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‘A Pipeline Straight to Jail’
Posted on Oct 11, 2015
By Chris Hedges
The defeat of the Harvard University debate team by a team from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility
in the Catskills elucidates a truth known intimately by those of us who
teach in prisons: that the failure of the American educational system
to offer opportunities to the poor and the government’s abandonment of
families and children living in blighted communities condemn millions of
boys and girls, often of color, to a life of suffering, misery and
early death. The income inequality, the trillions of dollars we divert
to the war industry, the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas and the
refusal to invest in our infrastructure wrecks life after innocent life.
I spent four years as a graduate student at Harvard University. Privilege, and especially white privilege, I discovered, is the primary prerequisite for attending an Ivy League university. I have also spent several years teaching in prisons. In class after class in prison, there is a core of students who could excel at Harvard. This is not hyperbolic, as the defeat of the Harvard debate team illustrates.
But poverty condemned my students before they ever entered school. And as poverty expands,
inflicting on communities and families a host of maladies including crime, addiction, rage, despair and hopelessness, the few remaining institutions that might intervene to lift the poor up are gutted or closed. Even when students in inner-city schools are not the targets of racial insults, racism worms into their lives because the institutions that should help them are nonexistent or deeply dysfunctional.
I stood outside a prison gate in Newark, N.J., at 7 a.m. last April 24. I waited for the release of one of my students, Boris Franklin, who had spent 11 years incarcerated. I had ridden to the gate with his mother, who spent her time reading Bible verses out loud in the car, and his sister. We watched him walk down the road toward us. He was wearing the baggy gray sweatpants, oversize white T-shirt and white Reeboks that prisoners purchase before their release. Franklin had laid out $50 for his new clothes. A prisoner in New Jersey earns $28 a month working in prison.
Boris
Franklin in a classroom at Rutgers. When he was in prison, he was a
student under the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in
Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP), and he is now attending Rutgers under the
university’s Mountainview Program. (Michael Nigro)
I spent four years as a graduate student at Harvard University. Privilege, and especially white privilege, I discovered, is the primary prerequisite for attending an Ivy League university. I have also spent several years teaching in prisons. In class after class in prison, there is a core of students who could excel at Harvard. This is not hyperbolic, as the defeat of the Harvard debate team illustrates.
But poverty condemned my students before they ever entered school. And as poverty expands,
inflicting on communities and families a host of maladies including crime, addiction, rage, despair and hopelessness, the few remaining institutions that might intervene to lift the poor up are gutted or closed. Even when students in inner-city schools are not the targets of racial insults, racism worms into their lives because the institutions that should help them are nonexistent or deeply dysfunctional.
I stood outside a prison gate in Newark, N.J., at 7 a.m. last April 24. I waited for the release of one of my students, Boris Franklin, who had spent 11 years incarcerated. I had ridden to the gate with his mother, who spent her time reading Bible verses out loud in the car, and his sister. We watched him walk down the road toward us. He was wearing the baggy gray sweatpants, oversize white T-shirt and white Reeboks that prisoners purchase before their release. Franklin had laid out $50 for his new clothes. A prisoner in New Jersey earns $28 a month working in prison.
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