Too often, discussions about realities of crime, policing, prison, take part in separate realms, as if they are not all intimately linked.  Too often, discussions about reforming or transforming the structures of society get boxed into narrow rhetoric far removed from the complexities that make it so difficult to create linkages in life that seem simple in thought.  And all too often, discussions of political engagement, of criminal justice, take place as if unconnected to the fears, hopes, losses, desires, each of us share.  As we look to how we can rethread what has become undone, it may be useful to keep in mind these words from one of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Prison Nation radio commentaries: 

… I speak today … of our yesterdays when one of the deepest social movements held sway. Men, usually men, mostly, and women who never held power, found themselves in powerful political positions in organizations, and more than a few of them abused that power usually for sexual favors from women.

… European modernity had its emergence not merely as Marx asserts in the brutal lives of capitalism but in the inquisition which marked mass terror and the suppression of women. In the name of a war against witches, men waged war against women who were traditionally herbalists, healers, doctors, and nurturers of European tribes ... Here we find the roots of patriarchy.

In hindsight, I can see that all of us were oppressed. Even while we were abusing our power, we were abused by a greater power, states’ power that killed us in the streets and, as the example of Fred Hampton showed us, in our sleep as well. We must not forget that the abuse of power also led to us killing each other, Panthers killing Panthers, the ultimate abuse of power and betrayal of power.

Social movements can and must allow for room to grow among each other … for fundamentally, social movements are peopled by idealists, people who deeply believe that another world is not only possible but necessary.

We must learn from the errors of our past so to not repeat them. I leave you all with two simple but pretty powerful words: compassion and love. These will not fail us.

What follows is an attempt to look at what it might mean to create a life of freedom, create a society free of oppression and hatred.  Writing in the spirit of Mumia’s commentary I turn my thoughts back toward prison life, on those who remain in its clutches or are “destined” to be amongst tomorrow’s incarcerated, until, unless we find the means to create our world anew.

Turns of Struggle/Twists of Fate

Ninety-three [Industrial Workers of the World members] were convicted in Judge Landis’ court and received brutal sentences … [They] were of heroic mold.  Several died, many came out ill and their health was broken.  Prison could not kill their spirits.  But prison can kill and does maim the human body.  Let those outside never forget that.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s comment about IWW unionists arrested in 1918 remains all too contemporary.  After 50 years in prison, nearly half of which were spent in solitary confinement, Russell Maroon Shoatz, a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, was released on October 25, 2021, from a Pennsylvania state prison on a medical transfer for treatment and hospice care (he was blind and suffering from stage-4 pancreatic cancer).  The release did not come easily, it took the committed engagement of his family members, political prisoner defense advocates and lawyers – and by Shoatz himself who organized within prison for the abolition of life sentences without possibility of parole.  His freedom was precious, but short-lived; 52 days later, on December 17, 2021, Shoatz died.

On October 28, 2021, David Gilbert, a former member of the Weather Underground, was granted parole after nearly forty years in prison.  RAPP – Release Aging People from Prison – played a key role in securing that parole, as did family members and political supporters.  During his years in prison Gilbert, now 77, remained engaged, writing, working with fellow inmates suffering from AIDS, serving as a mentor to others.

Though the timing was coincidental, their simultaneous release in 2021 was the product of unceasing struggle to end the barbarous treatment of political prisoners in the United States where sentences far longer than elsewhere around the world are routinely handed out under conditions that, by any definition, ought be labeled as inhumane (perhaps a misnomer -- as Mark Twain pointed out, such is an insult to other animals as humans are the only species that engages in such systemic mistreatment of its own kind).  Persistent work by people who refuse to forget has enabled a few who were supposed to enter and never leave see a ray of unfenced sunlight before dying, though too many others remain behind bars – including Mumia (locked up since 1981) and Leonard Peltier (since 1977).

The fact that we can talk of the continued imprisonment of people who were members of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement over 50 years ago, organizations effectively destroyed 40 years ago due in large measure to unrelenting government hostility, reflects the reality that our system of justice is not based on a desire for justice but on the bedrock of vengeance. And it is the reason compassionate release for aging or infirm prisoners is so rare – and so profoundly important.  Important for the individuals themselves and their loved ones, important too for society because lack of compassion for those behind bars infects our culture as a whole.  Be the crime serious or minor, be the charges true or false, it is far too common to keep people confined long after there can be a pretense of public safety as reason. This is true of political prisoners like Shoatz and Gilbert, it is true of “ordinary” prisoners whose choices and circumstances landed them in jail for any number of reasons. 

