SAGE Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC

Seize the time: an interview with Stephen Jones

AVERY F. GORDON
Abstract: There is a long and substantial history of prisoners rights movements in the US, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, which was spearheaded by Black prisoners, notably figures such as George Jackson, subsequently murdered by prison guards. They were forging a new politics and understanding of the role of incarceration in a capitalist state, a politics echoed in prisons around the world. On the fortieth anniversary of the Attica uprising, in which prisoners seized control of the prison and issued a series of political demands, and which was subsequently crushed with overwhelming force, leaving thirty-nine dead, this article reflects on that history. The lineage of radical Black politics, forged in the increasingly harsh and increasingly generalised conditions of the prison industrial complex, continues not only through the writings of prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal, but also through the work and teaching of formerly incarcerated Black activists like Stephen Jones, whose insights, analysis and history are presented through his interview here. Keywords: Attica uprising, Black Power, George Jackson, New Abolitionists, prison industrial complex, Stephen Jones, Soledad Brother, supermax prisons

Stephen Jones is a counsellor and Transfer and Continuing Coordinator of the Educational Opportunity Programme at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). I met him during the first class on prisons I taught when he was

Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Visiting Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and on the editorial board of Race & Class. Stephen Jones is a counsellor and the Transfer and Continuing Coordinator of the UCSBs Educational Opportunity Programme. This interview was given on 21 February 2011. Race & Class Copyright 2011 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 53(2): 1427 10.1177/0306396811413039 http://rac.sagepub.com
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a mature student completing his BA in sociology. Stephen had spent over twenty years in the Californian prison system, but he rarely talked about his experiences in class. About midway through the course, I began to understand that the absence of tension and conflict I had anticipated in a prison course with an abolitionist perspective could be credited to Stephen. Ever generous, he was working as a shadow professor to the class, meeting with the other students in the dining halls and dormitories, explaining things, handling hostile questions, teaching in the each one teach one style he knew well. I remain convinced that the positive learning environment established on that course was in large part due to Stephens efforts on its behalf. When Stephen returned to work at UCSB after he completed his masters in social work at California State University, Hayward, he would often come as a guest speaker to my classes. I had never recorded any of those presentations and began to regret the absence of a record of Stephens thoughts and stories. It was in this context that I interviewed him early on a Saturday morning, where our conversation turned to his background and to the political education and transformation he com- pleted in prison.1 I always liked the way Studs Terkel would take a long conver- sation with a person and edit it into a single-voiced narrative, and I followed this oral history format, adding some words from George Jacksons widely read book of letters from prison, Soledad Brother.2 George Jackson was a pivotal figure in radical Black politics in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially in helping others to understand the repressive role of the prison in consolidating and extending racism, and copies of Soledad Brother passed from hand to hand until they wore out. He was also an important influence on Stephen Jones, who has carried those insights forwards, modifying them according to the needs of the times and, in this way, keeping an important lineage of political leadership alive. Jackson often ended his letters with the phrase seize the time, and this seemed therefore a fitting title.3 The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said more or less that freedom is what you do with whats been done to you.4 To make your way through a sys- tem thats designed not just to take your freedom away, but also to destroy you as a person is extraordinarily difficult. To be able to find a space of free- dom, to make a life of dignity and respect while you are confined there is a special kind of work. Some prisoners can do it, some cant. Stephen Jones did it. He lived a long time in prison without, as Gregory Frederick put it, allowing the evil of the prison to live in him.5 His example is, to my mind, an important counter to the dehumanisation and demoralisation that prison intends. It is also an example that has special resonance as we approach the fortieth anni- versary of the Attica uprising. On 9 September 1971, days after George Jackson was shot in the back by guards at San Quentin State Prison in California on 21 August, over 1,000 prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York took over D yard and seized control of the prison. They issued a manifesto (reproduced in this issue), made twenty-seven concrete demands, took approximately forty officers and civilian staff hostage, called for a negotiation team and began to self-manage the prison, including
