81 students from all five Georgia Highlands campuses hit the road for a field trip to Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary on September 17. This free student-life field trip to the former maximum security penitentiary was hosted by the Social Justice Department and allowed students from any declared major to join.
Criminals such as James Earl Ray, the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr., were housed at Brushy Mountain. During this excursion, students walked the same halls as some of America’s most infamous criminals and learned first-hand about life in the penitentiary from one of the former inmates, Wayne Davidson. He was charged with second degree burglary and spent 25 years in the penitentiary. Davidson told his visitors, “Every three steps you take at Brushy has a story.”
Davidson shared descriptive stories about what he’d encountered through his years at Brushy.
Between the gripping stories and the shocking scenes, Manoucheca Jean said the field trip was an “inspiration because you really saw how the inmates lived.” The penitentiary was open from 1896 to 2009 and closed due to “lack of control over inmate violence,” said the Washington Post