I’ve been home from prison for a decade after having served 15 years in federal prison.  News of prison life, however, often brings back memories seemingly from ages ago, feeling as if yesterday.  Reading about Shoatz and Gilbert, I recalled waiting on the “pill line” formed outside the prison clinic where medicines are dispensed.  One of the guys who was beginning to stand on that line frequently was someone I befriended in the TV room watching a baseball game.  A few years older than me, he had seen Negro League games in his early youth and then, still a kid, became a Baltimore Oriole fan in 1954 when the old St. Louis Browns made the move from Missouri to Maryland.  I never knew, nor cared to know, the details of what he did before being locked up, though there was little doubt that he had escaped the clutches of poverty in a state then still more Southern than Northern when it came to race, by living his life on the other side of the law.  And, by all accounts, he had been successful at it, at least until he wasn’t.  Now, after too many years in custody, he was terminally ill with cancer and just wanted to go home and die in his own bed, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. 

Making that possibility more than pure wishful thinking were new guidelines for compassionate release of federal prisoners the Bush Jr. Administration had issued.  Looking over the document, it was clear that he met all requirements.  Hesitant to apply because no one locked up for more than a minute puts faith in Bureau of Prison promises, and there is nothing harder in an environment designed to make one hopeless than to get hopes up only to see them dashed, he nonetheless went ahead -- risk to a dying man is calculated differently than for those with a future.  And, lo and behold, he was approved, a date set to go home.  But it was not to be, at the last minute the rug was pulled out from under him by a system without compassion.  The BoP had contacted the prosecutor from his case and, though long retired, that one “no” outweighed all prior “yeses.”  As expected, a month or so later, death came.  The shackles that travel with us during our hospital stays likely still on him.

Very unusual during my years behind bars, the authorities allowed a memorial at the prison chapel, where a letter from his daughter was read and where person after person from the compound talked of him as a friend, many as a mentor.  Possibly that is why my thoughts returned to that memorial service when reading about Shoatz, about Gilbert, people who used their time behind bars meaningfully.  There is a difference.  Shoatz, Gilbert, Peltier, Mumia saw what they did in a wider context of systemic change.  The Baltimorean I’m writing about didn’t, although he had no illusions about the lack of justice in our country.  Where the similarity lies is seeing worth in people judged worthless by police and prosecutors, a willingness to impart wisdom about how to survive, how to do more than just survive.  That stands in contrast to our criminal justice system that simply grinds lives away, budget costs coming into consideration, human costs counted not at all.

The human cost is not appreciated by most people because the voice of those confined remains largely unheard.  What we should never forget is the silence of those buried alive who lose contact with the world outside, those literally buried when the clock winds down and death claims a life still chained.  A poem by E. Ethelbert Miller touching upon aging and loss has special poignancy if read with someone in mind for whom time is measured by a calendar imposed by a court:

There is the silence between phone calls

that soon becomes equal to the distance

between bases or the mound to the plate.

 

The first sounds of spring come from your

muscles, followed by the sound of fingers

now fists punching into gloves.

 

You want someone to remember your youth

before night comes or the sky with the wind’s

farewell, the darkened scoreboard.

 

The empty bleachers.”

Circles and Resistances

A paradox:  the more unforgiving the law, the greater the propensity for lawlessness on the part of those who enforce it.  Here we are talking about lawlessness of police violence and corruption; lawlessness of prosecutors who lie, cajole, distort, intimidate, to get the sentence they want; the lawlessness of prison life which is ruled by authority without pretense of accountability to those being ruled.  And we ought not forget the permitted illegalities of corporations that break unions, undermine competition, cheat consumers, destroy the environment – or the organized illegalities by which federal and local police have disrupted left-wing organizations through infiltration, provocation, entrapment and assassination, an official lawlessness by no means all in the past.  But perhaps not so paradoxical, for the real goal of policing and public authority is better understood as order over law. Order, that is, to protect existing power arrangements and property rights from “unruly” others, from organized resistance. Contrary to such forms of order, the law itself is and can be a site of contestation—a vehicle by which people can assert public and individual rights, even if that sometimes means challenging, sometimes violating, unjust laws and disrupting the established order of “business as usual.”

When we look at prison through such a lens, we can see how it forms a part of existing circles that keep people trapped in present day structures and relationships.  Those communities most afflicted by crime are the communities most afflicted by police harassment, most impacted by “jail first, ask questions never” prosecutorial practices, and most in need of public investment and social services – mutually reinforcing links that are not coincidental, but rather are held together by the glue of inequality.  That both systemic and visceral racism underlies these shouldn’t be a matter of dispute; the disproportionate numbers of arrests and of sentences, when totaled by race, ought to be sufficient to attest to that truth.  I know full well that the chief objection of some of the more aggressively white guys I met in prison was that they didn’t want to be treated as though they were black – i.e., no illusion amongst them that in the normal frame of the “outside” world, inequality prevailed.

Brutalities, injustices, violence are perpetrated by authorities against people every day, be they black, white, of Spanish, Asian or Native heritage.  But the kind of impersonal, almost passionless violence, violence done in public with a complete air of impunity, that resulted in the murder of Michael Brown, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery (and so very many more) is where racism reveals its corrosive face, blinding those whose lives are distorted by its grip.  Once it becomes possible to view another human being as somehow not fully human, the genie of hatred spreads outward and afflicts ever widening circles of people.  Just like the lawlessness of our militarized imperial foreign policy (and the accompanying neglect of the needs of those who serve after they return home), that reality has a growing consequence in undermining democratic rule, manifested in a real decline in standard of living and quality of life for most Americans – even people whose lives are far removed from the experience of those imprisoned.

