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So, TCI, I am curious about how you and Alice—how the
course evolved and how you determined the content. How that—how you
started out, and how that, what road that took?
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Well, Thomas, in the teaching for livelihood that he
does, teaches a course in American history and of course in world history
and so we began with world history. And we took a look at what was
discovered in caves in southern France. For example, there is a cave where
next to one another you find the footprints of a child and the footprints
of a wolf. Was the wolf tracking the child and did it eat the child, were
the wolf and the child friends, were the inscriptions created in different
periods of time and just accidentally turned out to be next to one another?
And we worked our way up, but when we got to what you might call modern
times, the advent of capitalism, 15th-16th centuries, without any
particular decision to do so, we found ourselves substituting a curriculum
based on violence and non-violence as a way of trying to grapple with what
world history had amounted to in the last 500 years and that still
continues and we-we still seek different ways of-of approaching that topic,
which of course, surrounds them every moment of every day in prison and is
more evident in the lives of the rest of us outside the bars then we might
sometimes like to admit.
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And, so we've done different things. Thomas has quite a
repertoire of things that he's found on the internet. And so we have a
series of visual experiences with, not slavery, but the use of a kind of
semi-slave indentured labor from India and South Africa and other
countries. Thomas showed us a chilling documentary made with a group of men
in Indonesia who had been members of a death squad at a time that the
United States sponsored slaughter of Communists and alleged Communists in
Indonesia took place, we showed the British film on the life of Gandhi. We
showed a film of the remarkable speech that Martin Luther King made the
night before his assassination when he said he had been to them—he might
not make it with them to the promised land, but he'd been to the
mountaintop. And then we saw a play that had been developed at another,
much lower security, prison under the supervision of the same administrator
who is responsible for TCI. This man is a friend of ours. He was a warden
at the supermax, at the time of our class action, and at the end of it we
were better friends than at the beginning because he too wanted changes in
the supermax. For example, when the supermax began there was no outdoor
recreation, and I asked the then warden, why? And he said, well the
Lucasville riot began on the recreation yard. So, with the kindness and
guidance of our friend, the former Warden at the supermax now regional
director, we went to a couple of other prisons in his jurisdiction and we
saw, you know, some remarkable dramatic productions. And when Thomas
originally suggested the idea of the listening project, which involved
telling each other stories about ourselves, I assumed that all of this was
preparatory to a dramatic production which we could then put on a
television channel that's used within the prisons. They don't yet have an
outside face, but it's called the Hope Channel and the prisoners like it.
And I thought that would be a natural progression, but no, Thomas wasn't
ready for that. We-we hadn't done enough listening to one another, and so
our—my accident last fall and our absence for the last three months has
kind of interrupted a process of three teachers trying to figure out
together what the next stage is, and I know that Thomas has been diverted
by the election results and given some classes on fascism.
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And so it's much too soon to say what the TCI program
amounts to. It's always been entirely voluntary. Classes are larger and
smaller and no discernible rhythm. People sometimes leave in the middle of
class because it's their only chance to get to the commissary and so on,
but it's been a rich experience and, in general, confirming of educational
lindism in the sense that we sit in the circle. No one is in charge of
anyone else, but we create something together. I, at the moment, not being
allowed to brave the snow and ice and go out too. TCI, have been doing the
same kind of thing with the group that meets in our basement every month.
Where it will always go in the end, where it will go in the end, I am not
certain because I have recognized that some of these heroes who made the
most of their prison experience did so in significant part because of the
outside movement of which they were a part. There's nothing like that in
the United States.
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Now I should say at the same time, and this might be a
good moment to say it, we assembled the class action that went to the
United States Supreme Court about due process violations in the Youngstown
supermax, and the central experience was that I would shake you awake at
4:00 in the morning and say pack up your stuff you're going to Youngstown,
which meant you were going from a medium level person to the most
restrictive. And naturally your reaction was, well, wait a minute, why am I
going? What's this all about? I want to be offered a chance to-to explain
myself and so on. And we won, we won enough that we began to get letters
from all over the country. And Alice just has the most marvelous way of
combining empathy with professional distance. And so, it came to pass that
in 2011 there was a group of men at the Pelican Bay supermax in California,
and they said we're going to go on hunger strike and we'd like you to
publicize what we're doing. And those were the small beginnings of
something became-became mighty. There were three hunger strikes in 2011 and
2013. It was totally nonviolent. The, and—and thousands of people, not
just at Pelican Bay but all over the state, were involved for shorter or
longer periods. You could take part in the hunger strike if you wished by
going without food for a weekend or going without food for 60 days, which
is about all a human being can do. And the really remarkable thing that
happened was that we persuaded the man who had been our, well, he'd been
Alice's teacher at the Pittsburgh law school and Center—president of the
Center for Constitutional Rights and a very close colleague. We persuaded
him to take on a class action at the—California on behalf of these men
who were in the most restrictive circumstances. Tiny cells, no windows,
some of them for more than 20 years. In indefinite solitary confinement.
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And I guess one of the kind of overflow experiences in my
life that I'll never forget is that a month or so ago Jules came to see us
and he said, you know, enforcing the settlement agreement is more demanding
than winning the lawsuit. And he said, now imagine this, I'm telling him
how guilty I feel that I got him involved in trying to run a transatlantic
and transcontinental lawsuit, which requires endless long-distance phone
calls, plane rides. He said, Staughton, my life may be shorter because of
what you got me into but this is the best thing I ever did in my life and
don't you regret it for a single moment. People don't usually talk to each
other that way.
