‘seize the time’: an interview with stephen jones

7/31/2019 Seize the time: an interview with Stephen Jones

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SAGELos Angeles,London,New Delhi,Singapore,Washington DC

Race & ClassCopyright 2011 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 53(2): 142710.1177/0306396811413039 http://rac.sagepub.com

Seize the time: an interviewwith Stephen JonesAVERY F. GORDON

Abstract: There is a long and substantial history of prisoners rights movementsin the US, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, which was spearheaded by Blackprisoners, notably figures such as George Jackson, subsequently murdered byprison guards. They were forging a new politics and understanding of the role ofincarceration in a capitalist state, a politics echoed in prisons around the world. Onthe fortieth anniversary of the Attica uprising, in which prisoners seized control ofthe prison and issued a series of political demands, and which was subsequentlycrushed with overwhelming force, leaving thirty-nine dead, this article reflectson that history. The lineage of radical Black politics, forged in the increasinglyharsh and increasingly generalised conditions of the prison industrial complex,continues not only through the writings of prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal, butalso through the work and teaching of formerly incarcerated Black activists likeStephen Jones, whose insights, analysis and history are presented through hisinterview here.

Keywords: Attica uprising, Black Power, George Jackson, New Abolitionists,prison industrial complex, Stephen Jones, Soledad Brother, supermax prisons

Stephen Jones is a counsellor and Transfer and Continuing Coordinator of theEducational Opportunity Programme at the University of California, SantaBarbara (UCSB). I met him during the first class on prisons I taught when he was

Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Visiting Fellow,Goldsmiths College, University of London, and on the editorial board of Race & Class.

Stephen Jones is a counsellor and the Transfer and Continuing Coordinator of the UCSBs EducationalOpportunity Programme. This interview was given on 21 February 2011.

at UNIV CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA on October 12, 2011rac.sagepub.comDownloaded from


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Gordon: Seize the time: an interview with Stephen Jones 15

a mature student completing his BA in sociology. Stephen had spent overtwenty years in the Californian prison system, but he rarely talked about hisexperiences in class. About midway through the course, I began to understandthat the absence of tension and conflict I had anticipated in a prison course withan abolitionist perspective could be credited to Stephen. Ever generous, he wasworking as a shadow professor to the class, meeting with the other students inthe dining halls and dormitories, explaining things, handling hostile questions,teaching in the each one teach one style he knew well. I remain convinced thatthe positive learning environment established on that course was in large partdue to Stephens efforts on its behalf. When Stephen returned to work at UCSBafter he completed his masters in social work at California State University,Hayward, he would often come as a guest speaker to my classes.

I had never recorded any of those presentations and began to regret theabsence of a record of Stephens thoughts and stories. It was in this context thatI interviewed him early on a Saturday morning, where our conversation turned

to his background and to the political education and transformation he com-pleted in prison.1 I always liked the way Studs Terkel would take a long conver-sation with a person and edit it into a single-voiced narrative, and I followed thisoral history format, adding some words from George Jacksons widely readbook of letters from prison, Soledad Brother.2 George Jackson was a pivotal figurein radical Black politics in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially in helping othersto understand the repressive role of the prison in consolidating and extendingracism, and copies of Soledad Brotherpassed from hand to hand until they woreout. He was also an important influence on Stephen Jones, who has carried thoseinsights forwards, modifying them according to the needs of the times and, inthis way, keeping an important lineage of political leadership alive. Jacksonoften ended his letters with the phrase seize the time, and this seemed thereforea fitting title.3

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said more or less that freedom iswhat you do with whats been done to you.4 To make your way through a sys-tem thats designed not just to take your freedom away, but also to destroyyou as a person is extraordinarily difficult. To be able to find a space of free-dom, to make a life of dignity and respect while you are confined there is aspecial kind of work. Some prisoners can do it, some cant. Stephen Jones didit. He lived a long time in prison without, as Gregory Frederick put it, allowingthe evil of the prison to live in him.5 His example is, to my mind, an important

counter to the dehumanisation and demoralisation that prison intends. It isalso an example that has special resonance as we approach the fortieth anni-versary of the Attica uprising.

