A Not So Friendly Fascism? Political Prisons and Prisoners in the United States

I have heard people refer to the "criminal countenance." I never saw one. Any man or woman looks like a criminal behind bars.

Eugene V. Debs, Walls and Bars, 1927

In introducing Cages of Steel, a book I coedited with Jim and Jennie Vander Wall on the politics of imprisonment in the United States (Churchill 1992), I observed that the United States maintained that no persons were held in its penal facilities for purely political reasons. To illustrate, I quoted John Clark, warden of what was then purportedly the toughest of all American prisons, the federal super-max at Marion, Illinois. "While it is true that some of the inmates held here subscribe strongly to certain ideologies, they are not here because they hold those ideological beliefs. They are here because they engaged in criminal acts" (Leyden 1986, n.p.). As a preliminary indication that the situation was not exactly as Warden Clark described it, I then provided five snapshots of the circumstances surrounding the long-term incarceration of selected prisoners known to "subscribe strongly to certain ideologies." To assess the extent to which things have/haven't changed over the 13 years that have elapsed since these samples were offered, it seems appropriate to begin the current essay by updating each of them.

• When the essay was first written, Dhoruba bin Wahad, a former leader of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), had recently been released after 19 years imprisonment (Horning 1989; Boyle 1990; Kunstler 1990). In 1973, at the end of his third trial on the same charges, bin Wahad had been convicted of wounding two police officers during a 1971 ambush and sentenced to serve 25-years-to-life.¹ In March 1990, his conviction was finally overturned after the court-ordered release of FBI documents demonstrated that the Bureau and the New York City Police Department's Bureau of Strategic Services (BOSS, otherwise known as the Red Squad) had collaborated to coerce false testimony against bin Wahad during his trials (Donner 1990, 155–96). The agencies involved managed to cover up their subornation of perjury by key government witness Pauline Joseph and others for more than 15 years. Even after it was proven that bin Wahad had been convicted on the basis of false testimony and that a mass of exculpatory evidence had all along been withheld from his attorneys, he was forced to spend an additional 13 months in prison while the New York State Supreme Court pondered whether the facts legally required its reversal of his conviction, or whether this was merely an option they might decline to exercise (Panther's Conviction Reversed 1990). The State of New York then spent several years asserting its intent to take the case to trial for a fourth time, using this threat to offset bin Wahad's claim to compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Charges were finally dropped in 1995 (Grady-Willis 1998, 379–82), in combination with a nominal monetary settlement.
• At the time I wrote the original piece, Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt, one-time head of the BPP's Los Angeles chapter, was serving the 20th year of a life sentence imposed after being found guilty in 1972 of having committed a 1968 murder in Santa Monica. Despite the fact that by 1990 there was substantial indication that ji Jaga had been in Oakland, some 350 miles from Santa Monica, when the murder occurred; that his defense team had been infiltrated by the police; that prosecution witnesses had repeatedly perjured themselves during his trial (Amnesty International 1980, 21–32; Cochran and Rutten 1996, 128–41); and even that a former FBI man had stated under oath that ji Jaga had been framed by agents working in collaboration with detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS, a...