarist. but he started out in the juvenile halls and then he got caught up in another crime and another crime until unhe got a life sentence. but every time he went before parole he would call them a bunch of racists, so and so is, we won't get into the semantics but he would call them out on the nonsense that they were utilizing so he would always get ped which in prison is called hit. i couldn't figure this out so i was talking to somebody that knew him well. that's what they told me. they said in here he's shaky brown, what's he out there but a 70-year-old black man that has nothing? so because of the prison culture you have to go to

parole, you have to try to get out but he didn't want out so we make sure he pushed back against them enough that hewouldn't . he was a state raised, what we call state raised the inside the prison system and he was the picture of it because a lot of the state raised and not being addicted to drugs and they have a lot of real issues because of the trauma the indoor from childhood to old agede. we needed him in the play to make sure the humanity or the taking of humanity what it means and destroy somebody's own humanity where to where they don't even want to move. where they can have people that they treat them in a humane way .

so that's why i think shaky it was important that that representation was in the play. >> ron through a generous grant worked with me on the book and was intimately involved o. he was in the originalclass and so involved in the process .ss boris, can you talk a little bit about what took place in the classroom. it was remarkable because people were reticent at the beginning. you were in the back and you had your glasses case like hathis kind of i amy. so you have to earn trust in an environment like that. it's not a given. >> i love it when i walked through the class, who isthis guy . but any event he earned the

respect and that's something that's part of a inside of an institution, a person everything is built on respect. not many people have different outfits, respect is a very big thing so when chris came in on his first s day he walked in and he started talking to everybody about what he was not going to tolerate inside of a maximum-security prison . it's like okay, you got my respect . gangster. but in any event, as it went on walls started coming down when you talk about breaking the code, there's a certain part of your health you can't express and a lot of guys do express it through our privately cs. conversation is very very private. you might see someone who has something on the wall with a heart and a picture of their child, they have another

inmatedraw on it or something but it's very private . we had the class we were able to go into this sort of dialogue about that had happened to us to start diving deep into some of that trauma. what came down allowed us to see each othersort of for the first time as a complete person . and then you know when we talk about things like what happened with his transformation for him to be on dialogue honest the dialoguehad to be honest . when you first came in remember you wanted to start the play and you brought in stuff that somebody had wrote you. i definitely pulled him i said they wrote this for a white person . there werethis for you . and that's how people thought when white the launch around. >> that's a fact that we were able to write back that it put everyone in this honest dialogue and then we were able to knock down some of the myths and some of the

stereotypes as to why do people sell drugs, you understand? there's shaky brown, most people couldn't understand why that guy couldn't get out of jail but through the stories we were able to communicate back and it has a resounding effect because we are, 2018 and its 2021 and we're still having this conversation which means that class did what it was supposed to do. it started aconversation that's still going on . it allowed us to get closer r to understanding each other and we began to think differentlyabout how we vote keeps on . so when a completely new .family. most of us stay in some of us work together. i've been weddings with individuals that i was in that class with. it created something different and taught us how to love in a different way

because some of us into the prison come from the communities we were in before. that don't allow for brotherhood and love to thrive in a way because it can make you vulnerable and threat to your environment . we've learned to love and to be brothers in a different way that made us better individuals by bringing the class stogether and having the audacity to say okay, 28 people that are housed in different states are going to write a play together. i mean, i had not known ron at all. >> ..

that was something that never happened. it made a new society within a society. hopefully it will make some sort of difference. >> i want to ask about when we produced the play and morris took one of the parts in the play and the part that he played was the older old head prisoner and it seemed that he wrote at the end comes out of his own experience in prison where he stopping someone from going into a mess all to carry out a revenge killing. he knows he has a homemade knife called a a shank, and he wante shank. when i watched for the first time boris do it on stage at the theater in "america in perspective: defending the american dream for the next generation," i knew i could notice he was very physical,

pushy and estimate after the play why, he said because if i couldn't get into him with a shake i had to start a fight so we'll will both go to lockdown. that gets to i think jarrell articulated the dreck of chicago best that at its core what all of this is about is radical love. and i'm going to ask all of you to address that scene. and we were talking about before. i'll let you start, ross. because that radical love is real within the prison. >> so i think the best, i'll just read out of the book on page 181, the code. the play was at its core about the bonds of loyalty and love. this loyalty and love do not shape the characters in the play. the forces against them are overpowering and lethal.

