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kevin_shepherd's review against another edition
5.0
“…we must fight for your life as though it were our own, which it is, and render impossible with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For if they take you in the morning they will be coming for us that night.” -James Baldwin, An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis
Angela Davis was jailed from 1970 to 1972 awaiting trial on charges for which she was eventually acquitted. In this, her first book, she presents a powerful indictment of America’s so-called “correctional custody” institutions and the racist policing of Black citizens which served to keep those institutions at maximum capacity.
This collection of essays, letters, legal arguments and written declarations, authored by the likes of Angela Davis, George Jackson, Margaret Burnham, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Erica Huggins, Jessica Mitford and others, collectively exposed the bigotry and brutality of existent, police-state procedurals.
1971 - Davis, a highly respected college professor with no previous criminal history, alleged that she incurred the wrath of the Nixon/Reagan establishment simply because she was black, intellectual and communist. She was, by the strictest of legal definitions, a political prisoner. Had she been convicted on the bogus charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy she would have most likely received a death sentence.
“You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.” -Huey P. Newton
The assertion here is that the prison-industrial complex, as a whole, has always served to prevent the have-nots from encroaching on the haves. As such, the framing of innocent individuals is a powerful tool. There was (and probably still is) a veritable army of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted human beings wasting away behind bars, a substantial percentage of which are Black. Had Angela Davis not been a high profile and distinguished icon of a movement she might have easily become just another statistic in a deluge of criminal and political injustices.
The testimonials are here. Read and decide for yourself.
Angela Davis was jailed from 1970 to 1972 awaiting trial on charges for which she was eventually acquitted. In this, her first book, she presents a powerful indictment of America’s so-called “correctional custody” institutions and the racist policing of Black citizens which served to keep those institutions at maximum capacity.
This collection of essays, letters, legal arguments and written declarations, authored by the likes of Angela Davis, George Jackson, Margaret Burnham, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Erica Huggins, Jessica Mitford and others, collectively exposed the bigotry and brutality of existent, police-state procedurals.
1971 - Davis, a highly respected college professor with no previous criminal history, alleged that she incurred the wrath of the Nixon/Reagan establishment simply because she was black, intellectual and communist. She was, by the strictest of legal definitions, a political prisoner. Had she been convicted on the bogus charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy she would have most likely received a death sentence.
“You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.” -Huey P. Newton
The assertion here is that the prison-industrial complex, as a whole, has always served to prevent the have-nots from encroaching on the haves. As such, the framing of innocent individuals is a powerful tool. There was (and probably still is) a veritable army of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted human beings wasting away behind bars, a substantial percentage of which are Black. Had Angela Davis not been a high profile and distinguished icon of a movement she might have easily become just another statistic in a deluge of criminal and political injustices.
The testimonials are here. Read and decide for yourself.
cwood6's review against another edition
4.0
A great way of learning more about that era of history and many of the issues that persist today. At times it gets highly repetitive but it is structured as a manifesto for getting Davis out of jail, so a lot of the arguements are related to that.
ashedryden's review against another edition
4.0
A good collection of essays, letters, and other works. Didn’t feel super cohesive and it definitely drags in places, but where it’s good it is VERY good.
(Highlights below as I purchased this book from Haymarket and not Amazon)
- The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves.
- as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our Black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
- Nat Turner and John Brown can be viewed as examples of the political prisoner who has actually committed an act which is defined by the state as “criminal.” They killed and were consequently tried for murder. But did they commit murder? This raises the question of whether American revolutionaries had murdered the British in their struggle for liberation. Nat Turner and his followers killed some 65 white people, yet shortly before the Revolt had begun, Nat is reputed to have said to the other rebelling slaves: “Remember that ours is not war for robbery nor to satisfy our passions, it is a struggle for freedom. Ours must be deeds not words.”
- The battle for the liquidation of slavery had no legitimate existence in the eyes of the government and therefore the special quality of deeds carried out in the interests of freedom was deliberately ignored. There were no political prisoners, there were only criminals; just as the movement out of which these deeds flowed was largely considered criminal.
- The political act is defined as criminal in order to discredit radical and revolutionary movements. A political event is reduced to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing order.