On 9 September 1971, days after George Jackson was shot in the back by guardsat San Quentin State Prison in California on 21 August, over 1,000 prisoners at theAttica Correctional Facility in New York took over D yard and seized control of theprison. They issued a manifesto (reproduced in this issue), made twenty-sevenconcrete demands, took approximately forty officers and civilian staff hostage,called for a negotiation team and began to self-manage the prison, including



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16 Race & Class 53(2)

completing complex battlements and fortifications. After four days, on 13September, with negotiations stalled over the question of amnesty from criminalprosecution for the prisoners, Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused for the fourthday the mens (and Commissioner Russell Oswalds) request to come to theprison. Instead, he ordered 1,000 National Guard troops, state police and prisonguards to storm the prison and retake it. Tear gas was dropped into the yard, andstate troopers, using shotguns, fired for over two minutes into the smoke. Thetelevised show of force, which ended with prison guards shouting white power,left twenty-nine prisoners and ten hostages dead, all killed by state troopers andguards as they retook the prison. The McKay Commission, although critical ofNelson Rockefellers handling of the uprising and the brazen lies that the mediapublished and that prison personnel circulated about who killed the hostages,did little to stop the wave of reprisals that followed.

Notwithstanding the still prevalent view that Attica was a spontaneous riottriggered by an incident of prisoner abuse, the uprising at Attica was well pre-

pared, the culmination of a period of organising within and outside of prison, astheir declaration made clear: The entire incident that has erupted here at Atticais not a result of the dastardly bushwhacking of the two prisoners on September8, 1971, but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administrativenetwork of this prison throughout the years.6 At Attica, the remarkable unity ofthe men had been painstakingly built and no doubt helped by the failure ofprison authorities to respond to demands that prisoners had been making peace-fully for quite some time. The wave of prison rebellions that occurred in thewake of the intense activity at Soledad prison in California and after George

Jacksons death at Attica and also in San Jos, California; Dallas and SanAntonio, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; and Bridgeton, New Jersey, to name afew places occurred in the context of a prisoners rights movement in the USthat began in the 1920s, peaked in the early 1950s and exploded from 1960 to1971.7 This movement was not, by any means, confined to the US and, duringthis same period, there was also a wave of revolts and strikes in European pris-ons, including youth facilities, notably in Sweden, France, Germany, NorthernIreland and Italy. In 1971, in Italy alone, there were almost monthly work, hun-ger and solidarity strikes, revolts, protests and riots across the country in Turin,Monza, Treviso, Milan, Naples, Sardinia, Genes, La Spezia, Brescia, Forl,Catania, Udine, Modena and Pisa.8 In France, a hunger strike by the politicalprisoners swept up in the post-1968 repression and by the 1970 anti-casseurs

law led to the founding of the Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons (GIP) in1971, which then, in turn, networked not only with prisoners in France, but alsowith prisoner movements across Europe and the US.9 The whole question ofwhat was intolerable, the title of GIPs journal, was now tied directly, constitu-tively, not only to the depredations of capitalism, imperialism and militarism,but to repressive policing and imprisonment in the name of security.

In the US, the escalation of the Black struggle in the 1960s and the criminalisationof its participants had, by 1970, produced a distinct population of political pris-oners connected to the Black Panther party, with its anti-racist Marxism, and



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experientially tied to a critique of police brutality and its repressive role in theeveryday lives of Black people. The radicalisation of prisoners and the upsurgein their protests can in part be attributed to the arrival of these prisoners. AsGeorge Jackson noted:

the recent influx of the political teachers, the political animals, from the BlackPanther Party were instrumental in the changes from the normalconservatism The new consciousness stems from the fact that the polit-ical teacher, the Black Panther concentration camped as a result of thepolitical thrust on the street, brought new ideas. You know revolutionary,scientific socialism, and anti-racism. And we attempted to make them under-stand that were all equally uniformly repressed by the administration.10

There were two key positions that Jackson, in particular, was instrumental inforcefully articulating and that remain to this day the twin elements of prisoner

radicalism in the US. The first Jackson alludes to: ideological and political unityacross the racial divides institutionally embedded in the prisons racial classifi-cation systems and in its segregationist policies. This unity emerged from, andwas harnessed to, a sophisticated humanism designed to throw off the effectsof institutions of authoritative inhumanity and to comprehend on a feelinglevel an existence contrary to violence. The Attica Liberation Faction mani-festo of demands was also, it is worth recalling, an anti-depression platform.The second element is the centrality of confinement and captivity to the func-tioning of the capitalist state and thus its importance as a target for elimination.As Jackson explained:

Well, were all familiar with the function of the prison as an institution serv-ing the needs of the totalitarian state. Weve got to destroy that function; thefunction has to be no longer viable, in the end. Its one of the strongest institu-tions supporting the totalitarian state. We have to destroy its effectiveness,and thats what the prison movement is all about.11