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And in the process, I feel we made a very dramatic
discovery. And like several other discoveries of almost infinite importance
in my life, I don't think people are sufficiently aware of it. And what we
discovered was this, is there a non-violent way to change a prison? And the
answer cannot be just a hunger strike because the administration waits you
out. And after 60 days, you have a choice between the continue as Bobby
Sands did and die or to set or—and to set a pattern for your intimate
colleagues that if they are really men and strugglers and saints of the
movement, they will do likewise, as I believe. Nine other Irish prisoners
did. Total of 10 deaths. Exactly the same number of people who died in the
Lucasville uprising. And what we discovered, I think, was the—if your one
hand is the nonviolent, hunger strike and you vigorously publicize it, and
if instead of making up an excuse for why you're stopping, which is the
general pattern, you say, oh no, we're putting this in the hands of our
lawyers now, we have a class action which the most repressive prison system
in the country settled. You've devised a formula for social change that is
unmistakably successful at least in this instance and didn't get anyone
killed. In contrast to what I now believe, there's a new book on Attica,
1971. There was a hideous prison uprising in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1980,
which was all prisoners torturing and killing one another. And then there
was the uprising Lucasville, where Alice and I had become involved. And the
formula was take over a part of a prison, be sure to capture and make
hostages several conscientious object-correctional officers and hope for
the best. And the result has been 85 people killed in those three uprisings
and no significant change. The new book on Atticus says for a while there
was an appearance of change but that Attica is now worse off in 2017 than
it was in 1971. So, I mean, this-this is a, I think, a very dramatic
discovery. And Alice and I have written a book that tries to celebrate it.
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And then the other thing that we have encountered of
late, on this same path, is the phenomenon known as moral injury, and just
to make sure it's said once and for all, as part of this series of photo
exposures, post-traumatic stress disorder is apparently typically an
experience of fear. You hear a car backfire and you hit the deck, if you go
out for a meal, you sit with your back to a wall in a chair where you can
watch whoever comes in the front door and a variety of improvisations on
this theme, to the detriment of your wife, your parents, and very often
yourself because the rate of suicides among combat veterans is roughly
twice that among civilians. And, in this universe of post-traumatic stress
disorder, a man named Dr. Shay at a veterans hospital in Boston discovered
there was a distinct subset. And these are people who are not threatened by
the future but are irrevocably scarred by something that happened in the
past, either they did it or they witnessed it, but they couldn't prevent
it, and it's so interesting to me as a lifelong agitator, a word by which I
will financ-finese the controversy about organizing, as a lifelong agitator
I'm just sick and tired of trying to get other people to do things.
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What moral injury is about. Is that volunteers for
military service, failing to comprehend the kind of war where nobody wears
uniforms, where women and children may be part of the oppositional forces,
etc. etc, etc., reach a point where they don't need you to organize them.
They cross a line within themselves that causes them to feel, often in a
tragic and lamentable—well, I've done things that I can't imagine I did.
How could I think of my grandmother, think what she would have felt? Could
she have seen what I did yesterday down by that river and so on. And I
think for the first time in my life, even thinking of Mississippi, where
there was such hope and such courage and an atmosphere so different from
that that you find in the inner city today, even thinking of that, I don't
think I've ever experienced anything as hopeful as the idea that the very
decision of those who run this country to substitute a volunteer military
for conscription, which they did in the belief that all the problems in
Vietnam, the fracking and so forth, were the result of forcing people to be
in the army. It makes absolutely no difference because the volunteers, who
often have economic and other motives for volunteering, but leave that
aside, who volunteer with no realistic possibility of understanding what
they're volunteering for, they too reach a point within themselves where
they say, I won't do that or I've done it and I'm going to feel shame and
guilt for the rest of my life.
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And so these are, I would say, two of the frontiers for
Alice and myself, the moment—number one, the idea of combining a
nonviolent tactic, which in prison for more and more people all over the
world means a hunger strike with a coercive tactic, with a legal approach.
I've gone back over Dr. King's campaigns in the South. They always had this
condemnation. He won the Montgomery Bus Boycott at a moment when the city
of Montgomery was about to put him and his friends in jail for creating any
illegal bus service, and he won because a three-judge federal court and
then the United States Supreme Court said what Montgomery is doing is
unconstitutional, same way with Selma. When everybody was ready to march at
Selma, after the massacre on the Edward Pettus Bridge, Dr. King led the
forces of good out to the bridge and then turned around because the federal
judge hadn't yet decided whether to permit the march, and Dr. King wanted
to have the law on his side when he did this remarkable mass nonviolent
enterprise. And sure enough day or two later, Judge Johnson said, yeah,
this is protected by the Constitution, you can march. And, I just feel that
what hope there may be for us on this planet, which we're doing our best to
extinguish and destroy, may lie in-in-in these combination of non-violence
and legal activity, and with what energy and number of days remain to me I
mean to do all I can to explore that.
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And, I mean, who knows? Maybe we can find a way to-to
deal with the steel mill kind of situation that we confronted here in
Youngstown, but to do it differently, more creatively and find a way to
create a new world within the shell of the old. And unless you can do that,
how do you expect people to-to want a new society, to really desire heaven
on Earth, to want the kingdom of God with all their hearts and souls unless
they've had a chance to experience it. I think that's too much to ask of
human beings, and really in the way sinful to ask of children or of anyone
else, because people live and die and grow through experience, and so we
have to find ways to help people taste what that blessed community would be
like, and-and if teaching means anything—and I'm afraid often it
doesn't—but if it has any significance in people's lives, I understand we
have to learn to read and write and add and subtract I'm not against that,
but what we really have to learn is to hunger and thirst for the kingdom of
God. And whatever you call it, I'm not attached to that—the words, and I
think there are some beginnings. Little flickers, little sayings. We can
get down on our knees and blow on them and help them become real fires.