As Lincoln once said, a society cannot exist half-slave, half-free. These words apply equally to a society of different ranks of citizenship rights -- a reality central to understanding how it can be considered so important to keep a dying man in prison.  The truth is that the lack of rights by those locked up reinforces a disrespect for human rights by those doing the locking up – and by this I don’t just mean police officers or prison guards, but also politicians who put in place programs that spend more on prison than on education, think tank researchers who cold bloodedly put forth programmatic “solutions” to society’s challenges without thinking of the flesh and blood individuals who may go hungry or become homeless in consequence.  The same holds for business owners and bankers who view those whose employment they control as disposable widgets, here today, gone tomorrow. Profits, investment opportunity, expansion, contraction, are valued more than the persons whose work make it possible – persons whose lack of security when jobs flee will inevitably lead some to look for another way to survive by living on that other side of the law.

Pathways out of the morass always exist, but only for a few as openings narrow.  People discover just how narrow that can be when they finally get out of prison.  Our inalienable rights, which are indeed alienated by virtue of a jail sentence, don’t automatically return when the sentence has ended. By virtue of law, by virtue of perception, by virtue of fear, by virtue of silences, by virtue of unquestioned past practice, various restrictions persist long after incarceration is over, as many civic rights are gone either permanently or for so long as to seem permanent.  Beyond the realm of program and prejudice, there is another fact -- years gone cannot be recaptured.  When returned to society, the process of readjusting, of finding work and housing, accessing services, and facing all the other tasks that comprise being a full-fledged member of a community takes place while starting many steps behind those who were free and functioning in the ever-changing outside world.  And that isn’t even taking account of the psychological toll on the person locked up, on that person’s family.  The upshot: a large and growing population of second-class citizens.

Second-class citizenship has another source in the criminalization of immigration.  The refusal to acknowledge the fundamental equality of those who cross our border, whether they are seeking work or fleeing repression, only creates another structure of division, a gap of rights inextricably connected with a gap in economic well-being. And as any unionist knows, a two-tier system (a system in which newly-hired workers earn less, have fewer benefits and fewer protections than existing employees), eventually results in the lower tier driving down the conditions and standards the higher tier had.  So it is with rights: to the extent that some who live in our country can’t participate in democratic processes, these processes begin to atrophy for everyone.

Seeking Change

Evidence of this can be found if we move from the confines of prison to the halls of Congress and observe the roadblocks that have blocked legislation to protect the right to vote, labor rights, the environment, and to protect communities against police violence.  The same roadblocks result in unmet needs for health care, childcare, education, housing and jobs at a living wage.  Overcoming these roadblocks is critical because the proposals contained in (the still not passed) Build Back Better Act and Green New Deal, put forward by members of the House Progressive Caucus and Senate progressives, are simultaneously universal in application and egalitarian in impact, benefitting most those with the least while improving the quality of life for all.

That the principal beneficiaries of those measures would be women is central to that equation, for women provide the unpaid and paid labor sustaining the life of most families. By helping raise the standard of living of those whose provision of care ensures society’s ability to function, everyone benefits.  Prison life points to that truth.  Women of all races, creeds and nationalities are most often the ones to provide the emotional and financial sustenance to those locked up, be they sons, husbands, lovers, brothers, fathers, cousins, friends – as any look around a prison visiting room reveals (and women similarly most often take on the emotional and financial burdens of our increasing number of incarcerated women).  The costs of travel to a prison, time taken off from work, money sent to help purchase commissary items, let alone the burden of paying rent or mortgage with a partner unable to contribute make for an indirect, regressive tax on those who are already giving of themselves – a kind of tax rendered as invisible as the people so “taxed.”

By contrast if we ensured economic security as a right, we would reduce fear of tomorrow and enhance a sense of possibility, enabling all to live a life of dignity, enabling each to have the space to discover a personal sense of meaning.  By taking steps toward ensuring greater equality amongst working people while also protecting rights to collective action, we can begin to confront the power of a privileged elite that hoards ever more wealth.  There can be little doubt, however, that this is the very reason such proposals are fought by the powers that be – any step toward redistribution of income threatens those who benefit by the institutional structures now in place.  The question of equality (or lack thereof) is central to the question of democracy (or lack thereof) and has been through the course of our history.  This ties back to demands of the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers (among others), for self-determination, for community control of police, and for refocusing public policy and practice on our genuine need – improving public safety for all by engaging all.  It could be a way of reconnecting criminal justice reform to assertions of popular rights and practice.  Instead, what we get are those roadblocks.

