"America means prisons," said Black Nationalist Pan-Africanist leader Malcolm X in a television interview some fifty years ago. It wasn't about crime he was talking. A similar sentiment was shared by Frederick Douglass less than a century earlier when he questioned the new form that amerikkka's "peculiar institution" (slavery) would take in the years and centuries following its formal abolition.
….salvation is a serious matter – it cost Christ His life in order to free us from our sin.
-- James C. Vogelzang, Doing HIS Time:
Meditations and Prayers for Men and Women in Prison (2008)
The video of police stopping three young black people, two men and a woman, for jaywalking, that ends with the woman screaming in the distance as cops throw her to the ground and twist her arms behind her back, becomes one of a growing category. This one happened May 2, 2014, in Berkeley. That same week, two others emerged, one on BART (the Bay Area subway system), and the other in Oakland. Both end with women screaming in the distance. On May 20, in Salinas, 60 miles to the south, Carlos Mejia was shot down on a street corner in broad daylight, on video.
Beginning in May 1985, I existed for over 14 years in various US jails and federal prisons—about 12 different institutions in all. I lived behind bars through what was probably the steepest rise in the country’s incarcerated population. Although the phenomenon known as “mass incarceration” was well underway, the term itself was not yet in use. When, in August 1999, I was released from a federal prison in Dublin, California, I had lived for years crowded alongside two to three other women in a prison cell originally designed for one.
The single greatest political transformation of the post-Civil Rights era in the US is the joint rolling back of the stingy social state and rolling out of the gargantuan penal state that have remade the country’s stratification, cities, and civic culture, and are recasting the very character of “blackness” itself.
If you are deaf, dumb, and blind to what is happening in the world, you’re under no obligation to do anything. But if you know what’s happening and you don’t do anything but sit on your ass, then you’re nothing but a punk. (Assata, 207)
The Power structure led by Nelson Rockefeller, wanted to show to the world and certainly to the rebellious forces within his own country – with the advice and consent and affirmation of Richard Nixon – what the price is for rebelling. And so, they created this assault force, which was there to murder everybody.1
-- Elizabeth M. Fink, Attica attorney
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist and author of the best-selling books, Live From Death Row and Death Blossoms. In 1981 he was elected president of the Association of Black Journalists (Philadelphia chapter). That same year he was arrested for allegedly killing a white police officer in Philadelphia. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982, in a process that has been described as an epic miscarriage of justice.
This volume is a leap into the abyss that is the American Gulag. Our purpose is to explore the origins of the current system of carceral punishment, which began to mass-incarcerate poor and working-class African Americans and Latinos living in urban centers beginning in the late 1970s. We link the new characteristics of imprisonment as it then emerged to the campaign of state repression unleashed against the civil rights and black power movements in the 1960s. Some of those imprisoned are veterans of these movements, and are political prisoners.
The collaboration culminating in this special issue of Socialism and Democracy was born a decade ago, when I began to visit Mumia on death row at SCI Greene in Waynesburg, PA. We never talked about the possibility of actually working together on such a project, but our conversations always centered on uncovering the roots of a problem; our eyes focused on the moment when freedom movements would once again take up the task of transforming society.