1. Introduction

1Since the 1960s, hundreds of prison narratives in the US were published by “civil-rights workers, anti-war activists, and revolutionaries imprisoned for political crimes” (Franklin 51). This emerging body of writing created a space for African-Americans, who represented the largest group of inmates at the time, to play a significant role in shaping this genre, thus remodeling contemporary American prison literature by creating a sub-genre of its own, specifically dedicated to the African-American political carceral experience. Defining it has not yet received significant literary, critical or theoretical attention in the US. However, a primary review of existing literature shows that African-American political prison literature distinguishes itself from White prison literature as “it cannot be lumped in some timeless category of ‘prison literature’” (Franklin 52). Instead, it has to be considered as an independent sub-genre with its merits, precepts, narrative characteristics and techniques, and its own themes. Race, morality, justice and authorship figure among the most inherently discussed themes in these writings, especially ones pertaining to the 1960s and 1970s.

2But the issue of generic definition, and maybe theorization, remains unresolved despite its complex significance, especially with this particular type of life writing as it is not only subjective but also laden with traumatic memories. As Hayden White stipulates,

[a]n interest in theory arises when established disciplines are forced to confront phenomena that do not conform to the generic categories ordinarily used to identify and classify matters with which they usually deal. A case in point is the kind of witness literature generated by those experiences of ‘extreme situations’ peculiar to our time. (114)

3This type of literature, also known as literature of fact, requires psychoanalytical and even anthropological techniques to be understood, according to White. In fact, Philippe Lejeune believes that defining the genre of autobiographical writing “seems to pose a kind of insoluble problem, a sort of vicious circle: impossible to study the object before having defined it, impossible to define it before having studied it” (121). Yet Lejeune finds the answer to this chicken and egg situation by suggesting that “[i]t matters little how we get into the vicious circle. It’s all part of the same merry-go-round” (112). It is therefore legitimate for any scholar with interest in this genre to choose where to start. The present study, for reasons that will be outlined at a later stage, chooses to generically situate African-American political prison writing within the genre of Political Prison Literature. This decision is influenced by a scholarly debate on whether to essentially call these narratives “Literature.” As argued by Claire Westall, “the term prison writing is specifically useful for drawing attention to both the end product—the text created—and the process of creation, the act of writing itself” (7). This denomination confers a human character to this type of writing and to writers who were dehumanized by imprisonment. In fact, the rise of Resistance Literature and the aesthetic and literary development of this genre helped “trace the shifting role of narratives of incarceration within debates of human rights, activism and the academy, including their place within literary studies” (Westall 9). Attributing the term “Literature” to political prison writing not only solidifies its political agency but also situates it in its rightful genre, Political Prison Literature, thus fighting all forms of academic and historical silencing. Positioning political prison narratives within a generically defined body of literature and enabling their theoretical framing will also contribute to lending credibility to prison memoirs as valid primary sources worthy of study.

4As stipulated by Angela Davis, “the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offence, not for a political act. Often the so-called crime does not even have a nominal existence” (“Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation” 66). Regimes that are politically contested by activists resort to a sort of framing and silencing of these voices in a context that usually uses the media to support this framing and vilify the activists. According to Devah Pager, superfluous media coverage of crimes in which Black individuals are involved has contributed to the creation of a negative portrayal of Blacks and even to minimizing their chances of finding employment. Prison, being an institution of dehumanization and social death, questions the narratives of political prisoners who expose carceral practices and prison conditions and, at times, real causes behind arbitrary and framed incarceration. Therefore, it is the duty of intellectuals and academics to unravel these dynamics and restore credibility to political prison writers and bestow their narratives with academic value. In this respect, Sarah Colvin posits in “The Credibility of Elves? Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing” that “[t]he collective of intellectuals engaged in prison writing studies must similarly ask: ‘can the incarcerated speak’—and, if so, who is listening?” (23). This multi-layered question echoes Lejeune’s appeal to activate the role of the reader of autobiographies. Yet with this genre in particular, “the reader is never simply free to read, because the social milieu in which communication takes place modifies not only what a person dares to read but what she thinks she chooses to read” (Colvin 22, emphasis in the original). It is, therefore, essential to acknowledge what “demands credibility and recognition as writing that is ‘worth reading’, and simultaneously ‘worth writing about’ – ergo it becomes acceptable for scholars to engage with it” (Colvin 23).

