What artists and prisoners have in common is that both know what it means to be free.
—JAMES BALDWIN, “A Letter to Prisoners” (1982)
Freedom, as an idea and as a practice, has been an enduring paradox of the United States from its origins to the present. Freedom and the various principles it is said to encompass have been encoded into the national origin story of the United States through genocide and enslavement. Violence does not just undermine the goal of American freedom; it is one of its central tenets. As a result, violence and freedom have together constituted the American experience.1 The history of prison organizing tells us that this sad reality is not inevitable, however, for the diverse institutions, ideologies, and infrastructures that accompany a freedom expressed through domination can be redeployed to more expansive forms of freedom. The precious contingency of freedom is in fact a central legacy of black prison organizing in the civil rights era.
Throughout American history, starkly contrasting versions of freedom are evident. Since the late 1960s, the conjuncture of freedom and violence has entered a new phase of expanded freedom and expanded violence. Critical ethnic studies scholar Chandan Reddy describes the organization of the modern U.S. state as “freedom with violence,” “a unique structure of state violence and social emancipation.”2 This experience of freedom is necessarily bound up with and expressed through diverse forms of violence. The U.S. state seeks legitimation for itself as an arbiter of freedom, constantly expanding its ranks by insisting on its own monopoly on violence. This insistence is both institutional and ideological and manifests in a number of violent forms, especially the permanent local-global wars on abstract concepts of communism, crime, drugs, and terrorism that have defined the United States since World War II. At the same time, the government monopoly on violence informs everyday common sense, knowledge production, and public policy. This type of freedom, steeped in “complex racial and racialized gendered inequalities,” has taken shape at the limit point of citizenship.3
Violence has structured the fight for civic inclusion by race and sexuality, forcing communities to disavow the criminalized construction of blackness and immigrants or to join the nation by serving in the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated military. As the U.S. state has disavowed official racism and now homophobia, it has reinforced racial and sexual difference through expansive systems of policing, punishment, and predatory capitalism as well as through deportations, national security, and warfare. The United States has become more free by becoming more violent, domestically and internationally. The first black president oversaw dramatic steps toward legalizing gay marriage while deporting millions of immigrants, embracing drone warfare, and expanding state surveillance.
Freedom with violence has been the organizing principle of American neoliberalism. Since 1970, the United States has helped lead a global shift in political economy toward greater power for corporations and all manner of private industry. Neoliberalism defines unbridled capitalism as itself a form of freedom. It is a libertarian economic freedom, with free markets, free trade, and the overall free flow of capital wherever elites wish. Because it seeks to dislodge structures of social solidarity, the neoliberal freedom dream has been possible only through nightmarish violence. The ascendance of neoliberalism globally has come through a variety of wars, direct and by proxy, that have killed or displaced millions of people while bolstering a handful of Western companies and eroding different forms of local and national sovereignty. The reconfigured political order of neoliberalism has empowered a host of mercenary forces and warlords, yet this violence has been the overwhelming province of militarily strong states. Voicing a desire to remove the government, neoliberalism has needed the state’s iron fist to pursue its agenda. Neoliberal freedom within the United States achieved power through a violent reordering of place and policy that have renovated racial oppression through frameworks of multiculturalism and color blindness.4
Freedom with violence, in other words, is the reason that a black person is killed every twenty-eight hours by police or a vigilante. It is the reason that the killers in these cases rarely face any criminal sanction for their actions—and further evidence that more prisons mean less safety. The prison and the attendant changes in criminal laws and sentencing policy that facilitated the 500 percent increase in the U.S. incarceration rate between 1980 and the early twenty-first century have nurtured this freedom with violence.5
In response to the political crises caused by postwar revolutionary movements, including the prison movement, and dramatic economic shifts, the U.S. state instituted a set of policies that produced a system of mass incarceration preying on the most oppressed sectors of society by race, class, geography, and sexuality. Millions of people—almost exclusively poor people of color from inner cities, a majority of them black and Latino, with strong overrepresentation of queer and trans people—have experienced freedom with violence through stop-and-frisk policing, an expanded criminal code, limited parole, and an unprecedented boom in prison construction. As a result, the United States has developed the world’s largest prison system and one of its most severe: it is the only industrialized nation that imposes the death penalty and life sentences without possibility of parole, and eighty thousand people live in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. George Jackson’s fear of dying without having lived has been institutionalized through a battery of austere conditions that suspend life through incarceration and its afterlives.6
Indeed, the prison rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s left officials believing that prisoners had too much freedom. As prisons modernized their technology, they limited their capacities for collective action, seeking ever more ways to separate prisoners from each other and the outside world. The prison construction binge that began in the 1980s included new experiments in isolation—including whole units and facilities devoted to isolation. By the 1990s, whole prisons were structured around solitary confinement, which has been used to punish the thoughts and actions of dissident prisoners, to break people’s spirits, and to reinscribe racial distinctions as political divisions among the prison population.
