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August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
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Stan Goff
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Wolfowitz the Censor
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July
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August
2, 2003
The
Meaning of George Jackson
One
Big Prison Yard
By RON JACOBS
"Sometimes it seems that this whole
world
is one big prison yard,
Some of us are prisoners
And some of us are guards.
Ballad of George Jackson,
by Bob Dylan
George Jackson was originally convicted of a $70
gas station heist in his late teens and sentenced to an indeterminate
sentence of one year to life. Because of his refusal to bend
down and crawl on his knees, so to speak, he never again left
the California prison system and was murdered by guards in the
yard at San Quentin on August 21, 1971. By that time, George
was a member of the Black Panther Party and a revolutionary hero
to millions around the world. His book Soledad Brother is still
in publication and is remarkable not only for its insights into
Jackson's life and thoughts but also for the emotionally charged
writing it contains.
A year before his murder, his brother
Jonathan was involved in an attempt to help free George and two
other men known as the Soledad Brothers. On August 7, 1970,
Jonathan Jackson entered the Marin County Courthouse armed with
a submachine gun. He hoped to force the release of the Soledad
Brothers. These were three men -- his brother George, Fleeta
Drumgo, and John Clutchette -- who were charged with the murder
of two guards at Soledad Prison after a black prisoner who was
also a Muslim was killed by guards. Jonathan gave guns to the
three prisoners who were present in the court--John McClain,
William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee, a jailhouse lawyer who
was testifying at the trial of fellow prisoner McClain, whose
trial Jonathan interrupted. The three then took the judge, prosecutor
and three jurors hostage.
They left the courthouse and placed the
hostages in a county van. Before the armed men and their hostages
left the courthouse, the Marin County sheriff ordered his men
not to shoot. Despite this order, the van was hit by a hail of
gunfire from San Quentin prison guards and other law enforcement
personnel immediately after it left the court building's garage.
Jackson, Judge Haley, McClain and Christmas were all killed.
Magee remains in prison to this day, the sole survivor of this
episode in US history.
Today, young black men are incarcerated
at a greater rate than twenty years ago when Jackson died. In
fact, the US prison system holds a higher percentage of its black
population in jail than apartheid South Africa did during its
heyday. According to a Justice Department report released on
July 28, 2003, that over 10 per cent of black men between the
ages of 20 and 39 were incarcerated in 2002. This figure contrasts
with 1.2 per cent of non-Latino white males and 2.4 per cent
of the Latino male population. Even more revealing are these
numbers: the 586,700 black men in prison outnumber both the 436,800
white males and 235,000 Hispanic males. Furthermore, many of
our country's inner city areas where many of these young people
live in are under what amounts to a state of siege. Using the
excuse of a war on drugs, heavily armed police can arrest virtually
anyone they wish and, if they deem it necessary, the police do
not hesitate to kill. After all, if they do kill a suspect, chances
are they will walk no matter what kind of outcry there is from
the public.
Drugs, which when consumed by the current
president in his younger days were but youthful indiscretions,
continue to be the primary reason people are in custody. One
would think that with the percentage of people in the seats of
power today who tried marijuana in their youth, there would be
a greater tolerance for those people who smoke it today. Yet,
when today's youth consume marijuana in a world much bleaker
than that of twenty years ago, calls go out to jail them. In
fact, in today's climate, even those who use pot for medical
reasons face the possibility of prison. According to the aforementioned
Justice Department report, over half of the current federal prisoners
are in prison on drug offenses. This is primarily due to sentencing
guidelines that require mandatory minimums on sentences and an
accompanying trend among state and county prosecutors to hand
many drug cases over to federal prosecutors, usually under pressure
from the feds. Indeed, a friend of mine just recently finished
serving a ten-year sentence for LSD possession with intent to
distribute (1st offense) because she was tried in federal court
instead of by the state of California. If similar cases are any
indication, she would probably have received some kind of supervised
probation if she hadn't been turned over to the Feds after refusing
to turn in her friends. It's not that drugs are not a problem,
mind you, but the greater problem is a government and society
whose solution to such problems is to take actions that would
be illegal if they were committed by a civilian.
It was George Jackson's belief that prisons
are but the latest form of slavery. The scenario is pretty much
the same: primarily poor people of color live in inhuman conditions
providing forced labor for the state and private industry. The
Nazis did the same thing in their prison camps, which is why
Jackson often finished his letters to friends and family with
the farewell, "From Dachau, with love." It is not enough
for us on the outside to merely protest the imprisonment of prisoners
in other countries, we must also examine the role we play in
maintaining the so-called justice system at home.
Ron Jacobs
is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground.
He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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