5In fact, recognizing the political agency of prison writers enables the authenticity and the relevance of the genre itself as it is in a sustained and close dialogue with the systems of justice that do not believe these writers. “Being believed”, in the words of Colvin, resists the epistemological exclusion of this type of writing; being believed means being considered as human, which ergo refers to the need of being “narratively included” (22, emphasis in the original). Therefore, the possibility of yielding an African-American prison writing paradigm that can be in interplay with a similar international body of literature is conditioned by uncovering what Doran Larson believes to be “an internal generic coherency in prison writing, a coherency that is a direct index of the conditions sanctioned or tolerated by existing systems of justice” (144). As such, African-American political prison writings figure as probably among the most revealing witness accounts about prisoner and prison conditions in the US. Panther members writing from prison, for instance, were among the first to report FBI frame-ups of their party members loudly exposing the state-imposed censorship of and opposition to Black Panther Party activism. Prison memoirs do not only historicize the US government’s (im)moral and (un)just practices in dealing with Black activism in the 1960s but also explain the essence, rise, and evolution of Black Radicalism. This article is thus an attempt at framing African-American political prison literature as a sub-genre through the lens of Angela Davis: an Autobiography (1974) aiming to unravel internal discussions of carcerality, justice, and morality in connection with Black activists. This discussion also opens the door to venues of comparison Davis’s text may have with similar non-American political prison texts. The choice of Davis’s autobiography is not random; it aims to fit within a core of Resistance Literature that not only deals with political activism and race but also interacts with global prison studies on abolitionism and prison profiteering.

2. Scholarly Debates on the Testimonial Authority and Collective Subjectivity of Prison Writers

7Larson believes that political prisoners’ texts unveil what happens within the penal system, which is why an in-depth examination of “the structural commonalities (and implicit communities) recorded in prison writing from different conditions and traditions” (152) proves necessary. The present study draws its significance from shaping and determining the genre’s authorship and readership roles. Such a body of literature, if examined using a comparative approach analyzing unjust prison conditions and practices, can enable a deeper understanding of the institutional systems of justice that society perceives as just. Only by doing so, Larson believes, can “we begin to uncloak the prison, and begin to shed light on the punishment regimes that we hold up as systems of justice” (144).

8As argued by Franklin, some common misconceptions about African-American prison literature turn around the fact that it is anti-White or that it is about individual experiences. But unlike “White” prison narratives, typically known for pushing towards self-discovery and for being acutely concerned with the carceral experience as an individual ordeal, African-American prison literature is highly imbued with history and politics and is rather about the collective experience of the Black race in its nature. Franklin makes a poignant observation in this respect stipulating that “[p]rior to the 1960’s, the autobiographical literature of white prisoners typically focused on the lone individual. The picaresque mode was dominant, with varying amounts of rascality, confession, defiance, and protest against both prison conditions and other social evils” (73). But, in fact, African-American political prison literature proves to be collective and very much imbued with racial memory, thus reflective of the Black people’s collective and ongoing struggle since slavery. In this sense, Larson upholds that “the political fluency of the ‘we’ is conditioned by a bodily response to the history—the chain letter—of physical restraint” (151). The expression “chain letter” refers to a type of correspondence sent to a group of people who, in turn, are required to send copies of it to other people or else misfortune will happen to those who interrupt the chain. Larson’s use of the expression implies a duty by political prisoners to pass on a message to their comrades in the struggle, and even to their communities outside or else the collective struggle will be hampered. Political prisoners in fact send a warning that raises awareness about the conditions of injustice and human rights abuse targeting African-Americans in prisons. They also discuss the driving forces pushing the Black community into conditions of incarceration that have been perpetuated since the beginning of the African-American existence in the American continent.