but the repeated acts of self-sacrifice were fired by loyalty and love. keep them human. so when we talk about, first of all let me say that we had to create a new code. we had to create that love and loyalty in the prison setting because it didn't exist. and that's the first area that we dare to be different, and that radical love was a love that said i'm going to love at all costs, it doesn't matter, and that's exactly what the situation that happened with boris, that's what it exemplifies, that radical love, that i'm going to put myself at risk. and this is something that we all learned to do, but it says in a book that it says that this loyalty and love don't stain the

characters -- save the characters, but it doesn't save any of us. and the real fight especially for us and it has always been this even now that we are out, is to keep reminding ourselves that we are human. because the prison strips that from you. it strips it from you in every way. and if i was to tell you that even now that i'm home i still feel the loneliness that it felt when i was in prison. and i can tell you exactly why. because of the way that they punish you. they so it into your flesh. i left the prison but the prison is in me. the bars, the concrete is in me. and as me and boris was saying earlier he has to remind himself every day that he's free. i have to remind myself every day that i'm free, that i'm

human. because i was so used to not having come so used to not being, and to learn how to love and i did love, and it would sacrifice myself. but the problem is i still do not know how to receive love. >> radical love is a person that spends 20 years of his life trying to get college back in the institution to bring hope and transformation to others. that's tone right there. he spent 20 years of his life pushing back against a system that in 1994 took college out of the prison system, because he knew the transformation of it. we were in new jersey together and there was college classes but they didn't matriculate to a

degree but these college classes gave somebody help. one of the main things about radical love is, is it will transform your heart. now, boris had mentioned that my name was rabble and i was a outlaw biker. and that's true, and back in the day i came into prison angry, angry and i had reason to be angry but i wasn't directing anger properly. i was just angry and directing it at making sure nobody could come into my space and make me more angry for other reasons. so the transformation for me was having somebody believe in me. that's a a transformation. that's radical love. somebody says yeah, i don't know him that well but i know how he

runs around this space. i know how he is. and i'm going to make sure that he gets into college. so that's radical love. it didn't matter he came from pain and i came from baylor in the space of prison where you come from matters. so radical love the somebody taking a chance on somebody. and i try to use it into a language that opportunity which is what he gave me, opportunities breeds hope. hope is the spark that ignites the fire of transformation. so radical love in the prison is how we got to be from east jersey state prison the east jersey university. that's how we got to change that space into a space that's for transformation and not a space

that's for pain and anger. you can't show anger. you can't show grief because you can't put it on your brothers in that same space because they are dealing with enough on their own. >> and i will add to that very quickly. there's not much more that you could add to that, except for the fact that some guys always say, the word radical cuts against the grade. it was like a bulldozer to concrete. the kids didn't really necessarily belong there. so when you show that kind of love in the space and make that kind of sacrifice, you know, from the outside looking a person who says why would this person that is nothing gets on the? why was this person who's never get out of joe make sure that another person gets out of jail? paralegals work effortlessly,, tirelessly trying to help get individual out. why would individuals who have

nothing coming in return to that? and they do it, that's radical, right? that's radical. they do it just to express their humanity. it's a very, very radical thing to do this age but we should see more of it on the side of the board, but that's what makes it so radical. >> how are we doing for time? >> your good. >> i know lots of stories about these guys. i'm going to tell one. >> i hope it's not too -- [inaudible] >> but ross went into prison and took a bow of nonviolence from the day he went in that prison, which is a very courageous about to take. he ran a prayer group when people were distressed in my class. at the end of the class, ross

would put his arms around them and they would all pray. i know this from boris that if somebody was dejected and alone and rejected, in the mess hall ross would go sit next to them and even hold their hand. and boris said russ was he only guy i know who probably won't, he refused to allow the prison culture to define him. and he will get out and that defiance will save him. and just to talk about radical love and what it means any physical setting like the prison is that ross was dealing with the blood and trying to get a particular member of the bloods to come to the prayer services, and the other bloods said you believe in, you believe out, which meant that it is going to leave and join that christian community that russ was part of, he was going to get a beat down.