Solitary confinement has featured prominently in official efforts to police and control “gangs,” especially but not exclusively in California. The widespread use of solitary confinement in the context of “antigang” measures in prison, “gang injunctions,” and other policing of informal associations among youth of color on the outside have contributed to undermining the reach and success of prison organizing as a part of antiracist social movements. Racial distinction blunted the unity message of prison organizers as solitary raised the stakes for challenging institutional violence. In California, “gang membership” has been a key mechanism of racialization; several people have been placed in solitary confinement as gang members for their possession of literature by or about George Jackson. In other places, possession of literature about the Black Panthers or other black radical associations has justified similar punitive measures.7
For its victims, freedom with violence is a bleak and enveloping experience that has at times captured the imagination of subjugated populations. It has fostered an idea that oppressed people might achieve freedom through violence. Some have taken the ubiquity of violence to mean that violence itself can be redemptive, cathartic. Anticolonial thinker, fighter, and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon famously suggested the idea that violence not only could eradicate colonization but was necessary to cleanse the colonized world of the disempowerment naturalized by foreign rule. A generation of guerrilla fighters believed that their actions would be transformative in this manner; violent struggle had a metaphysical imperative. In the early 1970s, George Jackson was perhaps the leading American proponent of and contributor to such theories, and a smattering of revolutionaries catalyzed by their opposition to imprisonment attempted to put these ideas into practice.8
Practitioners of freedom through violence have described their efforts as attempting to interrupt the greater violence of state-enforced invisibility and abuse. As an insurgent philosophy, such violence has always paled in comparison to that of the state. The ability of the oppressed to exact the kind of retributive violence such a freedom dream mandates has been limited to small-scale expressions. Its violence has always been more performative, rhetorical, and even philosophical than it has been physical.
As freedom with violence has become more all-encompassing, some antistatists of the Left and Right still hold out hope that freedom might yet be experienced through violence. Yet, precisely because its physicality cannot compete with that of the state, attempts to enact this kind of freedom have been easily countered by the larger system of freedom with violence. Freedom with violence anticipates, requires, and incorporates such violent irruptions as part of justifying its own monopoly on force and rationality. Freedom with violence finds its legitimacy in the (real or imagined) outbursts of its subjects. Each violent act by the oppressed is characterized as further need for the violent, excessive, and increasingly preemptive protection of the state.9
Against and beyond these options is another constellation of freedom: freedom from violence.10 The black freedom struggle, from the plantation to the prison and beyond, has been rooted in this notion of freedom. The black radical tradition, as Cedric Robinson notes, has been characterized by an “absence of mass violence.”11 Instead, it has been grounded in something far more powerful: a vision of human emancipation and global citizenship, a politics of mass self-defense rooted in the idea that black life is worth defending because all human life matters. Freedom from violence is the freedom of mobility and thought, the freedom of bodily integrity and communal action, the freedom of creativity and communication. It is a counterfactual freedom because it is forged in conflict with opponents far more powerful and violent, because it is found in furtive spaces of struggle, because it is both a process and a destination.
