Solidarity Without Prejudice - by John Bowden
Should
a decision to politically support and build campaigns on behalf of
particular prisoners who are engaged in a struggle against the prison
system be wholly contingent upon the type of offence that preceded
their imprisonment? Are some prisoners, no matter how politicised
they've become whilst in prison and committed to the struggle, unworthy
and undeserving of support because of lifestyles, forms of behaviour
and criminal activity engaged in prior to arrest and imprisonment?
When
it comes to supporting the struggle of “social” prisoners or those
imprisoned for offences other than the overtly political (although it
could be argued that in a capitalist system where the overwhelming
majority of those sent to jail are inevitably from the poorest and most
disadvantaged sections of society, all prisoners are in some way
political) is it okay to support those who are originally convicted of,
say, crimes against property but definitely not those jailed for crimes
like murder, extortion and even rape? Are some prisoners on account of
the crimes that put them in prison so irredeemably beyond the pale that
absolutely nothing they subsequently do or become can ever qualify them
as worthy of political support and solidarity? On this issue should we
bury our differences with the police, judiciary and capitalist media
and concur with their endlessly propagated view that some individuals
convicted and sent to jail for seriously violent behaviour and the most
“wicked acts” should be forever demonised, despised and permanently
excluded from the human race?
Most
prisoners in fact first enter jail for offences and forms of behaviour
almost wholly associated with a life time experience of poverty,
disadvantage and abuse, and are for the most part products and
casualties of a grossly unequal and class ridden society. Obviously
some people find their way into jail because of behaviour that was
criminally entrepreneurial (the “career criminal”) and violently
predatory, but these are a small minority of the overall prisoner
population, and in the case of the “career criminal”, especially, the
least likely to jeopardize early release by becoming politically active
in prison or being associated with politically radical groups on the
outside. The fact is that the prisoners more likely to become involved
in confrontation and conflict with the prison system are those
initially imprisoned for chaotically violent and rage-fuelled offences.
The
revolutionary black American prisoner George Jackson once wrote in a
letter to a friend - “I was captured and brought to prison when I was
18 years old because I couldn't adjust. The record that the state has
compiled on my activities reads like a record of ten men. It labels me
brigand, thief, burglar, hobo, drug addict, gunman, and murderer.”
Jackson of course was transformed by his experience of imprisonment
into a politically conscious prisoner leader and dedicated member of
the Black Panther Party before being murdered by guards at San Quentin
prison in 1971.
Amongst
prisoners themselves the diversity of offences that initially landed
them together in jail is quickly subsumed in a common experience of
repression and collective adversity, and apart from the traditional
hatred of serious sex offenders, prisoners are completely
non-judgemental of one another's crimes and bond quickly in a common
struggle for survival. Brotherhood and sisterhood amongst prisoners
that organise and fight back is a real imperative and heart felt
dynamic. Possibly in the enclosed world of prison populated by what
ordinary society considers outlaws and law breakers and guarded over by
individuals often prepared to brutalise, maim and occasionally murder
in the interests of absolute control, “normal” values of behaviour and
morality become inverted and corrupted; or maybe in conditions of
extreme repression, struggle and survival, what originally put a person
in jail matters nothing compared to the infinitely more important need
to stick together and collectively resist a system that treats them all
as something not fully human and undeserving of basic human rights.
Inevitably,
there is conflict and division amongst prisoners that is often fostered
by the guards for the purpose of exerting greater control, and some
prisoners enter into a complicity with their jailers which creates a
diffused suspicion hindering trust and solidarity, but during moments
of collective and open rebellion the most natural and powerful tendency
amongst prisoners is to band together and develop a new relationship,
whoever and whatever they may have been during their moments of freedom.
Political
activists on the outside who feel dubious about showing support for
prisoners because of their original crime should maybe consider this:
when prisoners revolt and fight back they are subjected to the cruelest
and most vicious repression because isolated and stigmatised by the
state and deionised by the media, conditioned and manipulated “public
opinion” largely endorses the behaviour of the prison system when it
brutalises prisoners back into line. Refusing to recognize and support
the struggle of prisoners purely because of their pre-prison lives is
tantamount to taking the side of the system against them and suggesting
they get all they deserve; it also suggests ingrained middle class
prejudice and fear of working class folk devils and tacit recognition
of the legitimacy of the prison system.
That
some prisoners, no matter how brutalised and brutalising they might
have been before their imprisonment are radically changed as people by
the experience of prison and sometimes embrace revolutionary politics
to their very core is undoubtedly true. Yet to deny such prisoners any
recognition and support when they politically fight back is also to
deny the possibility of profound change in such people as a result of
struggle. In fact, prison can and often is a crucible for radical
change and a deep politicisation of some prisoners, and as in all areas
and places of extreme oppression and resistance prisons by their very
nature do produce revolutionaries and individuals who single-mindedly
fight back. In the U.S. radical black groups, like the Black Panthers
and Symbionese Liberation Army, were actively and theoretically guided
by prisoners and ex-prisoners; George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap
Brown, Malcolm X etc., were all radicalised in prison following
conviction for crimes such as robbery, rape, drug dealing, pimping and
serious violence.
It
is easy for those who have never experienced extreme poverty and
discrimination, never experienced imprisonment and the inhuman
brutalisation that takes place there, to be moral purists about the
behaviour of people that have – it's a middle class inclination and
attitude based on ignorance, arrogance and a distaste of the poor, and
it pervades the characters of some individuals who claim to retain not
a trace of their middle class conditioning, like some “anarchists”.
Obviously
prison isn't full of nice people and there are individuals on both
sides of the divide in jail, both guards and prisoners, who are so
seriously de-humanised by the system. It's difficult to imagine them
living safely amongst ordinary people in the community; although
whether prison as an institution, the chief cause of their
de-humanisation, should exist to constrain them is another issue. The
issue here is that by its very context and the nature of the
environment struggles that take place in prison will be represented,
instigated and organised by people originally sent to jail for often
the most destructive and violent forms of behaviour, that's what
initially put them there and it's what the state uses to justify its
brutalisation of them for ever afterwards. The organisers and leaders
of most major uprisings in the U.K. during the 1960s, 70s and 80s were
all people that the state and media described as “psychopaths”,
“terrorists”, “gangsters” and “murders”, individuals that some strictly
principled anarchists would no doubt deem unworthy of any expression of
support and solidarity.
In
prison, as in all places where repression is extremely sharp edged and
survival hard, struggle is not an abstract concept or idea, it is a
basic necessity of existence and an all important imperative of
surviving with dignity and integrity, and it informs one's instincts
about, above and beyond everything else, who the true enemy is.
Real
prisoner support, if it means anything, is about expressing the same
instinct and supporting all those on the inside who are fighting the
common enemy
Solidarity Without Prejudice
A prison dispatch from Jeff "Free" Luers
A Prison Visit
Two short letters from Jerome White-Bey