9Franklin posits that African-American “activists also bring into the prisons political ideas from the outside world, in turn helping to move the prison toward revolutionary thinking and even actual rebellion” (55). In fact, the ability of political prison literature to transcend the carceral space and play a politico-historical role is not characteristic of African-American political prison literature per se; it is the backbone of Political Prison Literature as a genre in its global context. As Larson explains, these writings are shaped by prison conditions, which remain largely the same across different contexts. In this respect, Larson notes that “[t]he prison text is both imprinted by the shape of specific conditions, and yet bears that shape in ways that link it with all other prison writing” (Larson 153). Furthermore, he highlights the fact that African-American prisoners incarcerated for non-political crimes can equally produce highly politicized narratives thanks to the self-reflection process that drives them to think more about political and collective causes driving them into the condition of imprisonment. He cites the case of Wole Soyinka, incarcerated for being a dealer and a rapist, who managed to produce a text “as politically telling as that of the political prisoner” (157). In such cases, race plays the role of the driving force towards individual as well as collective reflections about what could lead an African-American to prison confines.

10Within the framework of African-American Political Prison Literature, Franklin positions the Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) as the primary narrative that has defined the genre. The text positioned X, posthumously, as a spiritual and political leader, which has resulted in spilling more ink and stirring even more poetic self-reflections transforming prisoners’ perceptions of themselves from “criminals” to “prisoners of war” (53). Thanks to political prison writing, the term political prisoner seems to acquire a new meaning that attempts to polish the name of its bearers especially those who were framed as threats to national security, or as terrorists. As to those who had been engaged in criminal offences, their writings greatly contributed to the rise and evolution of Black Radicalism in a way explaining the pressing need to break the law. As Angela Davis explains, “[t]here is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law” (“Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation” 65). Davis cites historical cases of activists who tried to rescue slave fugitives, like Virginia fugitive Anthony Bums whose supporters invaded the courtroom during his trial in an act that ended in casualties. According to Davis, this rebellious act resulted in ending the pursuit of slave fugitives in Boston in the mid-19^th century. Regimes that fear the spiritual and ideological impact of political activists resort to framing them for crimes they did not commit in order to isolate them from the community; and once inside, they are further isolated from other prisoners out of fear of their political influence on others. Different prison riots initiated by African-American activists, such as the Attica Revolt (1971) and subsequent uprisings in American prisons, are indicative of a struggle against these prison politics and isolationist policies.

11In this context of African-American activism, Davis believes that by writing her autobiography, she also hopes to “re-evaluate the traditional definition of the ‘political prisoner’, as a result of the intensification of racism” (An Autobiography 305) considering the role that race and systemic racism are believed to play in the incarceration of Black individuals in the US. Commenting on the framing of African-American prisoners, Davis posits that

Aside from the scores of men and women in prison because of their political beliefs and activities, there were many thousands more who had been framed or had received disproportionately long sentences for the sole reason that they were Black or Brown. The book [her autobiography that is] had to provide a voice not only for the political prisoners in the strict sense of the term, but also for those who were victimized in one way or another by the racism of the police-court-prison apparatus. (An Autobiography 305-306)

12Indeed, the large number of Black prisoners in the US during the 1960s and 70s constitutes a double isolation of the Black community from the rest of the population, both outside of prison and inside of it. Yet despite this isolation, there seems to be “an act of de-isolation” (Larson 147) by political prisoners themselves invoking the “we” instead of the “I” when they write. In this oscillation between writing the individual experience and narrating the collective struggle lies a dual agency, or what Franklin calls the associative-dissociative voice through which these writers express both individual resilience/resistance/survival and invoke the common experience of the people they fight for as well as that of other inmates. Viewed from this angle, even the associative “I” is indicative of a struggle that is relevant to the “we.”

13However, as such, Larson believes that the generic boundaries of political prison literature are blurred despite the act of isolation and because these texts are “written from inside the flexed muscle of power, there can be no distinction in such a text between autobiography and testament, between reportage and witness” (151). With this conclusion, he stipulates that the self is “relocated”—in an act of transcendence—from the carceral space considering the fact that the political prisoner does not write for him/herself but writes for and about a collective experience (147). This belief echoes Franklin’s postulation that “[f]rom the point of view of the African-American experience, imprisonment is first of all of a people’s freedom” (57, emphasis in the original).

