notes Introduction 1. Zayd Shakur, “America Is the Prison,” in Off the Pigs! The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party, edited by G. Louis Heath (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976), 247–80, mimeographed article, New York, N.Y., Oct. 17, 1970. Shakur attributed the insight to Malcolm X. See, e.g., Malcolm X, “The Harlem Hate-Gang Scare,” Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Grove, 1965), 64–71. In that discussion, Malcolm X said that “our people in this particular society live in a police state” (66). New Jersey state troopers killed Shakur in 1973. 2. Angela Yvonne Davis, “I Am a Communist Revolutionary,” in Heath, Off the Pigs!, 255, mimeographed article, Black Panther Party, Los Angeles chapter, Nov. 17, 1970. 3. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 59. 4. Fania Jordan Davis, quoted in Bettina Aptheker, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, 2d ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 31. 5. Ibid., 26. 6. Editorial, New York Times, Oct. 16, 1970, quoted in ibid., 24. 7. Leonard Peltier, PrisonWritings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, edited by Harvey Arden (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience (Farmington, Pa.: Plough, 1997); Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996). Ruchell Magee and Hugo Pinell, two men associated with George Jackson, remain in prison as well.The Oakland-based Prison Activist Resource Center tracks close to one hundred political prisoners, many of whom have been incarcerated since the 1970s. For the periodically updated list, see Prison Activist Resource Center, 8. Angela Davis to George Jackson, June 2, 1970, letter read into the record of the People of the State of California vs. Angela Y. Davis; rpt. in Aptheker, Morning Breaks, 209. 9. “Entertainers Raise $38,000 for Angela Davis Defense,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 1972. See also Sol Stern, “The Campaign to Free Angela Davis . . . and Ruchell Magee,” New York Times Magazine, June 27, 1971, 8. 10. “Long John,” Negro Prison Camp Work Songs, recorded and produced by Pete and Toshi Seeger (New York: Ethnic Folkways Library, 1956); lyrics transcribed in Harold Courlander, A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore (New York: Crown, 1976), 407–9. 11. See also Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: New Press, 2002), 256–313. 12. “Long John.” 13. Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began, 258. 14. H. Bruce Franklin, ed., Prison Writing in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1998), 8. Franklin developed this thesis in 1978. The most recent edition of his pathbreaking study, The Victim as Criminal and Artist, is titled Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Similar arguments about the relationship between slavery and incarceration appear throughout the political, cultural, and historical literature on prisons. See, e.g., Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: Five Hundred Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998); Neil Websdale, Policing the Poor: From Slave Plantation to Public Housing (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001); David Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon Cand Schuster, 1997); and Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and Austin Sarat, eds., From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 15. Ronnie Reed, “Open Letter,” in From the Cold Jaws of Prison: By Inmates and ExInmates , Musicians, and Poets from Attica, Rikers, and the Tombs, sound recording (New York: Folkways, 1971). 16. Laws of New York, 1822, chap. 273, sec. 3; Laws of New York, 1829, Revised Statutes , part 4, chap. 3, title 2, sec. 58. 17. Laws of New York, 1846, chap. 324, sec. 7. 18. Laws of New York, 1847, chap. 460, title 2, art. 1, sec. 48, subdiv. 12. 19. Prison Association of New York, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Prison Association of New York, Reports, 1871 to 1873 (vol. 7), New York State Archives, Albany, 187–88. 20. Larry E. Sullivan, The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn Hope (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 17. 21. Wines, quoted in ibid., 18. 22. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 180. See also Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery.” 23. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 177. 24. Ibid., 180. 25. Estelle Freedman,Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830– 1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 41. 26. David J...