Our Class
Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A powerfully moving book that “could make graspable why today’s prisons are contemporary slave plantations” (Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple), giving voice to the poorest among us and laying bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for a month in 2018 to sold-out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, and later be published, students gave words to the grief and suffering they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams. The class’s artistic and personal discovery, as well as transformation, is chronicled in heartbreaking detail in Our Class.
This “magnificent” (Cornel West, author of Race Matters) book gives a human face and a voice to those our society too often demonizes and abandons. It exposes the terrible crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