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completing complex battlements and fortifications. After four days, on 13 September, with negotiations stalled over the question of amnesty from criminal prosecution for the prisoners, Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused for the fourth day the mens (and Commissioner Russell Oswalds) request to come to the prison. Instead, he ordered 1,000 National Guard troops, state police and prison guards to storm the prison and retake it. Tear gas was dropped into the yard, and state troopers, using shotguns, fired for over two minutes into the smoke. The televised show of force, which ended with prison guards shouting white power, left twenty-nine prisoners and ten hostages dead, all killed by state troopers and guards as they retook the prison. The McKay Commission, although critical of Nelson Rockefellers handling of the uprising and the brazen lies that the media published and that prison personnel circulated about who killed the hostages, did little to stop the wave of reprisals that followed. Notwithstanding the still prevalent view that Attica was a spontaneous riot triggered by an incident of prisoner abuse, the uprising at Attica was well pre- pared, the culmination of a period of organising within and outside of prison, as their declaration made clear: The entire incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwhacking of the two prisoners on September 8, 1971, but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administrative network of this prison throughout the years.6 At Attica, the remarkable unity of the men had been painstakingly built and no doubt helped by the failure of prison authorities to respond to demands that prisoners had been making peace- fully for quite some time. The wave of prison rebellions that occurred in the wake of the intense activity at Soledad prison in California and after George Jacksons death at Attica and also in San Jos, California; Dallas and San Antonio, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; and Bridgeton, New Jersey, to name a few places occurred in the context of a prisoners rights movement in the US that began in the 1920s, peaked in the early 1950s and exploded from 1960 to 1971.7 This movement was not, by any means, confined to the US and, during this same period, there was also a wave of revolts and strikes in European pris- ons, including youth facilities, notably in Sweden, France, Germany, Northern Ireland and Italy. In 1971, in Italy alone, there were almost monthly work, hun- ger and solidarity strikes, revolts, protests and riots across the country in Turin, Monza, Treviso, Milan, Naples, Sardinia, Genes, La Spezia, Brescia, Forl, Catania, Udine, Modena and Pisa.8 In France, a hunger strike by the political prisoners swept up in the post-1968 repression and by the 1970 anti-casseurs law led to the founding of the Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons (GIP) in 1971, which then, in turn, networked not only with prisoners in France, but also with prisoner movements across Europe and the US.9 The whole question of what was intolerable, the title of GIPs journal, was now tied directly, constitu- tively, not only to the depredations of capitalism, imperialism and militarism, but to repressive policing and imprisonment in the name of security. In the US, the escalation of the Black struggle in the 1960s and the criminalisation of its participants had, by 1970, produced a distinct population of political pris- oners connected to the Black Panther party, with its anti-racist Marxism, and
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experientially tied to a critique of police brutality and its repressive role in the everyday lives of Black people. The radicalisation of prisoners and the upsurge in their protests can in part be attributed to the arrival of these prisoners. As George Jackson noted: the recent influx of the political teachers, the political animals, from the Black Panther Party were instrumental in the changes from the normal conservatism The new consciousness stems from the fact that the polit- ical teacher, the Black Panther concentration camped as a result of the political thrust on the street, brought new ideas. You know revolutionary, scientific socialism, and anti-racism. And we attempted to make them under- stand that were all equally uniformly repressed by the administration.10 There were two key positions that Jackson, in particular, was instrumental in forcefully articulating and that remain to this day the twin elements of prisoner radicalism in the US. The first Jackson alludes to: ideological and political unity across the racial divides institutionally embedded in the prisons racial classifi- cation systems and in its segregationist policies. This unity emerged from, and was harnessed to, a sophisticated humanism designed to throw off the effects of institutions of authoritative inhumanity and to comprehend on a feeling level an existence contrary to violence. The Attica Liberation Faction mani- festo of demands was also, it is worth recalling, an anti-depression platform. The second element is the centrality of confinement and captivity to the func- tioning of the capitalist state and thus its importance as a target for elimination. As Jackson explained: Well, were all familiar with the function of the prison as an institution serv- ing the needs of the totalitarian state. Weve got to destroy that function; the function has to be no longer viable, in the end. Its one of the strongest institu- tions supporting the totalitarian state. We have to destroy its effectiveness, and thats what the prison movement is all about.11 The Attica uprising represented the achievement of a sophisticated political con- sciousness in which both these positions found expression, as the manifesto of demands and anti-depression platform attest. George Jacksons acute and uncompromising analysis, the Attica rebels epitomised in the widely diffused image of young L. D. Barkley concluding his reading of the manifesto with the cry, We are men. We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such and the more anonymous, but significant, number of prisoners devel- oping a revolutionary international politics sustainable inside a US maximum security prison generated a distinctive intellectual culture in US prisons and inspired, especially elsewhere, a radicalisation of ongoing and emerging demands for prison reform.12 It is perhaps difficult to imagine today the close connection that existed then between the struggles inside and outside prison. This connection was, to a large
