Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning  journalist has been teaching classes in drama, literature, philosophy and history in the college-degree program offered by Rutgers University to inmates in the New Jersey prison system.  His latest book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, is a haunting and powerful account of the voices trapped within a cruel penal system that too often defines their lives.

After studying some of August Wilson’s plays, Hedges’s class at East Jersey State Prison decided to write their own play Caged which played to sold out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, NJ and went on to be published. In Our Class, Hedges chronicles the class’s grief and suffering, as well as their personal transformation in crafted detail, giving voice to those who our society often demonizes and abandons. 

Speakers

Chris Hedges

Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, author and television host. He has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years and reported from more than fifty countries.

Stephan Whitley

Stephan Whitley is a former student and a successful graduate of Rutgers who was locked up in multiple New Jersey prisons and is now engaged in criminal justice reform work. “The stink, the mice, the yelling. My time in solitary was the most savage moment of my life.” —from Whitley’s essay at nj.com