Herein we can glimpse what is often obscured: our ability to improve social rights or raise standards of living is linked to ending the system of mass incarceration that has grown up over the past four decades – which was our system’s response to the strength of egalitarian demands in the 1960s and 70s.  The United States still imposes the death penalty, permits life sentences without parole, sentences children as adults, holds people in solitary confinement -- not for a day or a week but, as happened to Shoatz, for years and years.  Extreme forms of punishment becoming routinized has inured us to a system in which the rate and absolute numbers of those imprisoned far surpass every other nation in the world, including many nations the arrogant in our midst look down upon.  And the fact that disparate treatment exists in how our laws function and are implemented is facilitated by racism in social practice become invisible in law, visible in its consequences. 

Most countries around the world have had periods of greater or lesser brutality to uphold the proverbial goal of “law and order,” and in this, the United States is no exception.  Humanity has traveled a long and torturous path over the course of historical developments in which individual dignity and social solidarity have repeatedly asserted themselves against constant efforts by power structures to divide and disinherit people in order to privilege a few.  What is striking about our country, however, is that in recent decades, as strides have been made elsewhere toward establishing a framework of enforceable social and economic rights, we have moved in the opposite direction. Progress has been reversed while our democratic heritage and industrial strength which, for all their many flaws, once served as a model others sought to emulate, have increasingly unraveled.  A measure of how deep the unraveling, embodied by Trump, was revealed by the January 6 attack on Congress. 

This downward slope of rights in our society can be noted by the fact that our criminal justice system violates international standards and conventions on the treatment of people imprisoned.  U.S. imperial pretentions rationalized in the guise of “American exceptionalism,” has been the excuse for our government’s refusal to adopt all but a few of the International Labor Organization’s Conventions promulgating labor rights standards, just as we have refused to comply with other international standards of weapons of mass destruction or war crimes – though we insist on our right to demand others comply.  This goes back to our rapid retreat from the goals sought with the establishment of the United Nations – in part because of our Cold War aggressiveness, in part because of an unwillingness to address systemic racism. 

Raising a demand repeatedly reflects the persistence necessary to overcome oppressive structures that at times appear immoveable.  But beneath the surface of events, change does come – each advance in the grasping of rights and freedoms is never wholly pushed back, for it remains lodged in how people see themselves.  Flowing from that, there can come a challenge to accepting what should be unacceptable as an unshakeable given, rather than a construct that can be changed piecemeal, that can be changed in total.  When we step beyond a way of seeing that looks only at the surface, blind to connections and transformations, blind to what lies within us, before us, alternatives open up.  John Trudell, one-time leader of the American Indian Movement turned poet and songwriter, gives voice to that transformation:

From my place in line
 I fell out of order

 I’ve been here
 I’ve been there
 I’ve been anywhere
 And
 I haven’t been anywhere
 and I’ll be back again
 I am Iktomi

 

Imagine running out of imagine
 Mistaking authority for power
 Weaving life’s free spirit
 Into patterns of control

 In the reality
 Of many realities
 How we see what we see
 Affects the quality
 Of our reality

Challenges and Past Reminders

Violence and repression are endemic to our history.  It may help to glance back over neglected aspects of labor history to gain perspective on the dynamic of policing, prison, resistance in our present -- and thereby better grasp “how to see what we see.”

In 1910, the American Federation of Labor was engaged in a bitter city-wide organizing campaign in Los Angeles, the center of open shop (i.e. non-union) power in California.  In October of that year, the anti-union Los Angeles Times building was blown up killing 21 people, unintended victims of a bomb that exploded too early.  John McNamara, president of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union (an AFL affiliate), and his brother James, were accused of being the culprits.  Over the course of the previous decade, they had planted bombs multiple times to blow-up bridges built by scab labor in the midst of on-going struggles with employers who had gained the upper hand by a combination of informers and violence.  Up to that point, the brothers had destroyed a good deal of property, without loss of life. 

In the belief that the McNamara’s had nothing to do with this bombing, a massive defense campaign began, supported by all wings of labor, from the most conservative to the most radical.  The brothers, however, knew they were responsible and decided to plea guilty.  Their hope was that by taking personal responsibility, unions in Los Angeles would not be blamed for their actions.  The plea enabled them to avoid the death penalty (John was sentenced to life imprisonment, James received a shorter sentence) but organized labor and a then strong city-wide Socialist Party were tarred with the brush of violence and suffered a setback in southern California not overcome for many years.  

In 1916, a bomb set off at a “preparedness day” march – pro-war rallies promoted by business interests on the eve of US participation in World War I – killed 9 and injured 40 in San Francisco.  Although the culprit was never found (never seriously sought), Tom Mooney, an iron molder, active in his AFL union, the Socialist Party and IWW was charged, along with several other radical unionists.  The bombing was used to stigmatize as foreign, as radical, those sections of the working-class that sought to prevent the rush to war.