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extent, initiated by and fought for by the men and women on the inside and it was maintained through what Jackson called the channels of education.13 On the one hand, outsiders brought news of the movement(s), of the war, of current events and new ideas political, social and economic theory and hidden histories forging a connection with the defiance and profound change taking place out- side the prison walls. At the same time, prisoners sent news back out about what was happening inside and taught the outsiders, especially the middle-class ones, about the centrality of the prison regime to the social management of a poverty deeply rooted in racism and violence. They also gave the outsiders a remarkable lesson in the power of education to transform consciousness. Political prisoners routinely organise both themselves and educational programmes within prison, even under the most restrictive circumstances, as the elaborate examples of the ANC, the IRA or the PLO have demonstrated.14 What was happening in US prisons was something else: poor people of colour abandoned by the educa- tional system, many of whom were learning to read for the first time, were edu- cating themselves. This was self-determined education on a whole other level. It produced not merely better educated or better disciplined or culturally sensi- tised political prisoners, but a new kind of political prisoner, the ordinary crimi- nal or the ordinary abject capitalist, to quote Stephen Jones, who rejects that identity and that practice and becomes someone else: someone able to connect their individual experiences to social causes and to replace individualist with collective action; someone who, amid an environment whose brutality demanded concentration on ones own safety, an atmosphere of cruel rivalry, would dedicate themselves to a dignified and cooperative life in prison;15 some- one who would have to work hard to achieve on a feeling level an existence contrary to violence and work even harder to have it publicly recognised. This was the kind of someone George Jackson, Stephen Jones, Gregory Frederick and many others became, and education was central to this because self-determined education was also the co-operative means by which the invitation to do ones time differently was offered. Stephen Jones was not at Attica when the uprising took place, but what hap- pened there had a significant impact both on him and more generally. Attica helped to radicalise US prisoners and it also provoked a terrible and cruel reac- tion to restore law and order that contributed its part to the largest prison expansion the world has ever seen.16 The Attica leaders were tortured and seg- regated; the organisers at Norfolk and Concord (November 1971) were kid- napped at night in their beds and sent to Walpoles notorious Nine Block; the strikers at the federal prison in Marion (1973, 1983) became guinea pigs for creat- ing the perfect control unit; the Angola Three were persecuted using solitary confinement two of them, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, for thirty-six years; the Lucasville uprising (1993) leaders were sentenced to death and began what continue to be eighteen years of solitary confinement on death row with- out any human contact, and so on. The counter-insurgency campaign that fol- lowed the uprising at Attica, and that followed each successive set of demands
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or strikes or revolts elsewhere, began the process by which a super-maximum prison regime designed to produce unquestioned compliance to authority has become completely normalised today. As is well known by now, the use of mass imprisonment in the US to manage escalating poverty, inequality and political opposition remains unabated, while this prison regime has been extended dur- ing the global war on terror and to encompass migrants. In the UK and Europe, the trend is similar, although the scale is smaller and the coercion less severe. The culture of self-education and radicalisation that was evident at Attica and that Attica also helped promote remained long after the immediate aftermath of the wave of prison revolts that occurred between 1960 and 1975, as Stephen Joness experience makes clear. At the same time, the nature of that culture and the terms of the prison struggle have changed significantly. In the US, the chan- nels of communication, education and legal redress have been closed or severely restricted, including access to and the content of the prison libraries. The prison- ers of Stephens generation are no longer alive or have been released, with some notable exceptions, such as Mumia Abu Jamal. And while there is a committed, but small, prison abolition movement, imprisonment is not a central analytic in the social movements today that animate political struggle against capitalism. Perhaps, then, the most lasting legacy of the Attica uprising is its unfinished business: to eliminate the prisons function as we know it today. That the politi- cal culture inside and outside prison is not as it was in the 1960s and early 1970s is merely a taken-for-granted fact. It certainly did not prevent the men from at least six of Georgias state prisons from co-ordinating a unified state-wide strike against their use as exploited labour and from receiving immediate public sup- port; or prevent the last of the Lucasville uprising leaders from launching a hun- ger strike to be treated as other condemned prisoners are treated; or prevent prisoners in Rio de Janeiro from rebelling against extreme conditions of over- crowding; or prevent the men at the Maison dArret dOsny outside Paris from renewing their protest