Freedom from violence is the freedom dream of prison radicalism. In her poem, “Affirmation,” former Black Liberation Army political prisoner turned exile in Cuba Assata Shakur summarizes this freedom as a belief in living.12 This belief in living propelled black prisoners in the three and a half decades after World War II to boldly declaim that the American state could not crush their spirit. A belief in living as a collective goal united prisoner rebellions throughout the country, animated defense campaigns for political prisoners, and led prisoners to conduct study groups and start their own media. It inspired them to keep reaching beyond the confines of the prison.
It is difficult to reconcile the militarism of George Jackson and many people he inspired with the idea of freedom from violence. To be sure, Jackson and many other prison organizers in the civil rights era were a product of the anticolonial era. Looking to Fanon, Mao, Che, and other guerrilla practitioners, they saw armed struggle and people’s wars as necessary paths to liberation. Their strategy was freedom through violence. One can still read into Jackson and other dissident prisoners, however, a desire to escape the institutional violence that structured their lives. Indeed, this desire motivated their political theories and activism. Freedom through violence held that the oppressed needed to use violence to escape greater violence. But freedom remains a question of praxis, and desiring freedom through violence meant that violence itself became a central preoccupation at the expense of pursuing the larger freedom from violence that informed their social commentary. In a post–Cold War, post-9/11 period, left-wing movements have largely and appropriately distanced themselves from such military ambitions.
Freedom from violence is an active, enacted set of practices. In challenging the diverse sources and structures of violence, this freedom strives for unity across difference. Prison organizing in the twenty-first century has made central the question of freedom from violence. It is the reason that many prison rebellions since the 1970s—including the labor and hunger strikes that transpired in dozens of prisons around the United States between 2010 and 2013—have been both rooted in black nationalist (principally New Afrikan) politics and multiracial in expression. New Afrikan nationalism, with its reference to ubiquitous confinement, continues to circulate, albeit in muted ways, throughout the American prison system. It provides a ready-made ideology in which dissident prisoners can identify their total rejection of the prison system and make common cause with anyone who insists on the primacy of the dignity of the incarcerated. Through a pastiche of New Afrikan nationalism and general human rights concerns, prisoners have raised demands that connect the particular conditions of confinement to the general structures of austerity.13
Prison protest stages a critical debate between what is and what could be. Poet and antiprison activist Emily Abendroth describes this debate as “the anticipated commons versus the currently inhabited one.”14 As gestated in campaigns against imprisonment, freedom from violence begins from shared experiences of abuse, alienation, criminalization, disenfranchisement, and marginalization—that is, from the common experiences of violence, even if one’s proximity to violence differs as a result of social status. From and against this currently inhabited commons emerges the anticipated one, the aspirational vision of life and safety governed by commonly held institutions, practices, and values in the affirmative rather than by the common exposure to violence. This aspired-to commons is one of collective safety and abundance. It is, in Abendroth’s words, a “frictive gasp for air” that serves as “a critical co-movement” of opposition to state violence.15
This attempt to reconcile these alternate notions of what we do and might have in common challenges the idea, popular among many scholars and pundits, that the United States since the 1960s can be best described as a series of increasingly fractured identities.16 Freedom from violence offers new forms of coalition and synergy: an aspiration of freedom at levels both interpersonal and social. And in fact, a variety of social movements have adopted the frameworks of black prison organizing. Some, like the reparations movement, have done so directly as a result of individuals having been involved in both movements.17
Other influences have been less direct but no less powerful. The reliance on exposure and spectacle to dramatize the urgency of a political crisis afflicting socially invisible populations, the subterranean circulation of political critique through diverse cultural forms that appeal to racialized groups, and the centrality of connectivity in social struggle—the key elements of prison organizing—appeared in hip-hop and the direct-action movement to end HIV/AIDS, among other recent movements. These two movements have been key arenas where the language of prison organizing continues to be spoken and reanimated by challenging the racial logic of criminalization. Both movements emerged from and in response to the “organized abandonment” of neoliberal urban restructuring. Both movements have framed their systemic critiques in terms of a battle over life against institutions of death—whether through police brutality, the death penalty, and the prison system or through pharmaceutical profits, government neglect, and biocapitalism. As direct products of the neoliberal urban condition, both hip-hop and AIDS have been criminalized in racial terms—by the “bad blood,” nonnormative genders and sexualities, delinquent style, or direct action of its adherents—and the prison remains a critical gestational site for a radical politics related to fighting AIDS, while hip-hop’s “ghettocentric” style dominates prison argot and aesthetics. Both movements have passed through and been shaped by the prison.18