As noted by several Arab scholars studying the prison text—most notably Tunisian critic Mohamed Toumi—Political Prison Literature receives little attention, not only due to debates about its essence as a genre, but also to aesthetics differentiating it from literary works and even from autobiographical texts concerned with the individual experience. Whether it should fit within the scope of Resistance Literature or under what is known as Desistance Literature—which uses the act of writing to deter crime and prevent recidivism—this highly politicized body of literature is worth studying in depth. It appears that the American literary scene is replete with narratives from both sub-genres where African-American prison narratives place themselves more under the label of resistance while “White” prison narratives are rather placed within a desistance framework. Generic definitions at this level are highly important in categorizing the narrative under study in this research. In African-American writings of the 1960s, “the central theme is America, prison house of the Black nation” or, more explicitly put, they are about “a people created within the United States” (Franklin 60). In the case of African-Americans, these autobiographical narratives are capable of telling a more powerful story, that of colonialism. They become a “testament that locates the biography not as ‘prison autobiography,’ but as biographical evidence of the existence of a colonial state—a state materially manifest in the prison itself” (Larson 156). Therefore, political prisoners’ historical duty lies in historicizing prison politics and making connections between current prison practices and ancient racial ones in an attempt at activating racial memory and raising awareness about silenced state carceral policies.

3. Political Activism and Racial Memory at Play

15The following examines the manifestation of these particular themes in their entanglement with justice in Angela Davis’s autobiography which I consider one of the pillars of African-American political prison literature not only written by women, but also by African-American political activists who experienced jail. The counter-discourse it carries and, more importantly, the essence and nature of Davis’s alliance with the Black Panther Party contribute significantly to shaping the sub-genre. “I am glad that I wrote this book at age twenty-eight, because it is, I think, an important piece of historical description and analysis of the late 1960s and early 1970s,” she reports, recognizing the importance of these narratives as primary sources. This underscores the necessity of immortalizing “the history of those who struggle for the benefit of our posterity” (An Autobiography vii), Davis concludes. In writing this autobiography, she was careful not to focus too much on her personal experience in order not to undermine the history of the Black Panthers’ struggle. She therefore transcends with her text any autobiographical tendency to “individualize history” (An Autobiography viii). She says in this respect, “I did not measure the events of my own life according to their possible personal importance. Rather I attempted to utilize the autobiographical genre to evaluate my life in accordance with what I considered to be the political significance of my experiences” (An Autobiography viii). Her initial hesitation to write her autobiography sprang out of fear of downplaying the importance of the movement which initially made her known to the public and contributed to her global activism. Consequently, she conceptualizes her text as a political autobiography.

16While narrating her experience in prison, she resists the “tendency to individualize [her] predicament” (28) and transmits little to no pain while describing the ailments of what prisoners endure in jail. She cites examples of brothers and sisters who were in solitary confinement, who seldom saw the sky and drew it on the ceiling of their cells. She tells the story of those who had to sleep in their urine and excrement in the confined space of solitary cells. Franklin confirms this tendency in writing the political prison experience when he posits that “[t]he works of today’s prisoners, though predominantly autobiographical, are rarely intended as a display of individual genius” (62).

4. Historicizing the Lived Experience of Carcerality in Light of Neoliberal Systemic Repression

18Davis was accused of murder, like many Panther activists, and also of kidnapping and conspiracy. Yet she conceived of these charges as some form of victory out of faith in the morality of the people who supported her, and the cause of other political prisoners, noting: “In the heavy silence of the jail, I discovered that if I concentrated hard enough, I could hear echoes of slogans being chanted on the other side of the walls. ‘Free Angela Davis.’ ‘Free All Political Prisoners’” (An Autobiography 23). It is the support of the Black community cheering for her release outside of the prison compound that gave her this perception of triumph over the jailers and over the system that framed and isolated her. This sense of victory underpins a shift in the dynamics of power whereby the system of justice ironically places Black prisoners on a triumphant pedestal in the eyes of their supporters while they are in “shackles and chains.” Charged with involvement in a politically motivated murder case and with aiding in the escape linked to Panther leader George Jackson, Davis spent 18 months in jail and was acquitted in 1972. During her incarceration, Davis felt she was the closest to her supporters, preferring prison over exile. This is obvious in her statement: “[T]he thought of being indefinitely exiled in some other country was even more horrible than the idea of being locked up in jail. At least in jail, I would be closer to my people” (An Autobiography 12).