Consistent with that, Mooney was sentenced to death after a show trial.  His conviction was based on perjured testimony and conspiracy laws which enable prosecutors to condemn those they choose, proof unnecessary (a precursor to Mumia’s trial, Peltier’s trial).  There was little doubt of Mooney’s actual innocence, but it took over 20 years of constant campaigning by union militants, Communists, Socialists, civil liberties organizations, to get his sentence reduced to life imprisonment, and then, in 1939, for him to be pardoned.  McNamara, who refused any attempt to gain a pardon, was also not forgotten.  Although his actions cost the labor movement much, many unionists continued to express solidarity with him. 

Flynn’s memoir focused on her years in the IWW, the repression it suffered, and on the years long trials and subsequent judicial murder of Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927.  Perhaps, however, when writing of those unbroken in spirit, yet broken in health, she also had in mind McNamara who died while still locked up in 1941 at age 59 and Mooney who died in 1942, three years after his release, at age 60.  Flynn penned her memoir in the 1950s when she herself was serving time in the Alderson, West Virginia federal prison for women, along with fellow Communists Betty Gannett and Claudia Jones.  Contrary to viewing people as sanctified or evil, to be rewarded or punished, the kind of working-class radicalism Flynn embodied saw crime as emerging from within a society rooted in greed, competition and exploitation and not as a “personality” defect or inherited trait that should be dealt with by repression.

Socialist leader Eugene Debs expressed this in a speech he gave in 1918 opposing World War I, when he cited as instances of the hypocrisy of capitalist justice the imprisonment of Mooney and the mass arrest of IWW members.  Proving his point, as Debs knew it would, that speech landed him in jail.  Significantly, he didn’t exclude the “guilty” McNamara brothers from his embrace of solidarity.  In an article written in 1912, shortly after their confession, Debs wrote: 

The McNamaras are the product of capitalism.  They have not been taught in the refinements and delicacies of things.  If you want to judge McNamara you must first serve a month as a structural ironworker on a skyscraper, risking your life every minute to feed your wife and babies, and then be discharged and blacklisted for joining a union.  Every floor in every skyscraper represents a workingman killed in its erection.  It is easy enough for a gentleman of education and refinement to sit at his typewriter and point out the crimes of the workers.  But let him be one of them himself, reared in hard poverty, denied education, thrown into the brute struggle for existence from childhood, oppressed, exploited, forced to strike, clubbed by the police, jailed while his family is evicted, and his wife and children are hungry, and he will hesitate to condemn those as criminals who fight against the crimes of which they are the victims of such savage methods as has been forced upon them by their masters.

That doesn’t mean Debs supported individual acts of violence – he was always clear that the struggle for union rights, for democracy, for socialism, needed to be an open battle in which working people confronted capitalism with the strength they hold by virtue of numbers, by their degree of organization and consciousness, and by their power as the creators of all wealth.  Neither that consciousness nor strength could be realized, however, if workers saw each other as the enemy rather than the capitalist system.  Debs, therefore, refused to dissociate himself from those who choose other paths of struggle, for to do so would render the notion of working class unity hollow.  By the same logic, he would not dissociate himself from individuals whose path through life broke them from those wider bonds of mutual support and led to criminal acts that, in turn, became jail sentences. His empathy for his fellow prisoners at Leavenworth, his recognition of the cost when someone’s dignity is denied, was of a piece with his hatred for the capitalist system.

Or perhaps we can say that he recognized how capitalism tends toward criminalizing working people.  That connection defines our recent past for the assault on unionism which began to take shape in the late 1970s has been coextensive with the rise of mass incarceration.  This trajectory was made definitive in 1994 when the Clinton Administration oversaw passage of NAFTA (the North America Free Trade Agreement) – accelerating deindustrialization and the decimation of mass production union strength -- and passage of the “Violent Crime Control and Prevention Act” – accelerating the expansion of police powers and limitation of the rights of defendants and prisoners.  That legislation provided the means of “controlling” the inevitable results of corporate free trade by denying freedom to its victims. 

Redefining Justice and Democracy

Solidarity with those locked up, not those who control the courts and dictate who is in prison, is thereby part of the wider concept of mutual support.  Such is also central to any notion of effective democracy and is the reason that alongside freedom of speech, press, assembly, the Bill of Rights include right to a jury trial and protection against self-incrimination.  It was the contradiction between those ideals and the reality of their denial by a system of racial slavery that created the “irrepressible conflict” of the Civil War; it is the contradiction between initiatives to fully expand those rights with the two-tier system that denies them to so many, that is behind the current and growing authoritarianism in the United States – and to the growing resistance to that danger. 

And yet that still doesn’t address the other side of the reality. After all, we can nod our head to this and yet ask what that might mean for someone who feels unsafe in their own neighborhood, in their own home.  Talk of social change as a solution sounds quite hollow in a world limited by fear – be that fear of police, fear of crime, fear of walking along a street at night, or fear of a domestic partner.  Amongst the many people I met in the various jails and prisons I spent time in, there were always a few individuals of whom I (and others) remained wary, individuals you could feel were on the edge of explosion, others who had lost any moral compass, lost sense of themselves or of others.  The fact that I have run into individuals like that outside prison doesn’t change the problem – not for me, not for people anywhere.  Most people I knew in prison hated the police yet did not themselves want to live in a society without them.  In prison or outside, no one wants to be threatened.  That contradiction is real; a resolution is only possible when building upon a shared desire to live in a world in which everyone is treated with respect.

