The US prison system amounts to a modern-day form of slavery based on lies about the underclass it is exploiting, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist says.
Photo: AFP / FILE
Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent in the Middle East and the Balkans for The New York Times tells Nine to Noon his time teaching in prisons helped him better understand the lives of those who make up the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the US.
Hedges says the prison population has ballooned enormously with the de-industrialisation of US cities and a move towards criminalisation of the poor, many of whom are now forced to work in prison 'sweat shops' for big US corporations.
He's the author of 14 books and is the host of an Emmy-nominated weekly radio show on RT America.
Listen to the full interview with Chris Hedges
For more than a decade he has taught courses in drama and literature to inmates at East Jersey State Prison. His latest book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison documents his relationship with those incarcerated students, the efforts of some in writing a play about their lives, and his belief that the criminal justice system is an abject failure.
"The project came about by accident," he says. The students he was teaching knew little about drama and, on a whim, Hedges suggested they write scenes from their own lives as a means of becoming familiar with dramatic dialogue.
“What I didn’t know was one of the students in the class, Kabir, had heard me out of the Pacifica Station in New York WBAI and had recruited the best writers in the prison. So, when I took that stack of scenes home, those 28 students, 28 scenes all hand-written in lined paper and retained that kind of musky smell of the prison, I had about a half dozen that were just brilliant.”
He proposed to the class a play be written based on their work.
"What they were unearthing was deep trauma, grief and loss that they had endured outside the prison and inside in the prison. And these are emotions you don’t share in a prison," Hedges says.
The prisoners held books in the highest esteem and saw learning a kind of sacred moment," he says. "They were in effect organic intellectuals."
The prisoners themselves pushed to earn their BA degree through a prison scheme, he says..
“It’s also part of the tragedy of the failure of the American educational system because they never had a chance and yet they so desperately wanted a chance, they’re desperate to learn and they work so hard,” Hedges says.
He sees de-industrialisation and neo-liberal policies as integral to the stories of these men, and other prisoners up and down the country.
“The urban enclaves that they live in are just wastelands and what happened is, by casting them aside, turning them into what Karl Marx would call ‘surplus labour’, you’ve ruptured the social bonds that knit societies together, a sense of place, and work being vital to that. Then everything disintegrates – the family, any type of community cohesion. The only possible way to make money is in the illegal economy, which breeds a kind of violence because it operates outside the legal system. And the stories that they told and wrote about, they’re in the book, are just heart-breaking.”
One of those students was Lawrence Bell, whose father died when he was two, and his mother died when he was nine. By the age of 11 he lived in an abandoned building without water or electricity as an orphan in Camden, New Jersey.
The illiterate child was arrested by police who forced him to sign a confession, which he could not understand. In court the 14-year-old attempted to retract it after discovering what he was meant to have committed, but was jailed, and was not eligible to go before a parole board until he was 70.
“He was one of my best students and like so many of my students he decided that, given the horrific circumstances of his life, he was still going to try to become the best person he could become.”
'Timmy' had another tragic story. He was, in his own words, the product of rape.
Hedges had asked the class to write a scene involving a dialogue with a mother. “The next week he writes the scene, which is autobiographical," Hedge says.
"He’s in a car in Patterson, New Jersey with his half-brother. The car is stopped and searched and there’s a weapon in the car that belongs to his half-brother. Now if no one in the car admits to the possession of the weapon, everybody gets a weapons charge.
“Although it wasn’t his gun, he said ‘it’s mine’ and then he writes the conversation from the county jail with his mother, which is ‘it doesn’t matter ma, I was never supposed to be here anyway, and you have the son you love.”
The process of writing the play was powerfully transformative for those prisoners and also helped reveal the nature of American society and its victims, he says.
“They were exposing things about themselves that they had undergone that they hadn’t spoken about in the prison.
“The whole process of writing a play unearthed this reality of the American underclass – most of my students are black – that is very rarely heard and expressed. What was so powerful for me was, as the play came into being, that it was clear that the core of the play was about radical love. It was about sacrifice for the other.”