Collective rebellions are episodic. Expanded technologies of control and limited leftist movements on the outside have made such rebellions even rarer in prisons. But the long-standing black critique of American criminal justice as a system of racial dominance continues, aided and abetted by the existence of resurgent opposition to prisons beginning in the late 1990s and with added ferocity since the economic collapse of 2008. In 1998, two organizations formed with direct connections to the previous generation of prison protest. Bo Brown, who spent seven years in prison for her involvement with the Seattle-based clandestine George Jackson Brigade, and Angela Davis were part of the intergenerational founding collective of Critical Resistance (CR). CR helped popularize a systemic analysis of prisons as part of a wider organization of the political economy—a prison-industrial complex. Alongside feminist antiviolence organizations such as Incite! Women of Color against Violence, CR has worked to reengage a politics of (prison) abolition that updates 1970s innovations.19
The same year that CR began, former Black Panther and longtime political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim initiated the Jericho Amnesty Movement, an organization dedicated to freeing U.S. political prisoners, especially the dozens of women and men still incarcerated for political actions and associations of the civil rights era. One of Jericho’s stalwart organizers on the outside was Safiya Bukhari, a former Black Panther who served nine years as a political prisoner. Prior to her death in 2003, Bukhari also worked with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, formed by people close to the Republic of New Afrika. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has organized against stop-and-frisk policing and for the freedom of black political prisoners. They turned Black August into an international hip-hop celebration of black resistance to confinement throughout history. CR began with a large conference, Jericho with a large march, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement circulates prison struggle through hip-hop: the response to captivity continues to be a combination of knowledge production, direct action, and cultural work.
To this list could be added a variety of local and regional organizations and campaigns that have worked to end the war on drugs; lift the barriers to the civil and human rights of formerly incarcerated people; support current and former prisoners in circulating their ideas or gaining their freedom; stop the construction of prisons, jails, and detention centers; abolish solitary confinement and the death penalty; and shift budgetary resources back to community institutions, among other priorities. Other veterans from the civil rights era’s prison organizing have contributed to these developments on both sides of the walls though organizations such as All of Us or None and various prison moratorium projects. Current prisoners, from veterans of the 1960s-era social movements to more recent internees, have worked to confront the AIDS crisis and medical neglect in prisons, protest solitary confinement, and challenge the global reach of the U.S. carceral state. They have confronted mass incarceration through creative proposals for mass decarceration that link the reduction of imprisonment to the expansion of social justice.20
As prison organizing demonstrates, the pursuit of freedom from violence is rooted in care and creativity. Throughout the civil rights era, black prisoners and their allies devised a series of ways to forge freedom from violence that were most dramatically located in exposure. Through writing, uprisings, and court cases, they worked to reveal the horrors of confinement. In exposing prison abuses, they worked to expose the larger brutalities of racism. Civil rights workers rushed to fill southern jails, and Black Power organizers leveraged their experiences with incarceration for the same reason: to eradicate the many ways in which black communities have faced oppression and premature death.
As that struggle moved more firmly into prison systems over more than a decade beginning in the late 1960s, the urgency of exposing racial injustice accelerated. The Soledad Brothers case launched a new wave of prisoner-initiated efforts to reveal state violence with the hope that exposure would incite popular outrage to end such violence. Though dissident prisoners continued to press for exposure by appealing to the United Nations and filing lawsuits, they moved on to other forms of self-reliance to survive and escape such violence when it became clear that public intervention would not save them. They enacted their own rituals of sovereignty through religion and culture to experience a modicum of freedom from violence.