- Indeed, the assistant warden at San Quentin, who is by profession a clinical psychologist, tells us in a recent interview that prisoners suffer from “retarded emotional growth.” The warden continues: “The first goal of the prison is to isolate people the community doesn’t want at large. Safe confinement is the goal. The second obligation is a reasonably good housekeeping job, the old humanitarian treatment concept.”2 That is, once the prisoner is adequately confined and isolated, he may be treated for his emotional and psychological maladies—which he is assumed to suffer by virtue of the fact that he is a prisoner. We have a completely circular method of reasoning. It is a closed-circuit system from which there is no apparent escape. The alleged criminal
- Professor Theodore Sarbin of the University of California criminology department put it very well: “… membership in the class of people known as ‘law-breakers’ is not distributed according to economic or social status, but membership in the class ‘criminals’ is distributed according to social or economic status … ”6 Example: the ten executives of the General Electric Company convicted in 1961 of price-fixing involving tens of millions of dollars are law-breakers, and some of them actually served some months in prison. Still, the society does not consider them criminals. By way of contrast, a Chicano or Black youth alleged to have stolen ten dollars from a grocery store is not only considered a criminal by the society, but this assumption allows the police to act with impunity. They may shoot him down in the street. Chances are it will be ruled justifiable homicide in a coroner’s inquest.
- consider penology as the confinement and treatment of people who are actually or potentially disruptive of the social system.
- In an increasing number of ways the entire judicial and penal system involving the police, the courts, the prisons and the parole boards has become a mechanism through which the ruling powers seek to maintain their physical and psychological control, or the threat of control, over millions of working people, especially young people, and most especially Black and Brown young people. The spectre of the prisons, the behavioral psychologists, the Adult Authority, the judicial treadmill, haunts the community.
- “indeterminate sentences” for felony convictions, e.g. one year to life imprisonment, gives the parole board incredible powers.
- For once you accept the behavioralist view of the criminal as morally depraved or mentally defective it is perfectly logical to preventively detain all persons who manifest such tendencies and are therefore potential criminals. Thus, in April 1970 a leading physician and close associate of President Nixon proposed that the government begin the mass testing of 6-to 8-year-old children to determine if they have criminal-behavior tendencies. He then suggested “treatment camps” for the severely disturbed child and the young hard-core criminal.
- Banfield’s analysis of the urban crisis exactly coincides with the behavioralists’ view of the criminal. That is, the cause of the urban crisis lies with the existence of what Banfield calls the “lower classes” who are poverty-prone. These lower classes are of course working people, and Black and Brown people in particular. They are, Banfield would have us believe, morally depraved and mentally defective.
- Banfield’s description of the lower class is in fact a description of the criminal. And it is precisely at this moment when the description of the lower class and the description of the criminal coincide that we have a central aspect of the ideological basis for fascism and genocide. This is exactly Banfield’s program.
- He argues that the people at the bottom of the society are exploited for the profit and advantage of those at the top. Thus, the oppressed exist, and will always be used to maintain the privileged status of the exploiters.
- America is a prison. As Brother Huey P. Newton stated, the only difference is that one is maximum and the other minimum security.
- As Brother Malcolm X once said, “We as people, as human beings have the basic human right to eliminate the conditions that have and are continuously destroying us.”
- Historically the prison system has been an integral part of our lives. Black people emerged from slavery only to encounter the prison labor system as one element of the new apparatus of exploitation. Arrested for trivial or falsified offenses, Blacks were leased out to politicians, planters, mining firms, and Northern syndicates for up to thirty years. A remnant of that era can still be detected, for example, in Arkansas’ notorious Cummins’ Prison Farm where prisoners work for no pay in cotton fields five and a half days a week. While more insidious forms of slave labor have persisted in the prisons, this broader social function of maintaining the existing socio-economic order has achieved monstrous proportions.
- There are more prisons of all categories in the United States than in all other countries of the world combined.
- Most crime, however, is clearly the simple effect of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege, a reflection of the state of present property relations. There are no wealthy men on death row, and so very few in the general prison population that we can discount them altogether—imprisonment is an aspect of class struggle from the outset.
(Highlights below as I purchased this book from Haymarket and not Amazon)
- The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves.
