On September 5, 2013, I pulled my old Volvo wagon—a bumper sticker reading “This is the Rebel Base” stuck on the back by my wife, a Star Wars fan—into the parking lot at East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, New Jersey. I had taught college-level courses in New Jersey prisons for the past three years. But neither my new students nor I had any idea that night that we were embarking on a journey that would shatter their protective emotional walls, or that years later our lives would be deeply intertwined.
I put my wallet and phone in the glove compartment, emptied my pockets of coins, and dumped them in the console between the front seats. I made sure I had my driver’s license. I gathered up my books, plays by August Wilson, James Baldwin, John Herbert, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Miguel Piñero, Amiri Baraka, and a copy of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I locked the car and walked toward the maximum security men’s prison, past the telephone poles that dotted the parking lot, each topped with two square spotlights.
East Jersey State Prison in Rahway was shaped like an X. At its center was a massive gray dome with boarded-up windows, surrounded at its base by a ring of oxidized copper. The wings of the prison stretched out in four directions from the dome. The brick walls of each wing were painted a dull ochre color with off-white patches. There were seventeen oblong windows on each wing with white metal bars. Turrets with what looked like brass spikes on top stood at the far end of these brick wings. The walls were covered with
— source scheerpost.com | Chris Hedges | Oct 19, 2021