The Attica uprising represented the achievement of a sophisticated political con-sciousness in which both these positions found expression, as the manifesto ofdemands and anti-depression platform attest. George Jacksons acute anduncompromising analysis, the Attica rebels epitomised in the widely diffused

image of young L. D. Barkley concluding his reading of the manifesto with thecry, We are men. We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or drivenas such and the more anonymous, but significant, number of prisoners devel-oping a revolutionary international politics sustainable inside a US maximumsecurity prison generated a distinctive intellectual culture in US prisons andinspired, especially elsewhere, a radicalisation of ongoing and emerging demandsfor prison reform.12

It is perhaps difficult to imagine today the close connection that existed thenbetween the struggles inside and outside prison. This connection was, to a large



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extent, initiated by and fought for by the men and women on the inside and itwas maintained through what Jackson called the channels of education.13 Onthe one hand, outsiders brought news of the movement(s), of the war, of currentevents and new ideas political, social and economic theory and hidden histories forging a connection with the defiance and profound change taking place out-side the prison walls. At the same time, prisoners sent news back out about whatwas happening inside and taught the outsiders, especially the middle-class ones,about the centrality of the prison regime to the social management of a povertydeeply rooted in racism and violence. They also gave the outsiders a remarkablelesson in the power of education to transform consciousness. Political prisonersroutinely organise both themselves and educational programmes within prison,even under the most restrictive circumstances, as the elaborate examples of theANC, the IRA or the PLO have demonstrated.14 What was happening in USprisons was something else: poor people of colour abandoned by the educa-tional system, many of whom were learning to read for the first time, were edu-

cating themselves. This was self-determined education on a whole other level. Itproduced not merely better educated or better disciplined or culturally sensi-tised political prisoners, but a new kind of political prisoner, the ordinary crimi-nal or the ordinary abject capitalist, to quote Stephen Jones, who rejects thatidentity and that practice and becomes someone else: someone able to connecttheir individual experiences to social causes and to replace individualist withcollective action; someone who, amid an environment whose brutalitydemanded concentration on ones own safety, an atmosphere of cruel rivalry,would dedicate themselves to a dignified and cooperative life in prison;15 some-one who would have to work hard to achieve on a feeling level an existencecontrary to violence and work even harder to have it publicly recognised. Thiswas the kind of someone George Jackson, Stephen Jones, Gregory Frederick andmany others became, and education was central to this because self-determinededucation was also the co-operative means by which the invitation to do onestime differently was offered.

Stephen Jones was not at Attica when the uprising took place, but what hap-pened there had a significant impact both on him and more generally. Atticahelped to radicalise US prisoners and it also provoked a terrible and cruel reac-tion to restore law and order that contributed its part to the largest prisonexpansion the world has ever seen.16 The Attica leaders were tortured and seg-regated; the organisers at Norfolk and Concord (November 1971) were kid-

napped at night in their beds and sent to Walpoles notorious Nine Block; thestrikers at the federal prison in Marion (1973, 1983) became guinea pigs for creat-ing the perfect control unit; the Angola Three were persecuted using solitaryconfinement two of them, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, for thirty-sixyears; the Lucasville uprising (1993) leaders were sentenced to death and beganwhat continue to be eighteen years of solitary confinement on death row with-out any human contact, and so on. The counter-insurgency campaign that fol-lowed the uprising at Attica, and that followed each successive set of demands



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or strikes or revolts elsewhere, began the process by which a super-maximumprison regime designed to produce unquestioned compliance to authority hasbecome completely normalised today. As is well known by now, the use of massimprisonment in the US to manage escalating poverty, inequality and politicalopposition remains unabated, while this prison regime has been extended dur-ing the global war on terror and to encompass migrants. In the UK and Europe,the trend is similar, although the scale is smaller and the coercion less severe.

The culture of self-education and radicalisation that was evident at Attica andthat Attica also helped promote remained long after the immediate aftermath ofthe wave of prison revolts that occurred between 1960 and 1975, as Stephen

Joness experience makes clear. At the same time, the nature of that culture andthe terms of the prison struggle have changed significantly. In the US, the chan-nels of communication, education and legal redress have been closed or severelyrestricted, including access to and the content of the prison libraries. The prison-ers of Stephens generation are no longer alive or have been released, with some

notable exceptions, such as Mumia Abu Jamal. And while there is a committed,but small, prison abolition movement, imprisonment is not a central analytic inthe social movements today that animate political struggle against capitalism.

