Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. In 1960, at the age of eighteen, George Jackson was accused of stealing $70 from a gas station in Los Angeles.
Though there was evidence of his innocence, his court-appointed lawyer maintained that because Jackson had a record (two previous instances of petty crime), he should plead guilty in exchange for a light sentence in the county jail. He did, and received an indeterminate sentence of one year to life. Jackson spent the next ten years in Soledad Prison, seven and a half of them in solitary confinement. Instead of succumbing to the dehumanization of prison existence, he transformed himself into the leading theoretician of the prison movement and a brilliant writer. Soledad Brother, which contains the letters that he wrote from 1964 to 1970, is his testament. In his twenty-eighth year, Jackson and two other black inmates — Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette — were falsely accused of murdering a white prison guard. The reissue of Soledad Brother at this point in time is essential.
Restorative Resistance. From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, the Role of Prisons in American Society. Is America's emerging prison state a revival or an extension of slavery?
Is it "a New Jim Crow"? Or is it something arising out of those experiences, but significantly different, a brand new phase in the history of African America? Historian Loic Wacquant here argues that America's reliance upon prison as the principal way of dealing with the black poor marks a qualitatively new stage in the Black experience. First, he says, there was slavery, then Southern rural segregation, followed by the enclosure of the northern ghetto, which has now been succeeded by the world's first carceral state. Like slavery, Jim Crow and the ghetto, prison has come to define for many of us what it is to be Black in America. Not one but several ‘peculiar institutions’ have successively operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States.
Labor Extraction and Caste Division 1. 2. 3. The ghetto as prison, the prison as ghetto Racial disproportionality in US imprisonment. California prison hunger strikers propose ‘10 core demands’ for the national Occupy Wall Street Movement. Occupy Miami and the Miami Workers Center occupy a Bank of America branch. – Photo: Miami Workers Center Greetings, Brothers and Sisters. A firm, warm and solid embrace of revolutionary love is extended to you all. These words by Brother Howard Zinn are particularly relevant to the survival of the evolving Occupy Wall Street Movement, as these truths have been integral to the success of populist organizing in the U.S. historically and are central to the proposal we’re putting forward here. Most of you, at this point, are familiar with the NARN Collective Think Tank (NCTT) from the many progressive programs and ideas that have come out of this body from both Pelican Bay SHU and here in Corcoran SHU, most recently our work in the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.
“(C)onsciousness is directly proportional to oppression.” – Honorable Comrade George Lester Jackson The mass media were counting on the national Occupy movements to just peter out and fizzle away. Police Violence Through Rap Music Timeline. 212 Degrees by Jasiri XAug 15, 2014" AUG 15 212° - Jasiri X (Produced by Soy Sos) Jasiri X: I never really wanted the role of Hip-Hop artist that speaks when something tragic happens in our community, but I guess it is what it is.
I got so many calls, tweets, and texts from folks asking me to say something so here it is. It’s raw and angry because that’s how I feel about more Black death unjustly at the hands of the police. For Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Ezell Ford, I hope your lives are not in vain, and God brings your families peace. For my community, this won’t stop until we stop it, and the first step is unity. I called this song 212 degrees because that’s the boiling point.
War on 'drugs' Migrants.