The daily work of prison organizing relies on labor typically gendered as female, a broadly defined notion of support that includes participating in and facilitating communication and person-to-person social networks, expanding communal ties, organizing coalitions, and providing services to those in need. In addition, standing up to the carceral state has required a great deal of ingenuity to overcome the many factors that make prisons difficult institutions around which to organize: their geographic remove from population centers, the stigma of criminalization, the oblique ways in which prisons are funded and governed. Artists, musicians, writers, and other cultural workers have been at the forefront of prison organizing precisely because such creativity has kept the prison in public memory and consciousness. This need for creative forms of resistance against such violence helps explain why prison activism, especially its abolitionist incarnations, has appealed to so many queer and trans people; the ability to imagine, in practical, daily terms, something beyond the seemingly naturalized gender binary lends itself well to the capacity to imagine a world without walls and cages. Such imagination has been instrumental in the ranks of contemporary antiprison movements, where organizers experiment with a series of alternative institutions, including modes of addressing interpersonal (especially sexual) harm outside the criminal justice system.21
Black prison organizing is a complex, contradictory, and robust example of the wider black freedom struggle. The tactics and strategies of that larger freedom struggle, continually revised since slavery, inform the shape and substance of black prison organizing. Because it takes shape amid extreme deprivation and violence, prison organizing is by nature contingent and disparate. Yet its impacts have been enormous. In the civil rights era, black prison organizing informed popular conceptions of race, alienation, and freedom. While the neoliberal era has witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the carceral state, prison organizing has not disappeared. The prominence of the phrase “prison-industrial complex” in scholarship, hip-hop music, and even popular journalism testifies to the ways in which terminology developed through political struggle has become part of a larger common sense that names the centrality of the criminal justice system—prisons, policing, surveillance—as it connects with schools, media, private industry, and American governance.
Contemporary opponents of the carceral state might take three major and interrelated actions from black prison organizing in the civil rights era: to care, to chronicle, and to coalesce.
Care: What social scientists at the time called “the convict code” was a robust network of communal care established outside the frameworks of liberalism. Prisoners pledged loyalty to one another, at least temporarily overlooking differences in the service of a larger unity that was, in moments of uprising, leveraged in a fight for prisoner rights. Further, the work of prison organizers on the outside—lawyer Fay Stender, journalist Jessica Mitford, nurse Phyllis Prentice, scholar Angela Davis, activist Karen Wald, and thousands of others—was premised on caring for people facing extreme state violence. Prison organizing, then and now, is about expanding a circle of care. Prison organizing lost sight of that directive at several key moments, facilitated partly by state infiltration. The long list of casualties in California from internecine battles in the movement’s later years—Fay Stender, Fleeta Drumgo, Huey Newton, Fred Bennett, James Carr, Popeye Jackson, and several others, on top of the many who had been killed by the state—scared many committed activists and would-be activists away from prison organizing there and facilitated an expanded push for “law and order.” Care in and of itself did not win much, but its absence contributed to heavy losses. Further, this care ought to be understood through vulnerability rather than deservingness. As contemporary critiques of mass incarceration focus on “nonviolent drug offenders,” there is a danger of asking or being asked to limit our care only to those who meet some preordained moral standard akin to “innocence.” But genuine care extends to those facing harm, those who have harmed, and those who do the work of maintaining communal ties. The deservingness of care ought to be premised on a recognition of shared humanity rather than jurisprudent categories.
Chronicle: All organizing is, at root, about telling stories. Whatever the issue, political success belongs to the most believable (though sadly not always the most true) story. These stories are crafted collectively and dialogically: they are the work not of one storyteller but rather of a convergence of tellers speaking through a variety of media. “Law and order” was a story about safety for certain people premised on incapacitating “those people” deemed threatening. Black prison organizing was a story about generational captivity and fugitive freedom. It was also a story about brutal conditions and better treatment. Many people—most centrally, prisoners themselves—participated in crafting this story. They told this story through uprisings, letters, poetry, newspapers, and manifestos. It was reiterated by others through conferences, books, bombs, protests, and other means. What united these various efforts was a visionary critique of the world as it was. George Jackson’s Soledad Brother remains a poignant text because it so eloquently captures both the horrors of the prison environment and the refusal to be reduced to those horrors. Throughout, he expressed a palpable belief in transformative social change. He invited readers to be horrified by what was and inspired by what could be. As his conditions worsened in the context of political upheaval worldwide, he hoped that immediate revolutionary assault would create change. With a tunnel vision shaped by years in isolation, he drastically overestimated how many people agreed with his story and saw no need to keep breathing life into an alternate story of fugitive freedom. Some of his supporters abnegated dialogue for devotion, failing to disabuse him of his militarism or keep intervening in what stories were told about crime, justice, and prisons. They stopped telling their own stories. Amid an aggressive counterrevolution, they lost the balance of chronicling what is and what could be.