Perhaps, then, the most lasting legacy of the Attica uprising is its unfinishedbusiness: to eliminate the prisons function as we know it today. That the politi-cal culture inside and outside prison is not as it was in the 1960s and early 1970sis merely a taken-for-granted fact. It certainly did not prevent the men from atleast six of Georgias state prisons from co-ordinating a unified state-wide strikeagainst their use as exploited labour and from receiving immediate public sup-port; or prevent the last of the Lucasville uprising leaders from launching a hun-ger strike to be treated as other condemned prisoners are treated; or preventprisoners in Rio de Janeiro from rebelling against extreme conditions of over-crowding; or prevent the men at the Maison dArret dOsny outside Paris fromrenewing their protest again after several of them were moved, in an act of repri-sal, across the country, to mention only four major activities that took place inthe winter of 2010. The possibility for refusal and for political struggle is alwaysthere, prompted by unacceptable and impossible living conditions, pursued byindividuals who, at some point almost always unanticipated by them, begin toacquire another level of understanding, to quote Stephen Jones. This otherlevel of understanding, which constitutes a way of seizing the time, of doing thetime so that the time doesnt do you in, is hard won: demons are confronted,

wounds are attended to, new friends are made, responsibility for oneself and thediscipline required to keep it are accepted, studies are completed. Once achieved,this mode of being must be continually cultivated and shared. Once achieved, itis formidable.

For having done the work to achieve such a level of understanding and forsharing it with others, including me, on the fortieth anniversary of the uprisingat Attica, I would like, with all my heart, to thank Stephen Jones.

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Ive been asked to explain myself, briefly, before the world has done with me Iwas captured and brought to prison when I was eighteen years old Therecord that the state has compiled on my activities reads like the record of ten men. Itlabels me brigand, thief, burglar, gambler, hobo, drug addict, gunman, escape artist,Communist revolutionary, and murderer. (p. 10)

I grew up in humble beginnings in an extremely poor and large family in Brooklyn,New York. I came to California in 1968 and I was incarcerated for the first time in1969. I was 13. I was arrested not convicted for a burglary I didnt commit.Because my mom was illiterate and didnt understand the legal system, she didntshow up at court. That sent me up to Chabot Ranch in Alameda County for twelvemonths. I ran away from the boys camp because it wasnt a locked-down facilityand they told you that you could leave any time you liked. What they didnt tellyou is that if you got arrested again, youd be going to a more secure and con-trolled camp. In 1970, I was sent to CYA (California Youth Authority), the juvenile

prison in California, and stayed for about two and a half years. When I camehome, I had learned how to be a better criminal, how to really participate in analternative economy. I was an abject capitalist! I wanted all the new toys andclothes, the pretty cars and all the things that everybody in America aspired toobtain. But I was a juvenile and couldnt get a job. So, I sold drugs and partici-pated in other types of illegal work. Well, when I turned 17, I was arrested andconvicted for a murder/robbery that I didnt have anything to do with and I wassent to the penitentiary. I went through Trace, Vacaville, San Quentin, Jamestownand was released in 1997 from the fire-fighting base camp in Oak Glen.

Blackmen born in the US and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are

conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison I was prepared for prison. Itrequired only minor psychic adjustments. (p. 9)

I never understood the social contract. We didnt know nothing about it.Thats why, when they talked about rehabilitation, the concept had no meaningfor me. I mean, how do you rehabilitate a person who was never habilitated?I grew up in a very violent world. I look back at my first encounter with lawenforcement. I was 5 or 6 years old when a NYC police [officer] killed my bestfriend because he said he wanted to kill a nigger. So, from that point forward,it was just a natural progression for me to be fearful of authority. They always

asked me: why did you run? I said: Oh man, because of you. You got a badge,you got a uniform, and you got a big old pistol!!

Hes dodging lead. (p. 27)

My first five years were an adjustment time from civil society to carceral soci-ety, getting used to prison politics and learning how to function. It was prettychallenging, to say the least. The level of violence that is perpetrated against



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your body every single day is unspeakable. The guards brutalise you, other con-victs brutalise you. I was young, nobody knew me and I didnt know anybody.But I met some good people, some very intelligent brothers, behind the wall,and they knew all about the prison industrial complex. Thats how I was intro-duced to the teaching of George [Jackson] and the Black Guerilla Family17 andprison politics and this thing they call direct participatory democracy, whereeverybody has a voice. I ended up being introduced to a new ideology of how tosee myself in this capitalist society and the role that I was playing: how I wasbeing commodified; how I bought into the concept of consumerism; and howthe choices I made, that I thought I was making on my own, were already pre-determined. When youre living in the hyper-ghetto, you see images of howother people live and you want that, want it last week, if you know what I mean.Everything is fast paced. But your reality is that when you leave your apartmentor your house, what you see is abject poverty. You dont see anybody with aBrooks Brothers suit or wingtip shoes carrying a briefcase. You see the whores,

the pimps, the drug dealers and the other gangsters. They become your rolemodels. Thats what I saw and thats what I aspired to be. And that is what Ibecame. The conditions were in place for me to fall into the trap.