again after several of them were moved, in an act of repri- sal, across the country, to mention only four major activities that took place in the winter of 2010. The possibility for refusal and for political struggle is always there, prompted by unacceptable and impossible living conditions, pursued by individuals who, at some point almost always unanticipated by them, begin to acquire another level of understanding, to quote Stephen Jones. This other level of understanding, which constitutes a way of seizing the time, of doing the time so that the time doesnt do you in, is hard won: demons are confronted, wounds are attended to, new friends are made, responsibility for oneself and the discipline required to keep it are accepted, studies are completed. Once achieved, this mode of being must be continually cultivated and shared. Once achieved, it is formidable. For having done the work to achieve such a level of understanding and for sharing it with others, including me, on the fortieth anniversary of the uprising at Attica, I would like, with all my heart, to thank Stephen Jones. *****
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Race & Class 53(2) Ive been asked to explain myself, briefly, before the world has done with me I was captured and brought to prison when I was eighteen years old The record that the state has compiled on my activities reads like the record of ten men. It labels me brigand, thief, burglar, gambler, hobo, drug addict, gunman, escape artist, Communist revolutionary, and murderer. (p. 10)

I grew up in humble beginnings in an extremely poor and large family in Brooklyn, New York. I came to California in 1968 and I was incarcerated for the first time in 1969. I was 13. I was arrested not convicted for a burglary I didnt commit. Because my mom was illiterate and didnt understand the legal system, she didnt show up at court. That sent me up to Chabot Ranch in Alameda County for twelve months. I ran away from the boys camp because it wasnt a locked-down facility and they told you that you could leave any time you liked. What they didnt tell you is that if you got arrested again, youd be going to a more secure and con- trolled camp. In 1970, I was sent to CYA (California Youth Authority), the juvenile prison in California, and stayed for about two and a half years. When I came home, I had learned how to be a better criminal, how to really participate in an alternative economy. I was an abject capitalist! I wanted all the new toys and clothes, the pretty cars and all the things that everybody in America aspired to obtain. But I was a juvenile and couldnt get a job. So, I sold drugs and partici- pated in other types of illegal work. Well, when I turned 17, I was arrested and convicted for a murder/robbery that I didnt have anything to do with and I was sent to the penitentiary. I went through Trace, Vacaville, San Quentin, Jamestown and was released in 1997 from the fire-fighting base camp in Oak Glen. Blackmen born in the US and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments. (p. 9) I never understood the social contract. We didnt know nothing about it. Thats why, when they talked about rehabilitation, the concept had no meaning for me. I mean, how do you rehabilitate a person who was never habilitated? I grew up in a very violent world. I look back at my first encounter with law enforcement. I was 5 or 6 years old when a NYC police [officer] killed my best friend because he said he wanted to kill a nigger. So, from that point forward, it was just a natural progression for me to be fearful of authority. They always asked me: why did you run? I said: Oh man, because of you. You got a badge, you got a uniform, and you got a big old pistol!! Hes dodging lead. (p. 27) My first five years were an adjustment time from civil society to carceral soci- ety, getting used to prison politics and learning how to function. It was pretty challenging, to say the least. The level of violence that is perpetrated against

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your body every single day is unspeakable. The guards brutalise you, other con- victs brutalise you. I was young, nobody knew me and I didnt know anybody. But I met some good people, some very intelligent brothers, behind the wall, and they knew all about the prison industrial complex. Thats how I was intro- duced to the teaching of George [Jackson] and the Black Guerilla Family17 and prison politics and this thing they call direct participatory democracy, where everybody has a voice. I ended up being introduced to a new ideology of how to see myself in this capitalist society and the role that I was playing: how I was being commodified; how I bought into the concept of consumerism; and how the choices I made, that I thought I was making on my own, were already pre- determined. When youre living in the hyper-ghetto, you see images of how other people live and you want that, want it last week, if you know what I mean. Everything is fast paced. But your reality is that when you leave your apartment or your house, what you see is abject poverty. You dont see anybody with a Brooks Brothers suit or wingtip shoes carrying a briefcase. You see the whores, the pimps, the drug dealers and the other gangsters. They become your role models. Thats what I saw and thats what I aspired to be. And that is what I became. The conditions were in place for me to fall into the trap. While behind the wall, an old brother named Pops took me under his wing and brought me up to speed. He said: Son, one day you going home. What are you going to do once you get out of here? You are living in a nether world right now, and it is a microcosm of the civil society. He said: The things that you learn here you are going to take home with you. What are you going to learn? What are you going to learn? Are you going to learn a different way? Or fall back into that same old trap that got you here in the first place? The textbooks on criminology