Another moving aspect of the strands of the play for Hedges is that it became obvious those telling their stories were cognisant of the fact that this self-sacrifice, given the forces that raged against them, would probably not save them or the people they cared about from disintegration. They, however, sacrificed themselves regardless.
Hedges says the prison system in the US has become a form of modern-day slavery. Prisons are not only privatised and turning a profit, but work is also carried out by prisoners.
The prisoners work for multinationals, making these firms millions of dollars per year.
“Under the 13 Amendment slavery is legal, which means if you are incarcerated you aren’t entitled to a minimum wage,” Hedges says. “My students earn $28 dollars per month for a 40-hour work weeks.
“Prisons function as plantations. We of course have 25 percent of the world’s prison population, 2.3 million people. Forty percent of them, by the way, have never been charged with physically harming another human being, and we’re less than 5 percent of the world’s population.
“Approximately one million of these incarcerated men and women work for profit-making corporates in prison sweat shops. They can’t organise, they can’t protest their working conditions. Indeed, if they do they’re immediately sent to solitary and these corporations don’t pay into social security, so they’ll get out after 40 years and have nothing although they’ve worked 40-hour weeks for most of their lives.
“With de-industrialisation and the abandonment of huge formerly industrial centres these bodies on the street, in the eyes of corporations, are worth nothing. But if you lock them up in a cage they generate anything from $40,000 to $60,000 per year, prisons are big business, a multi-billion-dollar a year enterprise.”
To make matters worse, an exploitative services industry is built into the prison, with private companies extracting profits from prisoners in other ways - if they want to make phone calls, transfer money and anything else they need to use to live they need to pay for it.
Without jobs and community the means of social control simply becomes naked repression and state violence, Hedges says.
“The reason that mass incarceration has exploded – and it was the Democratic administration that did it under Clinton and Joe Biden leading the way in the Senate – is, with the breakdown of these communities and the loss of work, the loss of the ability to function within the legal economy, the two primary mechanisms for social control become militarised police…and mass incarceration.”
Photo: Supplied / Literary Hub
Within five years of release, 76 percent of people return to prison, according to statistics. These figures significantly drop the higher educational levels that are achieved within the prison, Hedges says.
“The problem is this is not a state-funded program. These are private funds and the state itself does very little.”
There are also vested interests wanting recidivism levels here so companies can profit from it, with their lobbyists active in Washington, he says.
Life for ex-prisoners is constrained by laws that exclude them for taking part in the legal economy. It leads people to sheer desperation and forces them back into flirting with the illegal economy to survive.
“It’s even worse when you get out. Because of your record you can’t get employment, but you’re barred from hundreds of professions. Basically, any job that requites a license, including a hairdresser, a plumber, whatever… You can’t get public assistance, which means housing, you often lose the right to vote, you usually lose your passport. There are so many obstacles placed in front of you.”
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School, before becoming a newspaper reporter and going to El Salvador to cover the war there. Having spent time in Gaza and other conflict zones, going into prisons to teach seemed a good fit for him. His empathy for those prisoners stems for his Christian faith.
“I’ve always put myself in a place where James Cone, the great theologian, would call where the crucified of the Earth are. There was a kind of continuity when I came back to the United States going into the prisons.”
The industrial-prison complex, as he has described it, is a function of power and but is also based on a mythology, a false narrative, which he believes is the journalist’s duty to expose.
“These institutions perpetuate themselves through lies. They demonise poor blacks, particularly men. We make them part of a criminal caste system and it is socially acceptable to fear them and hate them and the mass media does quite a proficient job at perpetuating those stereo-types and engendering these kinds of emotions towards my students."
The prisoners' play and Hedges' own book play a role in challenging the corporate social narrative and US criminal justice system.
“It really is a way to expose that lie and make the demonised human. Tell people who they really are and what they’re really about.”