While behind the wall, an old brother named Pops took me under his wingand brought me up to speed. He said: Son, one day you going home. What areyou going to do once you get out of here? You are living in a nether world rightnow, and it is a microcosm of the civil society. He said: The things that youlearn here you are going to take home with you. What are you going to learn?What are you going to learn? Are you going to learn a different way? Or fallback into that same old trap that got you here in the first place?

The textbooks on criminology like to advance the idea that prisoners are mentallydefective. There is only the merest suggestion that the system itself is at fault investigation of anything outside the tenets of the system itself is futile Allother lines of inquiry would be like walking backward. Youll never see where youre

going. (pp. 2930, 23)

I tell people today that the freest I have ever been in my life was when I wasincarcerated because it actually took the veil of ignorance off of my conscious-ness. I got to see how people live and commodify other people and how not tobuy into that concept of consumerism or into capitalism. We can live in society

as sisters and brothers, more humanely. So, I understand about being institu-tionalised, I understand the punishment industry and the torture machine thatwas in place behind the wall. And I got a sense of belonging, of meaning, a senseof self-worth behind the wall. I said, I am valuable, my life has meaning tosomebody.

I participated with the Black Guerilla Family and they really brought me upto speed on the political structure of America and capitalism and what thatentails. I had to become self-educated because they never allowed me to go to



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school behind the walls. I had to start reading economic theory, sociology, psy-chology and history. Becoming politicised was a process where youd go throughan indoctrination period where youre given literature to read and then youdhave seminars. After we read a book we had to read a book a week onSaturday wed have discussions during yard time that might last up to fivehours. And youd have to be right on point! Youd have to be able to internalisethe information and then disseminate it, give it back. Your comrades could findyou anywhere. You could be in the chow hall and they could ask you: Communist

Manifesto, Chapter 2, page such-and-such, and youd have to [he snapstwice]. I said: Oh my god because they made sure that you got it! George

Jackson was a self-taught intellectual. He didnt have any college degrees. Butthat you must learn to read and disseminate information was part of the struc-ture. You had to learn how to write so that you could stay connected to the out-side world because we understood that one day some of us was going home,and we had to give voice to the voiceless.

The holds are fast being broken. Men who read Lenin, Fanon, and Che dont riot,they mass,they rage, they dig graves. (p. 31)

When I was politicised, it was a process of going from being a common crimi-nal and a common capitalist to becoming a prison abolitionist, someone whodoesnt have a concept of reform. You know what I mean, you have to blow itup and start up all over again. I became part of a cadre of very scholarly youngmen, Black men, who had a new way of looking at the world. The process wasthat everybody should be given the opportunity to access resources and knowl-edge in society regardless of where you were at; there has to be some type of

order to that process, right? Being locked up, it is a very violent society, and sothe first thing we got away from was the violence. We were not condoning vio-lence perpetrated against another prisoner. No, the only people the organisationwas at war with was the prison administration, our punishers.

When Angela Davis started using the term the prison industrial complex, weunderstood what it meant. We had been advocating against that since the late1960s and early 1970s. Its a multi-billion dollar industry and everybody is mak-ing money off of convicts, from the food we purchase in the canteens, to the soapand toothbrush and toothpaste we use to clean our teeth.18 We were alreadytalking about this and about how the prison industrial complex would mush-

room into a big fat white elephant sitting in the middle of everybodys livingroom that nobody sees. Fast-forward to today and look at the economy in theUnited States and at the budget crisis here in California. They still dont want toattribute that to the prison industrial complex. George Jackson was very pro-phetic many years ago when he said prison would be the central feature ofAmerican society and suck the lifeblood out of the inner cities if we didnt checkit. Like Malcolm X has stated so succinctly, the chickens have truly come hometo roost. The budgetary crisis is correctable if two things were to happen today(or tomorrow): one, reconfigure how you do the punishment industry blow it



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up and reshape it; two, put some major rehabilitation in place. I have to be hon-est. When I was locked up, I thought there were some people who deserved tobe locked up. You know what I mean. They were very violent, they were veryignorant and they were very hostile and mean-spirited. So I understand theneed to house some people away from civil society for a period of time. Butwhen these people pay their debt to society, how do you process them back intocivil society? Whats the process? When I got released with my $200 gate money,they made me purchase my own bus ticket back home. By the time I got back tothe Bay area, I had $93, no job, no place to stay and no food.