like to advance the idea that prisoners are mentally defective. There is only the merest suggestion that the system itself is at fault investigation of anything outside the tenets of the system itself is futile All other lines of inquiry would be like walking backward. Youll never see where youre going. (pp. 2930, 23) I tell people today that the freest I have ever been in my life was when I was incarcerated because it actually took the veil of ignorance off of my conscious- ness. I got to see how people live and commodify other people and how not to buy into that concept of consumerism or into capitalism. We can live in society as sisters and brothers, more humanely. So, I understand about being institu- tionalised, I understand the punishment industry and the torture machine that was in place behind the wall. And I got a sense of belonging, of meaning, a sense of self-worth behind the wall. I said, I am valuable, my life has meaning to somebody. I participated with the Black Guerilla Family and they really brought me up to speed on the political structure of America and capitalism and what that entails. I had to become self-educated because they never allowed me to go to
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school behind the walls. I had to start reading economic theory, sociology, psy- chology and history. Becoming politicised was a process where youd go through an indoctrination period where youre given literature to read and then youd have seminars. After we read a book we had to read a book a week on Saturday wed have discussions during yard time that might last up to five hours. And youd have to be right on point! Youd have to be able to internalise the information and then disseminate it, give it back. Your comrades could find you anywhere. You could be in the chow hall and they could ask you: Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2, page such-and-such, and youd have to [he snaps twice]. I said: Oh my god because they made sure that you got it! George Jackson was a self-taught intellectual. He didnt have any college degrees. But that you must learn to read and disseminate information was part of the struc- ture. You had to learn how to write so that you could stay connected to the out- side world because we understood that one day some of us was going home, and we had to give voice to the voiceless. The holds are fast being broken. Men who read Lenin, Fanon, and Che dont riot, they mass, they rage, they dig graves. (p. 31) When I was politicised, it was a process of going from being a common crimi- nal and a common capitalist to becoming a prison abolitionist, someone who doesnt have a concept of reform. You know what I mean, you have to blow it up and start up all over again. I became part of a cadre of very scholarly young men, Black men, who had a new way of looking at the world. The process was that everybody should be given the opportunity to access resources and knowl- edge in society regardless of where you were at; there has to be some type of order to that process, right? Being locked up, it is a very violent society, and so the first thing we got away from was the violence. We were not condoning vio- lence perpetrated against another prisoner. No, the only people the organisation was at war with was the prison administration, our punishers. When Angela Davis started using the term the prison industrial complex, we understood what it meant. We had been advocating against that since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its a multi-billion dollar industry and everybody is mak- ing money off of convicts, from the food we purchase in the canteens, to the soap and toothbrush and toothpaste we use to clean our teeth.18 We were already talking about this and about how the prison industrial complex would mush- room into a big fat white elephant sitting in the middle of everybodys living room that nobody sees. Fast-forward to today and look at the economy in the United States and at the budget crisis here in California. They still dont want to attribute that to the prison industrial complex. George Jackson was very pro- phetic many years ago when he said prison would be the central feature of American society and suck the lifeblood out of the inner cities if we didnt check it. Like Malcolm X has stated so succinctly, the chickens have truly come home to roost. The budgetary crisis is correctable if two things were to happen today (or tomorrow): one, reconfigure how you do the punishment industry blow it
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up and reshape it; two, put some major rehabilitation in place. I have to be hon- est. When I was locked up, I thought there were some people who deserved to be locked up. You know what I mean. They were very violent, they were very ignorant and they were very hostile and mean-spirited. So I understand the need to house some people away from civil society for a period of time. But when these people pay their debt to society, how do you process them back into civil society? Whats the process? When I got released with my $200 gate money, they made me purchase my own bus ticket back home. By the time I got back to the Bay area, I had $93, no job, no place to stay and no food. Capitalism and capitalist man, wrecker of worlds, scourge of the people. It cannot address itself to our needs, it cannot and will not change itself to adapt to natural changes within the social structure. (p. 185) The process of becoming enlightened to the commodification of the human body is linked to slavery. It is just a new form of slavery. That is all it is, man. But we dont get that here in America. We dont understand that slavery is not dead. It occurs every day of our lives here in America. And they are doing it without our permission. Well, some of us give permission. Others have been scared into voting for those politicians with tough on crime stands, not knowing the rami- fications of keeping people housed as