Moreover, we do want laws enforced – employers should not be able to violate labor laws, occupational and health standards, or environmental regulations; politicians should be charged for ethical “lapses,” medical fraud should be penalized, banks and business should be compelled to obey tax and anti-trust laws, and police, prosecutors and judges should not be privileged to act as if laws apply only to others, not themselves.  No teacher, bus driver, nurse, fire fighter or any other worker should face assault on the job, just as no one should live in fear of violence in the neighborhood where they live.  And those who perpetrate such should be held accountable – as should those who commit sexual assault be they sitting members of the Supreme Court, Hollywood moguls, or guys drinking too much at the bar.  So too, vigilantes, militias, need to be compelled to obey laws they believe they can violate with impunity.  No attempt to rein in police violence will take root absent a meaningful way to address the tangible violence that has become an all-too-common feature of our culture

So once again, a circle, a circle which we need to break if we are to create a genuine free, equal society.  Perhaps to do so, we need to step back.  The protests following the police murder of George Floyd did not spring from nowhere.  There has been a long history of community organizing by those treated by the state as subjects not citizens.  Mass protests against police brutality erupted twice in 2014, first after Michael Brown’s unprovoked murder by a police officer, second following the prosecutor’s refusal to prosecute the policeman who did the killing.  Behind these protests too were the unfulfilled hopes aroused by Obama’s election and which partially accounted for Trump’s election.  It was a combination that set the stage for the marches which rocked the country in 2020.

But there was one other added factor to those waves of protest – Covid-19.  An illness that swept through the world, killing by preventing a person’s lungs from taking in oxygen, created a sense of vulnerability in wide swathes of the population who had felt themselves to be “safe” – and empathy for a man who died because a knee on his neck prevented him from breathing.  The reality of an entire society upended created the context for turning a generalized sense of wrong into action that is rare in any society.  

Yet in another way, the deaths caused by the pandemic were quite unlike Brown’s or Floyd’s, for they were largely hidden from public sight, due to fear of the contagion itself, due to justifiable family desire for privacy.  Silent, hidden deaths provided room for demagogues to deny reality.  And there lies a too little remarked upon similarity flowing in a different direction: the silence with which violence against women is perpetrated, all too often by someone known in a home that should connote safety, or if by a stranger, then out of others’ sight, a lack of visibility that allows many to deny a victim’s victimization.  Unlike Michael Brown, whose dead body was left lying in the street for all to see, Sandra Bland died alone in her jail cell; unlike George Floyd killed in full view of a crowd, Breona Taylor was murdered in her apartment.  Every day, women are assaulted behind closed doors by the powerful, by husbands, by “lovers,” by parasites great and small.  There is no police force in the world large enough to address that reality.  And were there to be one of such scope and power, it takes little imagination to predict that women would be the chief victims. 

What unites all these is a kind of erasure – a denial of bodily autonomy whether in the form of an unwanted hand, a rape, a lack of health care, lack of access to abortion or forced sterilization.  Sexual assault is hidden, in another way.  Non-disclosure agreements in which the wealthy pay for their crimes with cash, left free to commit other such crimes while remaining “respectable” citizens, flow from the private nature of the assault.  It is a form of self-protection only available to the rich.  The fact that corporations also use NDAs to escape responsibility for illegal actions that destroy the climate, workers’ health, consumer safety, underlines the class nature of the practice and the double standards that prevail throughout society. 

And for the women who feel compelled to accept such payments, there is neither accountability nor justice, just that silence.  It is a kind of erasure experienced by all too many who are in prison.  In a sense, the silent pains, injuries, trauma, premature deaths that are invisible outside the private sphere, create the conditions in which far more public displays of hatred and harm are played out.  It is a framework that gets lost when our understanding of the circle of police violence, crime, economic deprivation and hopelessness are viewed without taking into account the intimate relations of life as well as the structural foundations of an unjust society.  For violence against women also spreads; once we allow ourselves to view another human being as a possession, we can view any human being as a possession.  And as love of possession serves as a virtual religion in a system rooted in ownership of things, it is easy to see how one rationalization replaces another in an endless stream.

This is where we can make one more connection – alongside national and statewide laws to reground social and economic justice and protect rights that have atrophied, alongside forms of local organizing that roots such change in collective power in workplaces and communities, we need to foreground individual rights, rights to be different, to be free from violence anywhere, rights for each to have a public voice, for each of us to be treated with dignity.  That translates into changing our culture, the culture of silence, of acceptance, of a conformity in which words cease to communicate and instead are used as a veil that protects the injustice that flows from inequality.