and russ went to the bloods and said i'll take his place, you beat me down. and, of course, in the prison that just upends the entire ethos of the prison, and they were so stunned, they didn't you walked in and said beat me down. i've met some of the most remarkable people in my life in prison. and three of them are sitting here today. people of tremendous integrity and brilliance. i don't think very many of us could have endured what they endured and become who they have become. and it's -- i'm not going to cry. i think there are other teachers here. jill and jim and celia. it's an honor for us.

and i, before we open up the question i just want to read a little passage from the end of the book. so this was 2019. it was the graduation ceremony. we had 27 formerly incarcerated students graduate from rutgers and i was asked to give the commencement address. i am an ordained presbyterian minister. i very rarely wear a clerical collar but i but i put itt day because i think that not only that what has transpired, what transpired between us is sacred but also at its core is what ministry is about, it's an outstanding in solidarity with the crucified of the earth as the great james comey reminded us. and my father was a presbyterian

minister, a great influence on my life and active in the civil rights movement, antiwar movement. he's a veteran of world war ii, and the gay rights movement at a time when very, very few ministers spoke out. his brother was gay, youngest brother, my uncle, and father had a particular sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in america in the 1950s and '60s. and so i put the clerical collar on, and as i read in the book, i put my father's cufflinks into my shirt with his initials. and just going to give the beginning of this talk is what i told my students, and then we can have questions. and boris enron were there. my fellow college graduates, integrity is not an inherited trait.

it is not conferred by privilege or status or wealth. it cannot be bequeathed by elliott school for institutions. it is not a a product of birtr race or gender. integrity is not a pedigree or a brand. integrity is earned. integrity is determined not by what we do in life, but by what we do with what life gives us. it is what we overcome. integrity is the ability to affirm our dignity even when the world tells us we are worthless. integrity is forged in pain and suffering, loss and tragedy. it is forged in the courtrooms where you were sentenced. it is forged in the shackles you were forced to wear. it is forged in the cages where

you lived, sometimes for decades. it is forged in the cries of your children, those who lost their mothers or their fathers to the monstrosity of mass incarceration. it is forged in the heartache of your parents, your brothers, your sisters, your spouses, and your partners. integrity is forged by surmounting the hell around you to study in a cramped and claustrophobic cell with a college degree no one, perhaps not even you, thought you would ever earn. integrity is to refuse to become a statistic. integrity is to rise up and shout out to an indifferent universe, i am somebody. and today, no one can deny who you are, what you have achieved,

and what you have become. college graduates, men and women of integrity, who held on fiercely to your dignity and your capacity to exert your will, and triumphed. [applause] >> so we can take questions, if there are any. >> is this on? all right. i'm going to come around with a mic. it's not so obvious to me how we transition to questions. it's such a privilege to be here, simply to listen and to be witnesses to your thoughts and your experiences. it's a privilege, so i i wanto start with a thank you for that.

if there are questions in the room, allow me to come to you so that i can hand you the mic. and there's one in the front here. >> first of all, thank you for all coming. very powerful, very moving. you each mentioned how there's a code that you don't go against, yet you participated in class. you write a new code that said you had to break that. i'm curious about the first class and the first person that told their story. what puts them over the edge to the point where they could do that? what was that like? >> i will let boris answer that, but i, are rigidly when wrote the scenes, they were delivered to me.

they weren't read. it was only later that they would get up and be read in front of the class. so i think it was a kind of safety and security interest passing the scene to the professor. but then they would read it and it was really moving. people were complaining that they wanted to get through fences or whatever it was weird readings of people could read, and it would come up. some of the scenes were so emotionally fraught that they couldn't read them. i don't think timmy read his originally. when tammy read it at the performance that we did for, after he finished, he disappeared and i asked boris or someone, where is timmy? and the set i think is in the bathroom. and i found him crumpled in the corner shaking and sobbing. but it became this remarkable

experience where people would get up in front of the class and all of that emotion would pour out as they read and then the entire class would applaud. what i will let boris also address that. >> well, very quickly what we did was is that i don't think anybody really new we're going to have to read it public in front of the class. we was like, complete stress, in whatever the process that chris was bringing in. so we would -- we were taking as a class. when he came in he said come who wrote the scene? and by then you know the train had already left the station. it was like -- [laughing] >> like, i wrote it. well, come up in read it. after you read it and he was like, who wrote the scene? then the next guy had to come up and do some reading. so that's kind of what tipped it. you came in after him and his wife looked over the scenes and came back with what we thought was good, and we started

