America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s

Introduction

introduction Prisons are really an extension of our communities. We have people who are forced at gunpoint to live behind concrete and steel. Others of us, in what we ordinarily think of as the community, live at gunpoint again in almost the same conditions. The penitentiaries, as they call them, and the communities are plagued with the same thing: dope, disease, police brutality, murder, and rats running over the places that you dwell in. We recognize that most of the militant-dissatisfied youth are off in the penitentiaries. Eighty percent of the prison population is black, brown, and yellow people. You look around and say, “what happened to my man. I haven’t seen him for along time,” then you get busted, go to jail, and there he is. Prisons are an extension of the repression. In these penitentiaries are the Malcolms, Cleavers, Huey P. Newtons, Bobby Seales and all other political prisoners. Now the inmates are moving forth to harness their own destinies.They’re not relying on lying, demagogic politicians to redress their grievances. Of course, the courts didn’t redress their grievances in the first place, so there’s no sense in relying on them either. There’s very little difference between the penitentiaries in California and those in NewYork, New Orleans, Alabama, or Chicago. It’s the same system—America is the prison. All of America is a prison where the people are being held captive by the real arch criminals.—ZaYd ShakUr, 1970 Writing just after his acquittal as part of the NewYork PantherTwentyone , Zayd Shakur reflected a consciousness that prisoners were broadly representative of racism and inequality in the country. Drawing on insights developed by Malcolm X, Shakur, deputy minister of information for the New York branch of the Black Panther Party, declared that “all of America is a prison where the people are being held captive by the real arch criminals.”1 This insight underscored the high proportion of African Americans in prison, relative to other ethnic groups, and the ongoing racism and inequality pervading U.S. society. This view held great currency during the late 1960s and early 1970s. After her capture in 1970, Angela Davis wrote that “our enemies find themselves 2 IntroductIon confronted with a growing awareness among the people that the concentrated effort to maim and murder revolutionaries is just another form of the daily genocide of police brutality, and impoverished living conditions of ghettos and barrios.”2 In his wildly popular Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver similarly argued that “it is only a matter of time until the question of the prisoner’s debt to society versus society’s debt to the prisoner is injected forcefully into national and state politics, into the civil and human rights struggle, and into the consciousness of the body politic. It is an explosive issue which goes to the very root of America’s system of justice, the structure of criminal law, the prevailing beliefs and attitudes toward a convicted felon.”3 This straightforward metaphor that America is itself a prison for African Americans helped the 1970s generation of inmates see themselves as potential leaders in movements for social change. As they grew to understand the political and historical dimensions of theirconfinement, some, like George Jackson, believed that incarcerated people would serve as the vanguard of a revolution. They hoped they would inspire large-scale revolt and unprecedented attention to the writings, thought, and creativity of incarcerated people. As in Shakur’s comment, debates over prisons and the criminal justice system became a way to more broadly contest the meaning of American history and society. The connection between the penitentiary and the plantation highlighted the sense of injustice. If America was a prison, it became one in the aftermath of slavery. Standing beneath of statue of Sojourner Truth in Detroit’s Kennedy Square in December 1970, Fania Jordan urged her audience to understand activists who struggled to abolish prisons as akin to those who had fought to abolish slavery the century before: “We stand before the monument of Sojourner Truth, a Black woman liberation fighter,” Jordan told the crowd. “She was on the slaveowners’ most wanted list, just like Angela Davis, another freedom fighter, was on the fBI’s most wanted list.”4 Jordan was Davis’s sister and cochair of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis. In speaking about and below the statue of the famed feminist and abolitionist, Jordan sought to make clear that people deemed enemies of...