Coalesce: At its height, the prison movement had a large and surprising coalition. It consisted of activists from different communities and movements, a wide variety of sympathetic professionals and politicians, musicians and artists of all stripes, friends and family members of the currently and formerly incarcerated, with all of them gathered around the symbol and message of dissident prisoners. The movement’s success lay in a constant expansion of the coalition. Uprisings, interviews, and poetry helped raise awareness and enlist new members. This coalition offered its members a chance to feel directly affected by and connected to the issue across a wide variety of social locations and personal experiences. “The prison” signified both a bricks-and-mortar institution and a diverse set of antagonisms. It could be an overly malleable concept, taken up for cynical or narcissistic as well as reactionary aims. But to the extent that it was anchored in prisoner demands through grassroots organizing and direct action, through an escalating sense of “we,” a critique of the prison enabled a political opposition to confinement and a cultural language of expanded freedom. A belief in universal confinement, a belief that “America is the prison,” as Malcolm X and then the Black Panther Party and Republic of New Afrika put it, popularized a Black Power analysis. It created the conditions under which diverse movements could challenge the criminal justice system based on their negative experiences with police, prisons, and other forms of state repression. The drive for an ever-expanding coalition of people and issues allowed organizers to break the divisions that the prison works so hard to instill: by identity and geography, by walls and gates.
Direct action unites these modalities of care, chronicle, and coalition. The most successful and enduring forms of organizing freedom from violence have been found in direct confrontation with the state. During the civil rights era and perhaps again today, activist prisoners demonstrated that confinement would not sap their energy or their intellect. Through a series of dramatic encounters—in courtrooms and prison cells, in the pages of books and letters—prisoners displayed a collective initiative, political sophistication, and global imagination. They showed that it is possible to enact radical visions and social structures even—or especially—in situations where state power was at its most abusive and restrictive. From solitary confinement, George Jackson and Angela Davis made the world aware of the prison’s racist violence. Ruchell Magee, the San Quentin 6, and other prisoners in solitary confinement (as well as in the general population) showed that the prison was deeply entwined with the afterlife of slavery.
In the connections they made between people they knew well and those they never met, between other prisoners and outside supporters, prisoners expressed an auspicious transformative potential that still has the power to recalibrate notions of race and gender in ways that might undermine bedrock structures of state violence. Through such challenges to the U.S. state, prison organizers learn to develop their own modes of governance. To succeed, they must create an affirmative freedom from violence as well as an opposition to the dominant form of freedom with violence. And to the extent that they succeed in any element of their work, campaigns and initiatives that reduce and supplant the life and scope of the carceral state remain the most urgent, life-affirming political task imaginable.
Captivity and nationality lie at the heart of race in the United States. They form a dialectic found in terms of both how the U.S. state racializes certain populations and how such populations respond to and make sense of their conditions. Captivity continues to animate black social life. From poverty and unemployment to mass incarceration and health discrimination, from educational inequity and police violence to diverse forms of disenfranchisement, blackness in the United States remains a marker of premature death, of the “poor-butchered half-lives” of which George Jackson spoke in 1971.22
Yet the fact that black prisoners have, time and again, emerged as spokespeople for and theorists of a different kind of freedom shows that nothing can be taken for granted and that the tragedy of American imprisonment—like the greater tragedy of racial state violence of which it is a part—is neither preordained nor permanent. That knowledge provides a potent and poignant glimpse of freedom, the contingent and courageous struggle for freedom from violence, that always haunts systems of captivity. It is an expansive, reparative, and transformative freedom. It is a future-oriented freedom with deep roots and sprouting seeds to be nurtured. It is a freedom hopeful that the world can be defined by something greater than captivity, something more meaningful than nationality.