long as we do in California. When I came home in 1997, nobody was talking about convict labour and we were making a dollar an hour on the fire lines. This year, I was listening to the news and finally someone mentioned the CDF [California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection] and their use of convict labour. The guys on the fire lines still make one dollar an hour. Heres how it works. The free men, the smoke jumpers, they get helicoptered in. The convicts, we are in hook line order. Between thirteen and sixteen people in a line and everybody has some type of implement or tool. Theres your first saw, your second saw, and each person with a chainsaw has a puller. The puller works the rakes and he has a smaller chainsaw to cut the big trees down. People come behind him and kick the tree off to the side of the road. Then you have your people come through with the Pulaski and then the Drag Spoon comes up with the shovel. You are cutting a line might be three or even six feet wide up to, through and around the fire to create firebreaks. I was there when a bunch of guys got burnt up. At every fire somebody dies because you are right in the middle of this firestorm and you have these big widow makers, old exploding trees. The sap would heat up to such a high degree that the tree would just explode. Boom. When these trees explode, six- to eight-foot long splinters come crashing from the tree. Youre standing there and you dont have any protection. When you hear those big booms going off, those are trees, not gas lines, up there. That is a tree blowing up. You get one dollar an hour and youre on the fire line, risking your life every day. The camp clerk, the lieutenant, they never go out on a fire line. But these are the people who contract convict labour to different com- munities. And the money theyre paid goes back to their particular camp and
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they get a percentage of the proceeds. And it doesnt stop when fire season con- cludes. It goes into the winter because then theres flood control and community maintenance. Up in the mountains, we kept the roads clear. It snows, and they have convicts out there. Dear Fay I detected in the questions posed by your team a desire to isolate some rationale that would explain why racism exists at the prison with particular promi- nence. The question was too large Its tied into the question of why racism exists in this whole society with particular prominence, tied into history. (p. 22) The process of criminalising whole groups of people occurs through racism. The system uses racism as a divide and conquer mechanism. America is more or less ground zero for the punishment industry. We export our various theories not only for housing people, but also for criminalising people. This involves othering people. You cant commit acts of brutality against your brother or your sister. They have to be somebody else, a dirty person, a terror- ist. You marginalise this person, dehumanise this person, so now you can punish this person. Poor people have a tendency of never looking up. They always look around. And when they look around, what do they see? They see people who dont look like them, who seem to be doing much better than them even though they are struggling the same. You have all these groups of poor people here in America and what do they have in common? They all have a fear of immigrants. I hear it all the time in the hood. And these are poor people in the hood. I hear it from the Chicanos and Latinos, I hear it from Blacks, I hear it from Asians. They get pissed off and angry: Why are they here? They should have gone through the bureaucracy like I had to. I said: These are your brothers and sisters, man. Wouldnt you want to give them the same opportunities, access to resources and privileges that you have? I look at the border control officers and I see that most of them are people of colour. And theyre very conservative, very Republican. Anytime you can other groups of people and get the poor people to buy into it, they are going to think they are doing something great, even if its substantiating the prison industrial complex. They dont understand divide and conquer techniques. The incarceration of migrants is expanding in these United States, and we are also in the process of creating a two-tier prison system.19 Recently, three of my students came in to talk about their fathers being incarcerated. Their fathers are immigrants charged with immigration violations. They are housed in separate facilities; its how the punishment industry is reconstructing itself and expand- ing. I have some old friends, immigrants living in the US for fifteen to twenty years, who were arrested for simple crimes. After doing eight or nine years in the California penitentiary, they are sent back to Trinidad or the Cayman Islands. Its ridiculous! I was blindsided by this. I hadnt seen it happening until Im on the other side of the wall. What is happening is that we are in the process of
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reinventing institutionalised racism by othering people not just based on skin colour, but because of religious and political beliefs or because theyre immi- grants or migrants. Its the same process of othering people, and you do it through institutional racism. I am living very badly now and just to stay alive is an ordeal, but I see something better. It is vague, and is a possibility at best, but I know a place, a refuge where people love and live. (p. 49) The work I am doing now is truly an honour and a blessing for me because I see the effects of the punishment industry on a lot of the young people I work with. Some of them have direct connections to the punishment industry because their parents are part of it. And so emotions come up. One young ladys father has been incarcerated since she was 3 years old and she is 19 years old now. She has been going to see her dad behind the wall for