Capitalism and capitalist man, wrecker of worlds, scourge of the people. It cannotaddress itself to our needs, it cannot and will not change itself to adapt to naturalchanges within the social structure. (p. 185)

The process of becoming enlightened to the commodification of the human

body is linked to slavery. It is just a new form of slavery. That is all it is, man. Butwe dont get that here in America. We dont understand that slavery is not dead.It occurs every day of our lives here in America. And they are doing it withoutour permission. Well, some of us give permission. Others have been scared intovoting for those politicians with tough on crime stands, not knowing the rami-fications of keeping people housed as long as we do in California. When I camehome in 1997, nobody was talking about convict labour and we were making adollar an hour on the fire lines. This year, I was listening to the news and finallysomeone mentioned the CDF [California Department of Forestry and FireProtection] and their use of convict labour. The guys on the fire lines still makeone dollar an hour.

Heres how it works. The free men, the smoke jumpers, they get helicopteredin. The convicts, we are in hook line order. Between thirteen and sixteen peoplein a line and everybody has some type of implement or tool. Theres your firstsaw, your second saw, and each person with a chainsaw has a puller. The pullerworks the rakes and he has a smaller chainsaw to cut the big trees down. Peoplecome behind him and kick the tree off to the side of the road. Then you haveyour people come through with the Pulaski and then the Drag Spoon comes upwith the shovel. You are cutting a line might be three or even six feet wide upto, through and around the fire to create firebreaks. I was there when a bunch ofguys got burnt up. At every fire somebody dies because you are right in the

middle of this firestorm and you have these big widow makers, old explodingtrees. The sap would heat up to such a high degree that the tree would justexplode. Boom. When these trees explode, six- to eight-foot long splinters comecrashing from the tree. Youre standing there and you dont have any protection.When you hear those big booms going off, those are trees, not gas lines, up there.That is a tree blowing up. You get one dollar an hour and youre on the fire line,risking your life every day. The camp clerk, the lieutenant, they never go out ona fire line. But these are the people who contract convict labour to different com-munities. And the money theyre paid goes back to their particular camp and



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they get a percentage of the proceeds. And it doesnt stop when fire season con-cludes. It goes into the winter because then theres flood control and communitymaintenance. Up in the mountains, we kept the roads clear. It snows, and theyhave convicts out there.

Dear Fay I detected in the questions posed by your team a desire to isolate somerationale that would explain why racism exists at the prison with particular promi-nence. The question was too large Its tied into the question of why racismexists in this whole society with particular prominence, tied into history. (p. 22)

The process of criminalising whole groups of people occurs through racism.The system uses racism as a divide and conquer mechanism. America is moreor less ground zero for the punishment industry. We export our varioustheories not only for housing people, but also for criminalising people. Thisinvolves othering people. You cant commit acts of brutality against your

brother or your sister. They have to be somebody else, a dirty person, a terror-ist. You marginalise this person, dehumanise this person, so now you canpunish this person.

Poor people have a tendency of never looking up. They always look around.And when they look around, what do they see? They see people who dont looklike them, who seem to be doing much better than them even though they arestruggling the same. You have all these groups of poor people here in Americaand what do they have in common? They all have a fear of immigrants. I hearit all the time in the hood. And these are poor people in the hood. I hear it fromthe Chicanos and Latinos, I hear it from Blacks, I hear it from Asians. They getpissed off and angry: Why are they here? They should have gone through the

bureaucracy like I had to. I said: These are your brothers and sisters, man.Wouldnt you want to give them the same opportunities, access to resourcesand privileges that you have? I look at the border control officers and I see thatmost of them are people of colour. And theyre very conservative, veryRepublican. Anytime you can other groups of people and get the poor peopleto buy into it, they are going to think they are doing something great, even if itssubstantiating the prison industrial complex. They dont understand divideand conquer techniques.