- as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our Black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
- Nat Turner and John Brown can be viewed as examples of the political prisoner who has actually committed an act which is defined by the state as “criminal.” They killed and were consequently tried for murder. But did they commit murder? This raises the question of whether American revolutionaries had murdered the British in their struggle for liberation. Nat Turner and his followers killed some 65 white people, yet shortly before the Revolt had begun, Nat is reputed to have said to the other rebelling slaves: “Remember that ours is not war for robbery nor to satisfy our passions, it is a struggle for freedom. Ours must be deeds not words.”
- The battle for the liquidation of slavery had no legitimate existence in the eyes of the government and therefore the special quality of deeds carried out in the interests of freedom was deliberately ignored. There were no political prisoners, there were only criminals; just as the movement out of which these deeds flowed was largely considered criminal.
- The political act is defined as criminal in order to discredit radical and revolutionary movements. A political event is reduced to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing order.
- Indeed, the assistant warden at San Quentin, who is by profession a clinical psychologist, tells us in a recent interview that prisoners suffer from “retarded emotional growth.” The warden continues: “The first goal of the prison is to isolate people the community doesn’t want at large. Safe confinement is the goal. The second obligation is a reasonably good housekeeping job, the old humanitarian treatment concept.”2 That is, once the prisoner is adequately confined and isolated, he may be treated for his emotional and psychological maladies—which he is assumed to suffer by virtue of the fact that he is a prisoner. We have a completely circular method of reasoning. It is a closed-circuit system from which there is no apparent escape. The alleged criminal
- Professor Theodore Sarbin of the University of California criminology department put it very well: “… membership in the class of people known as ‘law-breakers’ is not distributed according to economic or social status, but membership in the class ‘criminals’ is distributed according to social or economic status … ”6 Example: the ten executives of the General Electric Company convicted in 1961 of price-fixing involving tens of millions of dollars are law-breakers, and some of them actually served some months in prison. Still, the society does not consider them criminals. By way of contrast, a Chicano or Black youth alleged to have stolen ten dollars from a grocery store is not only considered a criminal by the society, but this assumption allows the police to act with impunity. They may shoot him down in the street. Chances are it will be ruled justifiable homicide in a coroner’s inquest.
- consider penology as the confinement and treatment of people who are actually or potentially disruptive of the social system.
- In an increasing number of ways the entire judicial and penal system involving the police, the courts, the prisons and the parole boards has become a mechanism through which the ruling powers seek to maintain their physical and psychological control, or the threat of control, over millions of working people, especially young people, and most especially Black and Brown young people. The spectre of the prisons, the behavioral psychologists, the Adult Authority, the judicial treadmill, haunts the community.
- “indeterminate sentences” for felony convictions, e.g. one year to life imprisonment, gives the parole board incredible powers.
- For once you accept the behavioralist view of the criminal as morally depraved or mentally defective it is perfectly logical to preventively detain all persons who manifest such tendencies and are therefore potential criminals. Thus, in April 1970 a leading physician and close associate of President Nixon proposed that the government begin the mass testing of 6-to 8-year-old children to determine if they have criminal-behavior tendencies. He then suggested “treatment camps” for the severely disturbed child and the young hard-core criminal.
- Banfield’s analysis of the urban crisis exactly coincides with the behavioralists’ view of the criminal. That is, the cause of the urban crisis lies with the existence of what Banfield calls the “lower classes” who are poverty-prone. These lower classes are of course working people, and Black and Brown people in particular. They are, Banfield would have us believe, morally depraved and mentally defective.
- Banfield’s description of the lower class is in fact a description of the criminal. And it is precisely at this moment when the description of the lower class and the description of the criminal coincide that we have a central aspect of the ideological basis for fascism and genocide. This is exactly Banfield’s program.
- He argues that the people at the bottom of the society are exploited for the profit and advantage of those at the top. Thus, the oppressed exist, and will always be used to maintain the privileged status of the exploiters.
- America is a prison. As Brother Huey P. Newton stated, the only difference is that one is maximum and the other minimum security.
- As Brother Malcolm X once said, “We as people, as human beings have the basic human right to eliminate the conditions that have and are continuously destroying us.”
- Historically the prison system has been an integral part of our lives. Black people emerged from slavery only to encounter the prison labor system as one element of the new apparatus of exploitation. Arrested for trivial or falsified offenses, Blacks were leased out to politicians, planters, mining firms, and Northern syndicates for up to thirty years. A remnant of that era can still be detected, for example, in Arkansas’ notorious Cummins’ Prison Farm where prisoners work for no pay in cotton fields five and a half days a week. While more insidious forms of slave labor have persisted in the prisons, this broader social function of maintaining the existing socio-economic order has achieved monstrous proportions.