sixteen years. She came to my office Friday and she says: Mr Jones, he is not just doing this time by himself. I have been incarcerated for sixteen years. I said: Wow, that is so true. My chil- dren told me when I came home that they was right there with me. So, I get the chance to give her and other students some clarity and some understanding of what their parents are going through, what theyre doing and why they act the way they act in certain circumstances. I also have some former convicts that I mentor through college who are making a re-entry through an education pro- gramme in Oakland. I teach people about the punishment industry and about their rights as citizens, as formerly incarcerated people, and about the need to change the verbiage, the meaning and power of words. Ive thought about this for many years. When I first met you, I thought of myself as an ex-convict or an ex-felon. And it didnt feel right. I was x-ing myself out of society. We reaffirm our marginalisation every time we say we are ex- convicts or ex-felons. I mean, when do we get our rights as citizens back? When do we start viewing ourselves as being worthy of being a man or a woman? When I looked at the term formerly incarcerated, I said: Thats me. Im for- merly incarcerated, Im not a convict. It was like an epiphany, it was empower- ing. I look at myself totally differently than I did just a few years ago. Those of us who are formerly incarcerated have another level of understanding that a lot of people dont have access to. I share these insights with young people and encourage them to get educated as a form of empowerment to make better and healthier choices for themselves. When people become more educated and more politicised, they are not apt to create crimes against one another. They start look- ing at the real criminals, the ones stealing billions from the unsuspecting mil- lions. It is really important for young people and (old people too!) here in America to know how their tax dollars are being spent, so they can make better and healthier choices for themselves. Why their tax dollars are not going to fund education. Why they dont have access to healthcare. Why even some profes- sionals are now part of the new working poor.
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I am very optimistic. The young people nowadays are starting to become more aware. The most important group of students who need to take the blind- ers off is white students. They come in with these gorgeous questions. They are very curious. Because they are going to be in leadership roles that can change the policy that governs the prison industrial complex, they are asking critical questions. And I say, this is fascinating, amazing. People of colour, we know it, we live it every day. Back in the day, we had this cross-cultural peoples libera- tion movement that was global, and it was resisting the machine, the machine of capitalism. It was resisting all that nonsense. This movement will not reoccur until people become educated and do cross-cultural collaboration and form coalitions of support across the board. All of our struggles are interlinked. The tentacles of oppression are many and varied, so you need all these various groups to come together and say: We are going to stop this machine. We are not going to let this occur because what happened to you today is going to happen to me tomorrow, and we need to address this as a collective. You have to remember that I was acculturated behind the wall to believe and understand that the process of collective thought breeds collective action. The collaborations are at the seedling stage, but I am very hopeful because the government can only do as much as we allow them to. When we have an educated proletariat and you form a real peoples movement with a theoretical framework and a history and examples and reference points that can be shared with young people, they say, we can do this! They did say slavery was going to last forever, right? Ha, ha, ha! I look at things today in the same framework: when people become aware, they can change the system. References
1 2 3 Thanks to Jordan Camp for arranging, recording and transcribing the interview and to Stephen Jones for his time and patience with having his life and his beautifully expressive voice reduced to a few pages. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: the prison letters of George Jackson (New York, Bantam Books, 1970), introduction by Jean Genet. Page numbers for each passage quoted in the text of the interview are, in order: 10, 9, 27, 2930/23, 31, 185, 22, 49. Seize the Time was the title of former Black Panther party chairperson Elaine Browns first album of music recorded in 1969. It became not only a popular Black Panther party slogan, but also a political and strategic concept. See Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: the story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore, MD, Black Classic Press, 1996). The idea which I have never ceased to develop is that, in the end, one is always responsible for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else besides assume this responsibility. For I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him. This is the limit I would today accord to freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, Itinerary of a thought, New Left Review (no. 58, November/December 1969), p. 45. Gregory Frederick, Prisoners as citizens, Monthly Review (Vol. 53, no. 3, July/August 2001), p. 85. Massacre at Attica, Black Panther (Vol. 7, no. 4, 1971), p. 3. For a contemporaneous view of George Jackson and his death, see Eric Mann, Comrade George: an investigation into the life, political thought, and assassination of George Jackson (New York, Harper & Row, 1974). On the history of the prisoners rights movement, see Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 years of imprisonment in America (Boston, MA, Northeastern University Press, 2000), Chapters 56.