Poet, writer, activist Audre Lorde, in an aptly named essay, Poetry is Not a Luxury, gives expression to this need:

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.  Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.  But women have survived.  As poets.  And there are no new pains.  We have felt them all already.  We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power.  They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom.  Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.”

Silences and Voices

Lines are never easily drawn.  Or rather, how we respond to any particular situation is done without a script, without foreknowledge of the result – and is made within spaces that can be so narrow as to provide few clear options, few good alternatives.  People who are kind and loving can turn around and commit heinous acts, people who were brutal can become gentle and giving. So too, scabs can become good unionists, social justice activists can turn their backs on the causes for which they fought.  Life might be simpler if people could be divided into “good” and “bad,” yet that is the simplicity of fascism, an illusion with no bearing on human beings as they are.  We need to go beyond the surface to understand how acts of resistance to oppression can become acts of affirmation that points to change personal and social.

Samuel Butler created a fictional world in Erewhon nearly two centuries ago, depicting a society which treated crime as a social problem to be cured while depicting illness as a crime to be punished. Butler understood that viewing crime solely as a moral failing ought to be recognized as absurd as treating illness in such fashion, that both ought to be addressed by looking at the social and personal causes – as we do when a community is struck with a contagion.  Unfortunately, as our crumbling public health system revealed during the pandemic, we seem to have gone in the opposite direction, failing in our treatment of the sick and the jailed.

In a speech she gave in 1977, Lorde referred to a then recent cancer diagnosis and surgery that made her fear for her life.  It was an experience which shook her, yet, she claimed, left her stronger, with greater clarity around the need to transform “silence into language and action” – for silence is often how victims of abuse or the seriously ill respond to what befell them.  Turning that around, speaking out against the madness of our times, speaking out against the violence which surrounds us as individuals, becomes a means of individual and collective engagement.  And for Lorde, it becomes a pathway to envision liberation, a way to reject the false choice between freedom and security, for without both, neither exists.  Public speech is a means of self-assertion, a means of identifying truths of difference not to divide or accuse or create walls, but rather because in the absence of naming what one experiences, there is no way to find common ground to overcome the conditions of unfreedom that otherwise abound.  To that end, she stated:

Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.  Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness.  For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.  And neither were most of you here today, Black or not.  And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which is also the source of our greatest strength.  Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.  We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be afraid.”

As Lorde understood, fear is a common denominator whether in the face of sickness or oppression, acceptance of vulnerability all too often leading to the silence of acceptance.  That is the mechanism by which injustice rules, breaking free from that fear is the means we create within ourselves to overcome.  Perhaps that is why, shortly before her death from cancer not quite a decade later, Lorde took the name Gamba Adisa – a name with two meanings: “warrior” and “she who makes her meaning known.”

Silence is how people are forgotten – as takes place all too often when death comes in a prison cell.   Even in a noisy, crowded cell block, silence forms part of the chain of confinement, as does the wistfulness of aging stretched beyond the beyond (“You want someone to remember your youth before night comes …”).  We all have a need to be heard, which is why it is imperative to end the death penalty and solitary confinement, why it is imperative to never erase the possibility of release back into society.  Breaking free from that fear as individuals lies behind every public policy proposal that attacks organized greed, every piece of legislation, every organizing drive, every election campaign, every mass demonstration that seeks to extend freedom and equality.  And it needs to be at the center of every discussion of what to do the day after the organizing drive or demonstration or election is over.  In this way, we may find the means to create communities and a culture able to challenge and to overcome.

Watching a baseball game in the prison TV room was itself a kind of community even if people had little in common otherwise.  Mostly older, there was a degree of nostalgia for games any of us had seen or played, for our youth, for old ballparks and neighborhoods, watching with an intensity that brought all of us back to some other time in life.  Knowing that in such an ordinary gesture of sharing a memory while focused on the present a spark of life is reignited, serves notice that repression only ever succeeds to a certain degree, resistance never fully extinguished.

People had various ways of asserting their humanity.  One guy I met violated some rule everyday – easy enough to do where rules were everywhere.  Nothing so drastic as to get himself in trouble, just something to remind himself of who he was, to not turn into someone defined as “prisoner”.  Talking to him brought to mind a conversation I had had decades earlier, my first day on the job on a ferry.  I was working in desultory fashion, mopping up on the deck.   The pilot walked by, I speeded up to act as if I had been hard at work all along.  One of the older crew members saw me and told me I had it backwards – work hard to do your job, slow down when you think a boss is watching, that way you maintain your self-respect.  It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.  Life in prison is different and oppressive in ways no one should ignore – but that people in prison are like people outside prison is a truth no one should ignore either. 

This is where we can connect that vexed question of accountability, for so many crimes have taken place for which no one takes responsibility, for which there has never been any reckoning.  And these are far more often crimes committed with the approval of existing power than by those of the powerless.  John Trudell’s wife, Tina Trudell, a Paiute-Shoshone woman and an AIM activist, was deeply involved in a campaign for water rights on the Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada (campaigns by Native water protectors being waged against pipeline construction today have a long lineage).  During an interview held in the midst of a 1976 trial of AIM members, she said that

Technology has brought with it pollution, competition, nuclear waste, greed ... It has bred … people whose only concern is their check,” adding that for her two children (and a third then on the way) she dreamt that they “not grow up in fear, that they could trust people at their word, that we would be a society of truth.”