19During the period I spent as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, I had the opportunity to access the Angela Davis archives which she generously donated to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The scores of documents that I examined contained a large number of letters from prisoners from around the world sent to express support and share stories with her. There was even proof of several connections between the Black Panther Party in the US and a Panther branch in Algeria and a dozen supporters from Palestine. I also read her personal diary in which she described the routine of her days and the encounters she had. But despite some sense of anxiety that loomed in those diary entries, what is intriguing after examining this primary source was noting the absence of affect or personal information connected to her ordeal, which not only denotes her selfless character as an activist but also echoes what she announces in its preface when she says

Such a book might serve a very important and practical purpose. There was the possibility that, having read it, more people would understand why so many of us have no alternative but to offer our lives—our bodies, our knowledge, our will—to the cause of our oppressed people. In this period when the covers camouflaging the corruption and racism of the highest political offices are rapidly falling away, when the bankruptcy of the global system of capitalism is becoming apparent, there was the possibility that more people—Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and white—might be inspired to join our growing community of struggle. Only if this happens will I consider this project to have been worthwhile. (An Autobiography xvi)

20Even during stark moments of sadness upon the loss of George Jackson, the man she loved and idolized as the icon of Panther activism, Davis preferred to re-channel her grief into “rage.” She writes in this respect

George was dead, and the deeply personal pain I felt would have strangled me had I not turned it into a proper and properly placed rage. I could not dwell on my own loss. Any individual gnashing of teeth would bring me to my knees. Personal sadness in that still gray cell under the hateful eyes of my jailers might break the cords of will that held me together. George’s death would be like a lodestone, a disc of steel deep inside me, magnetically drawing toward it the elements I needed to stay strong and fight all the harder. It would refine my hatred of jailers, position my contempt for the penal system, and cement my bonds with other prisoners. It would give me the courage and energy I needed for a sustained war against the malevolent racism that had killed him. He was gone, but I was here. His dreams are mine now. (An Autobiography 319)

21Channeling grief towards rage is very common in political prisoners’ memoirs. It seems to be the way to strengthen one’s will to resist and to continue the fight. Sentiments of this sort denote a strong sense of resilience and ought to be examined as the burgeoning seeds of Black Radicalism, militant inmate rebellions, abolitionist ideology, and anti-carceral, anti-racial and anti-capitalist activism. In this respect, Orisanmi Burton explains that “For decades, combatant-theorists and politically engaged academics have conceptualized political Blackness as a mode of consciousness emerging from a collective historical experience of oppression and struggle” (4). In his book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt (2023), Burton resorts to a “counter-insurgent historiography” (8) based on archival sources ranging from Black prison activists’ reports and correspondence, to official prison management manuals and Attica survivors’ testimonies. He believes that “listening to the movement elders and taking what they had to say seriously” (9) led him to compare prison intellectuals and instigators of the various prison uprisings to the tip of a spear that ignited a sort of neo-slavery activism that burst into flames inside the American prisons of the 1970s. Burton thus consolidates the idea that political incarceration is inducive to carceral rebellion against a “state’s intensified campaign to criminalize Black resistance” (13).

22Similarly, prison, to Davis, brought her closer to what she perceived to be a higher mission: prison activism. She felt the jailers’ attempt to isolate her first when they assigned her to a mental ward. This process of isolation echoes Burton’s realization that threatening elements were purposefully removed from circulation by prison authorities as were others who were eliminated by the state through “political frame-ups and excessive bail” (Burton 13). Davis qualifies this as an incapacitating mission practiced by prison officials who put women in that ward on Thorazine (a tranquilizer) the whole time, making them stare at the ceiling with empty eyes. This sight disturbed her who “[a]fter a few hours of watching them gaze silently into space, … felt as though [she] had been thrown into a nightmare” (An Autobiography 32). She reflects on this experience saying, “to me, jail was jail—there were no degrees of better or worse. And nothing could detract from the thought that they wanted to isolate me because they feared the impact the mere presence of a political prisoner would have on the other women” (An Autobiography 20). The isolationist practices described by Davis in her autobiography are many, some of which were later, as a result of Black activist pressure, dismantled by the prison administration, namely the isolation units. Yet she still thinks that “inhumanity seethed from all cracks and crevices of that place” (41). After the famous prison uprisings that took place in New York City Jail (1970) and Attica (1971), the Department of Corrections proceeded to “quarantining resistance and radicalism in order to prevent their large-scale diffusion” (42). As such, prison writing not only de-isolates the political prisoner but also connects the prisoner’s predicament to a larger collective cause that mobilizes and un-silences outside support, thus historicizing systemic prison practices targeting African-Americans.