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Philippe Artires, Laurent Quro and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds, Le Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons: archives dune lutte 19701972 (Paris, ditions de lIMEC, 2003), pp. 945. A casseur is a thug. The Chaban-Delmas law was specifically directed towards criminalising union strikers and protesters. It created enhanced penalties for actions taken in groups and directed towards law enforcement personnel and gave new meaning rioting demonstrator to the term casseur. The law was repealed in 1981 and a new version, targeted at banlieue youth, was reinstated by the Sarkozy government in March 2010, known as the loi sur les bandes (law concerning gangs). It was first used on 29 March 2010 at an authorised demonstration against imprisonment and in solidarity with the prisoners at La Sant, when more than half of the 200 or so demonstrators were arrested. Cent dix personnes interpells pour un tir de fuse dans une manifestation, Le Monde (28 March 2010), available at: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/ article/2010/03/28/110-arrestation-lors-d-une-manifestation-anticarcerale_1325507_3224. html#xtor=AL-32280184. Interview with comrade George, conducted in March 1971, Black Panther (Vol. 7, no. 1, 1971). Karen Wald, An interview with George Jackson (16 May 1971), originally broadcast on KPFA-FM Berkeley, California. This interview is widely available online and has been reprinted many times, including in Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (neo) slave narratives and contemporary prison writings (New York, SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 22934. See Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: imprisoned radical intellectuals and the US prison regime (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006). On influence in Europe, see Artires et al., op. cit. Sadly, 23-year-old L. D. Barkley was one of the men killed when the prison was stormed. Wald, op. cit. This connection was also energised by the enormously popular campaign to Free Angela Davis following the FBI manhunt, her arrest (in 1970) and trial as an accomplice in the kidnap and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. See, for example, Govan Mbeki, Learning from Robben Island: Govan Mbekis prison writings (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1991). Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States (New York, HarperCollins, 2005), p. 519. See Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: police and prisons in the age of crisis (London, Verso, 2000). George Jackson and W. L. Nolen founded the Black Guerilla Family in 1966 at San Quentin. Known principally today as a prison gang, its original purpose was to unite prisoners in the struggle for dignity in prison, to eliminate racism and what Jackson described as the totali- tarian function of the state embodied in and by the prison, and to link the struggle in prison to the active movements outside of it. It considered itself a revolutionary organisation, Black Marxist in orientation, and was associated both with the Black Panther party and the Black Liberation Army. See Angela Y. Davis, Masked racism: reflections on the prison industrial complex, Colorlines (Fall 1998); Joy James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1998); Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media, 2003). For an interactive map of the prison industrial complex, see Ashley Hunt, The corrections documentary project, available at: http://correctionsproject. com/. On convict labour and profiteering, see Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, eds, Prison Profiteers: who makes money from mass incarceration? (New York, New Press, 2007). See Amnesty International, Jailed without Justice: immigration detention in the USA (2009); also Teresa A. Miller, A new look at neo-liberal economic policies and the criminalization of undocumented migration, SMU Law Review (Vol. 61, 2008), pp. 17188.

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