actually reading the dialogue. >> thank you all so much for speaking. it's really a meaningful experience. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about your decision specifically to teach drama. why drama as opposed to novels, poetry, of the forms of art? and in what ways do you think in addition to writing the play, how does influence of the class and the kind of conversation to having and the lessons you all were learning? >> so the beauty about the program is that i can teach, igs all sorts of stuff. a lot of times when there are holes i will fill it, history, philosophy. and i picked plays that addressed the experiences of my

students, august wilson, baldwin, these kinds the figures, because they were really, i mean, a great playwright like wilson is really writing for them. but they didn't live in an environment and, unfortunately, they live in a country we don't support the arts, they couldn't pay $150 to go see august wilson. and so all of these writers, they were not writing for us like myself. there were writing for my students. so i i wanted my students to r the voice. and we read joe turner come and gone, a wonderful play, the august wilson cycle. this is the first but it set at a boarding house in pittsburg and it's about convict leasing, slavery by another name, worse in some ways than slavery because those who use convex

paid a small fee for them. they were not actually buying a human being, so the mortality rate was astronomical. and in that play it's the character comes up after seven years of being enslaved, this convict looking for his wife, and he's bitter and he's angry, and the conjure in the play keeps telling him that he has to find his song. because the dominant society is never going to tell them who they are, where they came from. they have to go in that search themselves. but they can't be complete human beings and ill-defined their song. and as that play evolved it became clear to me that this was their song. and that last night of the play, you know, after cornell and

james cohen came, i had one more class. i think it was hightower, got up and said, well, you may have all seen last night went doctor weston, dr. cohen were speaking that i was crying. i have been in this prison system since what 1984 or something. and the night that doctor weston and dr. cohen came to the person to speak to us is only happy night i've ever spent in prison. that was, and that, that last class, i think that of us wanted it to end. there was a sense of morning really. but anybody came up and signed the front of the script. and i remember walking up -- come on, i've seen you cry. >> i walked out and i had their song that no one wanted to hear.

because of this guy we make sure their song was heard. anyway, you take it. >> i'm not going to cry. that's why he taught drama because he's extremely dramatic. [laughing] next question. [laughing] >> i have a question from online audience. i just want you know there are more people listening to you online. and there's a question here from, let's see, terry. i treasure having seen the play passage theater and it is an honor and joy to hear you tonight. do we need you continue to write plays or essay stories of individuals? might collaborate experience be

especially valuable or unique to your creativity. >> as well, i'm still writing, and right now i'm actually writing a play that is called love in the time of mass incarceration to see does love survive with all the coming and going, the war on drugs, makes it extremely difficult to maintain some sort of a connection. so it did, it did inspire me to continue to write and also books as well. that's a yes. >> how about the others? >> well, the only writing i'm doing at the moment is at school, that keeps me well, well busy writing. but i am come one of my classes is on wrongful convictions so what is, my aim is always toward changing the whole narrative that's inside and changing the words that everybody uses to

dehumanize us, people are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated. so i am also writing right now. i'm writing work to try to get people incarcerator to try to write a book. i forgot, i'm published in what's that encyclopedia? american prison, american prisons and something. right now i'm a a little overwhelmed by the story he just told, and i'm not going to cry but that doesn't mean i'm not choked up by it. >> yes, i myself do plan to write in the future, i particularly plan on writing about trauma. so, and i just believe in what hemingway said that never write about the thing while you were in it. so right now i'm just waiting and i'm processing everything around me and so i can articulate it to where it's most effective to others.