- There are more prisons of all categories in the United States than in all other countries of the world combined.
- Most crime, however, is clearly the simple effect of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege, a reflection of the state of present property relations. There are no wealthy men on death row, and so very few in the general prison population that we can discount them altogether—imprisonment is an aspect of class struggle from the outset.
srahmhl's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
5.0
persnickety_9's review against another edition
3.0
This was a really interesting collection of essays/speeches regarding imprisonment. Many authors pointed out how fascist and dehumanizing prison is when you consider the cutoff from the rest of the world, the lack of real medical care, solitary confinement, etc. Prison is not about rehabilitation; it’s punitive and hurts people.
I also was interested by Davis’s point of many activists actually being political prisoners and the Folsom Prison Manifesto. Another great piece was “I Bring an Indictment Against the American System” by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy.
“If they come for you in the morning, they come for us at night” was an incredibly powerful statement. Essentially, if we allow these injustices to happen to people like Angela Davis (who, again, is a complete badass), they will come for the “common” folk next. It is about thinking collectively, not just individually, to sustain a movement for justice. We are not free until we are all free.
Also, in case you forgot, our “justice system” is actually incredibly effed up.
I also was interested by Davis’s point of many activists actually being political prisoners and the Folsom Prison Manifesto. Another great piece was “I Bring an Indictment Against the American System” by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy.
“If they come for you in the morning, they come for us at night” was an incredibly powerful statement. Essentially, if we allow these injustices to happen to people like Angela Davis (who, again, is a complete badass), they will come for the “common” folk next. It is about thinking collectively, not just individually, to sustain a movement for justice. We are not free until we are all free.
Also, in case you forgot, our “justice system” is actually incredibly effed up.
eabhawall's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
3.25
heidi_'s review against another edition
5.0
"[W]hen formal considerations of order are placed above justice, it is usually disorder which prevails. On the other hand, out of a true and sincere respect for justice, order naturally flows."
Angela's strength of conviction is refreshing and contagious. She is clear and uncompromising in her assessment of her own case, those of political prisoners at large, and the status allotted to Black people within the U.S. Along with her co-authors, she addresses the a priori culpability rendered to Black 'criminals', who dare to transgress the societal rules which keep them in poverty. The carceral system serves as an instrument of state power, leaving prison abolition as the final recourse for millions to access justice.
It's difficult to fully grasp that these excerpts were written 50 years ago. We're still dealing with the same nonsense, if not an amplified version. Since this book was first edited, we've witnessed mass incarceration and police brutality intensify by many factors of magnitude. Wealth and income inequality have magnified in tandem. I would hope that with the events of the past year, a greater collective consciousness is forming around the urgent need to dismantle harmful institutions to make space for a socialist future.
"[O]ur fundamental strategy ought to consist...in abolishing the property relations which allow those few to hoard wealth while the masses of Black people eke out their existence at an extremely low economic level. We must destroy the institutions in which racism and exploitation are crystalized and project at the same time new institutions which will allow us to be free."
Angela's strength of conviction is refreshing and contagious. She is clear and uncompromising in her assessment of her own case, those of political prisoners at large, and the status allotted to Black people within the U.S. Along with her co-authors, she addresses the a priori culpability rendered to Black 'criminals', who dare to transgress the societal rules which keep them in poverty. The carceral system serves as an instrument of state power, leaving prison abolition as the final recourse for millions to access justice.
It's difficult to fully grasp that these excerpts were written 50 years ago. We're still dealing with the same nonsense, if not an amplified version. Since this book was first edited, we've witnessed mass incarceration and police brutality intensify by many factors of magnitude. Wealth and income inequality have magnified in tandem. I would hope that with the events of the past year, a greater collective consciousness is forming around the urgent need to dismantle harmful institutions to make space for a socialist future.
"[O]ur fundamental strategy ought to consist...in abolishing the property relations which allow those few to hoard wealth while the masses of Black people eke out their existence at an extremely low economic level. We must destroy the institutions in which racism and exploitation are crystalized and project at the same time new institutions which will allow us to be free."