The incarceration of migrants is expanding in these United States, and we arealso in the process of creating a two-tier prison system.19 Recently, three of my

students came in to talk about their fathers being incarcerated. Their fathers areimmigrants charged with immigration violations. They are housed in separatefacilities; its how the punishment industry is reconstructing itself and expand-ing. I have some old friends, immigrants living in the US for fifteen to twentyyears, who were arrested for simple crimes. After doing eight or nine years inthe California penitentiary, they are sent back to Trinidad or the Cayman Islands.Its ridiculous! I was blindsided by this. I hadnt seen it happening until Im onthe other side of the wall. What is happening is that we are in the process of



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reinventing institutionalised racism by othering people not just based on skincolour, but because of religious and political beliefs or because theyre immi-grants or migrants. Its the same process of othering people, and you do itthrough institutional racism.

I am living very badly now and just to stay alive is an ordeal, but I see somethingbetter. It is vague, and is a possibility at best, but I know a place, a refuge where

people love and live. (p. 49)

The work I am doing now is truly an honour and a blessing for me because Isee the effects of the punishment industry on a lot of the young people I workwith. Some of them have direct connections to the punishment industry becausetheir parents are part of it. And so emotions come up. One young ladys fatherhas been incarcerated since she was 3 years old and she is 19 years old now. Shehas been going to see her dad behind the wall for sixteen years. She came to my

office Friday and she says: Mr Jones, he is not just doing this time by himself.I have been incarcerated for sixteen years. I said: Wow, that is so true. My chil-dren told me when I came home that they was right there with me. So, I get thechance to give her and other students some clarity and some understanding ofwhat their parents are going through, what theyre doing and why they act theway they act in certain circumstances. I also have some former convicts that Imentor through college who are making a re-entry through an education pro-gramme in Oakland. I teach people about the punishment industry and abouttheir rights as citizens, as formerly incarcerated people, and about the need tochange the verbiage, the meaning and power of words.

Ive thought about this for many years. When I first met you, I thought of

myself as an ex-convict or an ex-felon. And it didnt feel right. I was x-ing myselfout of society. We reaffirm our marginalisation every time we say we are ex-convicts or ex-felons. I mean, when do we get our rights as citizens back? Whendo we start viewing ourselves as being worthy of being a man or a woman?When I looked at the term formerly incarcerated, I said: Thats me. Im for-merly incarcerated, Im not a convict. It was like an epiphany, it was empower-ing. I look at myself totally differently than I did just a few years ago. Those ofus who are formerly incarcerated have another level of understanding that a lotof people dont have access to. I share these insights with young people andencourage them to get educated as a form of empowerment to make better and

healthier choices for themselves. When people become more educated and morepoliticised, they are not apt to create crimes against one another. They start look-ing at the real criminals, the ones stealing billions from the unsuspecting mil-lions. It is really important for young people and (old people too!) here inAmerica to know how their tax dollars are being spent, so they can make betterand healthier choices for themselves. Why their tax dollars are not going to fundeducation. Why they dont have access to healthcare. Why even some profes-sionals are now part of the new working poor.



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I am very optimistic. The young people nowadays are starting to becomemore aware. The most important group of students who need to take the blind-ers off is white students. They come in with these gorgeous questions. They arevery curious. Because they are going to be in leadership roles that can changethe policy that governs the prison industrial complex, they are asking criticalquestions. And I say, this is fascinating, amazing. People of colour, we know it,we live it every day. Back in the day, we had this cross-cultural peoples libera-tion movement that was global, and it was resisting the machine, the machine ofcapitalism. It was resisting all that nonsense. This movement will not reoccuruntil people become educated and do cross-cultural collaboration and formcoalitions of support across the board. All of our struggles are interlinked. Thetentacles of oppression are many and varied, so you need all these variousgroups to come together and say: We are going to stop this machine. We are notgoing to let this occur because what happened to you today is going to happento me tomorrow, and we need to address this as a collective. You have to

remember that I was acculturated behind the wall to believe and understandthat the process of collective thought breeds collective action. The collaborationsare at the seedling stage, but I am very hopeful because the government can onlydo as much as we allow them to. When we have an educated proletariat and youform a real peoples movement with a theoretical framework and a history andexamples and reference points that can be shared with young people, they say,we can do this! They did say slavery was going to last forever, right? Ha, ha,ha! I look at things today in the same framework: when people become aware,they can change the system.

References

1 Thanks to Jordan Camp for arranging, recording and transcribing the interview and toStephen Jones for his time and patience with having his life and his beautifully expressivevoice reduced to a few pages.

2 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: the prison letters of George Jackson (New York, Bantam Books,1970), introduction by Jean Genet. Page numbers for each passage quoted in the text of theinterview are, in order: 10, 9, 27, 2930/23, 31, 185, 22, 49.