>> may be i can just ask a closing question just to highlight another dimension of this book, , chris, because the book is also, it also contains some really remarkable reporting about what chris, , you called e collective crime of, american crime of not just tolerating but also profiting from the structural poverty, structural racism in mass incarceration. there are wrenching stories in this book about how it is possible that prisoners were under release, we entered the world in debt, that if there's bereavement in their families and they want to go see for the last time the family member that they have lost, that they have to be the over time for, i think

it is four police officers to take them there and watch them while they are there. you have to pay for this. on and on. it used to be, says in the book, that there was a fund, a state-funded that would cover some of these expenses. and i want to know, and this returned to the question of the are so many calls to action that a kind of talked in the book. is there an effort today to reconstitute that fund? what can be done? where do we focus our energy? maybe we can and with that. >> i will let them answer this. there is a fund, it's stolen in essence. the prisoners have to pay into it and then it is stolen by the

d.o.c. but let me just address that point because present our modern plantations. slavery, a product of white supremacy is protean. it changes its shape but not its essence. all the work in a prison is done by the incarcerated who earn about $28 a month in new jersey. and yet i got a list of commissary prices from 1996 and today, and they are all, the sellers that they earn him if you want call that salary, 22 since an hour is the same. the prices are all increased by over 100%, and we're talking basic items, toothpaste, coffee, et cetera. but then everything internally has become privatized in the american prison system, so the commissary is privatized. the medical privatized. j pay, money transfer, the

phone, our mark out of philly has huge missing contracts around the country with constant cases of food poisoning throughout the prison. and when you were sent to prison your given fines. so bell, is a 14-year-old, was given given $10,000 with a fines and their polling about two dollars a month out of it and he finishes prison in debt. as you mention if you wanted to go get that 15 minutes of a viewing with an immediate family member, that's hundreds of dollars. and if you can't pay, if you can't pay that back when you get out, then you go right back in. so all of the impediments that people face when they get out, guarantee the 76% recidivism rate that takes place in this

country within five years. and so, i, you know, i have taught students who have committed crimes, but i have never taught criminals. there are criminals, those people who orchestrate the poverty, and poverty as george bernard shaw said in major barbour is the greatest of all crimes. there are criminals. global tell link our mark, j pay who are predatory against the most vulnerable. and this abraham henschel said, a few are guilty but all are responsible, and we are all responsible. 1 million people within our prison system work for for-profit corporations, sweatshops, with no right to

organize, no, nobody is paying into the social security account. if they protest the conditions are sent to solitary, 80,000 american citizens as i i speak aren't solitary at this moment, a form of torture. so yes, , yes, i am glad thu highlighted that. i looked at mass incarceration as a civil rights issue of our time. >> well, yeah, two things. one, that they utilize the money that is earned by the commissary, commissary is supposed to go into a general fund called the inmate welfare fund, right? the inmate welfare fund is a fund you were talking about. that's what used to pay, when i went, when my brother passed in the '90s, they paid for me to go and spend time and i was in

trenton state prison. i was maximum-security. they paid for me to go spend a half hour and a allowed my family there. when my father passed they made me pay $650 to go from rahway to sit in in a funeral home by f for 15 minutes. when we got there they jumped out of the car, they kept me locked, handcuffed, shackled in the back of the car with a check to meet the cars come through bushes before they opened the car door for me they told me it so much as a motorcycle drive by this funeral home we're pulling out of here. that's, that's what i had to deal with. they told my family, if my family even thought about coming, right, they were going to not let me there. so that, that's part of the grieving process. so i had to pay $650 to see my

father when he passed. but i didn't get a chance to grieve with my family at all. and so that fund needs to be reinstated. but they need to reinstate every part that was before they started tearing everything down. >> well, i will say that, first of all, it's difficult because the way that the president find out about people in a family that had died, you know, that's not humane. you know, they call you arbitrarily out of the blue, and is usually an officer that tells you. and it's so cold. but then we've also had services on the inside where we held memorial services for people who couldn't afford to go out there and be with her family, so we on

the inside that the best we could to help people that were grieving, you know, but that just goes to speak about what we talked about earlier. and even coming home, you know, we all heard, there's millions of dollars that are for us when we come home but it never reaches us. you know, it never reaches us. and i just want to tell you that what was told me when i came home, my parole officer told me, i do want you to keep in mind that you're not a regular citizen. >> so, i know, boris, that when you left prison the first thing you said to chris was, because you had to leave your library which at that point was 100 volumes that you to rebuild your library. i just want to end by saying anyone who has to leave their books inside that you know about and that gets released, we are

here to replace those books. okay. >> thank you. [applause] >> please thank them. [applause] >> weekends on c-span2 are intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest and nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies, and more, including buckeye broadband. ♪ ♪ ♪

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