That was not to be.  Tina Trudell died together with her children and her mother in a mysterious fire set by a never discovered arsonist in 1979 the evening after John Trudell had burned an upside down American flag in front of the FBI building in Washington DC at a rally calling for Peltier’s freedom.  No one was ever found or charged for the arson, partly because neither the FBI nor anyone else bothered to investigate.  When we think of crime, pain and punishment, fates such as hers need never be forgotten.  Yet the answer is not vengeance, it is liberation, as these lines from John Trudell’s poem suggest:

We are a part of the memories of evolution
 These memories carry knowledge
 These memories carry our identity
 Beneath race, gender, class, age
 Beneath citizen, business, state, religion
 We are human beings
 And these memories
 Are trying to remind us
 Human beings, human beings
 It’s time to rise up
 Remember who we are

Conclusion: Pain and Compassion

Another remembrance.  A fellow prisoner is lying in a fetal position on the floor underneath his bed.  The reason:  he is about to be sent home, deported back to Mexico.  The guards were, for once, utterly at a loss – someone hiding to avoid release is not in anyone’s playbook. They asked my cellmate at the time, known to be well-respected by the other Spanish-speaking prisoners on the compound, to help out.  After a long, private conversation, the young man got up and went on his way. Later, I was told the story – he lived with his brothers in a rural part of Mexico.  He had some developmental issues that prevented him from keeping up with the work, resulting in harsh treatment by family members there.  But he had a sister in the US who was nice to him, so he snuck across the border to live with her.  This was the third time he was caught, each time serving a longer sentence.  He felt he had found a place in this prison, surviving by doing odd jobs (cleaning cells and doing laundry for guys who had a little more, being paid with commissary items he otherwise couldn’t afford).  People liked him, he was well-treated – and so he just didn’t want to go.

As for my cellmate, originally a farm worker from the Southwest, he had joined the marines as a young man and served two tours of duty in Vietnam.  He said he found a camaraderie with the guys in his unit -- black, white, Spanish -- that he never experienced before or since.  But the war took its toll.  We shared a cell when charges that former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey witnessed atrocities during his tour of duty were aired on TV.  My cellmate had horrible nightmares for a week or so thereafter (always apologizing to me in the morning for whatever racket he had made at night).  After Vietnam he needed drugs and so started on the path that eventually led him to prison.  In return for doing his duty as a soldier, the judge gave him extra prison time; Vietnam veterans were considered especially dangerous by the courts.  Consistent with that, he was transferred soon after this incident; prison guards don’t like it when they require the help of an inmate.  He was hoping for a transfer that might bring him closer to home so his wife and other family members could visit – but he was transferred further away with a group of guys scheduled for deportation (though he himself was a US citizen). 

Another kind of circle in this?  Perhaps, perhaps not. Neither of these two men were victims, nor saw themselves that way.  Each played the cards they were dealt and tried to do the best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves.  The question we ought to be asking, however, is what kind of society shapes people’s choices in this way.  Why would anyone think that repeatedly deporting someone who wants to do no one any harm serves the public interest?  And why is it that a sense of purpose for those at the bottom rung of our society is most easily found in war – war that leads to nightmares, narcotics, with past service forgotten once hypocritical patriotic cheers are no longer needed. 

How to put this all together?  Answers don’t – shouldn’t – come easily to mind.  There are moments of clarity where the pain of life is overcome by a glimpse of the possibility of people joining together, seeing each other as truly human, grasping at that other possible world.  Collective actions, such as that which took place with “Occupy Wall Street,” mass protests such as those initiated by Black Lives Matter, mass strikes, organizing drives, creation of free communities, all are part of the equation.  Yet these are ever so hard to sustain and in the gap between hope and power, despair can too easily set in.  Filling that gap with a continued assertion of what we can be, needs to be part of change that is lasting – solidarity as compassion and love as Mumia’s commentary suggests.

If we truly hope to rebuild the world anew, we can never lose sight of the pain and anger that are everywhere around us.  When people in a bloodless manner talk about crime and prison as abstractions, they, knowingly or not, participate in the silencing so damaging to all.  While writing this, thinking back to one person or another I met during my own years in federal prison, the lyrics of a Lucinda Williams song keep playing in my mind for it gets to a truth that, too often, too many of us refuse to understand:

For everyone you listen to

Have compassion

Even if they don’t want it

What seems cynicism

Is always a sign

Always a sign

Always a sign

 

Always a sign of things no ears have heard

Always a sign of things no eyes have seen

You do not know

What wars are going on down there

Where the spirit meets the bone

Down there where the spirit meets the bone

Down there where the spirit meets the bone