3 Seize the Time was the title of former Black Panther party chairperson Elaine Browns firstalbum of music recorded in 1969. It became not only a popular Black Panther party slogan,but also a political and strategic concept. See Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: the story of the BlackPanther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore, MD, Black Classic Press, 1996).

4 The idea which I have never ceased to develop is that, in the end, one is always responsiblefor what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else besides assume this responsibility.For I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him. This is thelimit I would today accord to freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, Itinerary of a thought, New LeftReview (no. 58, November/December 1969), p. 45.

5 Gregory Frederick, Prisoners as citizens,Monthly Review (Vol. 53, no. 3, July/August 2001), p. 85.6 Massacre at Attica, Black Panther(Vol. 7, no. 4, 1971), p. 3.7 For a contemporaneous view of George Jackson and his death, see Eric Mann, Comrade George:

an investigation into the life, political thought, and assassination of George Jackson (New York, Harper& Row, 1974). On the history of the prisoners rights movement, see Scott Christianson, WithLiberty for Some: 500 years of imprisonment in America (Boston, MA, Northeastern UniversityPress, 2000), Chapters 56.



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8 Philippe Artires, Laurent Quro and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds, Le Groupe dInformationsur les Prisons: archives dune lutte 19701972 (Paris, ditions de lIMEC, 2003), pp. 945.

9 A casseur is a thug. The Chaban-Delmas law was specifically directed towards criminalisingunion strikers and protesters. It created enhanced penalties for actions taken in groups anddirected towards law enforcement personnel and gave new meaning rioting demonstrator tothe term casseur. The law was repealed in 1981 and a new version, targeted at banlieue youth,was reinstated by the Sarkozy government in March 2010, known as the loi sur les bandes (lawconcerning gangs). It was first used on 29 March 2010 at an authorised demonstration againstimprisonment and in solidarity with the prisoners at La Sant, when more than half of the 200or so demonstrators were arrested. Cent dix personnes interpells pour un tir de fuse dansune manifestation, Le Monde (28 March 2010), available at: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2010/03/28/110-arrestation-lors-d-une-manifestation-anticarcerale_1325507_3224.html#xtor=AL-32280184.

10 Interview with comrade George, conducted in March 1971, Black Panther(Vol. 7, no. 1, 1971).11 Karen Wald, An interview with George Jackson (16 May 1971), originally broadcast on

KPFA-FM Berkeley, California. This interview is widely available online and has beenreprinted many times, including in Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (neo) slave narrativesand contemporary prison writings (New York, SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 22934.

12 See Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: imprisoned radical intellectuals and the US prison regime (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006). On influence in Europe, see Artireset al., op. cit. Sadly, 23-year-old L. D. Barkley was one of the men killed when the prison wasstormed.

13 Wald, op. cit. This connection was also energised by the enormously popular campaign toFree Angela Davis following the FBI manhunt, her arrest (in 1970) and trial as an accomplicein the kidnap and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California.

14 See, for example, Govan Mbeki, Learning from Robben Island: Govan Mbekis prison writings(Athens, Ohio University Press, 1991).

15 Howard Zinn,A Peoples History of the United States (New York, HarperCollins, 2005), p. 519.16 See Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: police and prisons in the age of crisis (London,

Verso, 2000).

17 George Jackson and W. L. Nolen founded the Black Guerilla Family in 1966 at San Quentin.Known principally today as a prison gang, its original purpose was to unite prisoners in thestruggle for dignity in prison, to eliminate racism and what Jackson described as the totali-tarian function of the state embodied in and by the prison, and to link the struggle in prisonto the active movements outside of it. It considered itself a revolutionary organisation, BlackMarxist in orientation, and was associated both with the Black Panther party and the BlackLiberation Army.

18 See Angela Y. Davis, Masked racism: reflections on the prison industrial complex, Colorlines(Fall 1998); Joy James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader(Oxford, Blackwell, 1998);Are PrisonsObsolete? (Open Media, 2003). For an interactive map of the prison industrial complex, seeAshley Hunt, The corrections documentary project, available at: http://correctionsproject.com/. On convict labour and profiteering, see Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, eds, PrisonProfiteers: who makes money from mass incarceration? (New York, New Press, 2007).

19 See Amnesty International,Jailed without Justice: immigration detention in the USA (2009); alsoTeresa A. Miller, A new look at neo-liberal economic policies and the criminalization ofundocumented migration, SMU Law Review (Vol. 61, 2008), pp. 17188.


‘seize the time’: an interview with stephen jones

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