23Davis was put in solitary, supposedly for her own protection from other prisoners who would fear her Communist ideas; but “It was all a lie,” she notes (61). A special log called “Angela Davis Daily Activities” was kept and filled every hour of every day to capture her every move. As described by Burton, “Black people are a ‘captive nation’; the physically imprisoned had therefore been captured ‘doubly so’” (1). Feeling her predicament doubled as she was in a “prison within a prison” (46), Davis went on hunger strike, spurring a wave of hunger strikes by other women detainees in her support. She was thus determined, more than ever, not to surrender to the mental pressure her isolation was causing, reflecting: “I would not let them conquer me. I transformed my frustration into raging energy for the fight” (46) once again. Even when the prison administration relaxed her solitary confinement conditions, she felt “a profound sadness” because of what had been provided to her had not been provided to other inmates elsewhere. Her thoughts were always with “the specters of all those sisters and brothers whose lives were eroding in other jails. Ruchell, Fleeta, John, Luis, Johnnie Spain, David Johnson, Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Earl Gibson, Larry Justice, Lee Otis Johnson, Martin Sostre, Marie Hill, the Attica Brothers” (327). Naming all these individuals in her autobiographical text contributes to preserving their struggle and resisting the system’s attempts at erasing them, which is a standard practice in political prison writing. In authoritarian regimes that do not allow political prisoners to even possess or use pen and paper, other mnemonic practices exist such as memorization and storytelling. Once out, the ex-prisoner would be able to write names of inmates and cite facts thanks to retrieved memories.

24While exposing her resilience mechanisms, Davis also reflects on other forms of escapism that exist in prison. Such is the case of what she labels as “The Gay Life” which, according to her, “provided an easy and attractive channel for escape” (55). Another phenomenon she noticed was the personal bonds created between inmates who organized themselves in family systems that in her words “humanized the environment and allowed an identification with others within a familiar framework” (53). Davis also reports that the support she got from inside the prison and out constantly helped her resist the matrons’ mental games, such as when she was provided with a very tight uniform, to name but one example. She endured with the firm belief that her spirit would not be broken despite the psychological challenges of solitary confinement in the two prisons she was sent to. Davis’s fight for justice was not just a fight in the court of law. She also had to fight, along with her lawyers, to ease her second solitary confinement conditions and to allow her motion to represent herself as co-counsel in her case, which she was granted after much reluctance from the judge.

I was accustomed to being handcuffed with my arms behind me—it had become a part of the routine. When the three other women prisoners were brought out into the corridor … the manner in which we were handcuffed revealed the blatant racism of the matrons. There was a Black woman and a Chicana woman. They were cuffed to each other, the right arm of one locked to the left arm of the other. The one remaining prisoner was a white woman. The matrons had done nothing to restrain her movements. So, there were we, me with both arms manacled behind me, the Black woman chained to the Chicana woman, and the white woman with both hands free. (298)

26Against such carceral practices, and in the midst of her fight to plead not guilty, Davis reminisces about the experience of slavery and its chains, which activates racial memory. As such, African-American prison organizing and writing fight not only for political justice but for racial and economic justice as well. Arthur Harrison, who served time in Attica reflects on the conditions of the prison saying “It reminded me of the things I used to hear about on plantations in slavery” (Dave Davis). In fact, political prison literature written by African-Americans intersects with the vast literature written about incarceration in the US since the 1970s, a period in which incarceration rates skyrocketed due to social and political instability in the US, reaching a peak in 2009 with an increasing prison population seven times bigger (World Prison Brief).

28As such, the state, through prisoncrats, creates this “system of disappearance” to also conceal the social dilemmas that it should address (Story 168). With one of the most pressing crises being political dissent in the 1970s, prisons last because of what Brett Story calls reification, a process whereby prisons ossify repressive practices and normalize them until total control and dehumanization become facts. According to Story, “the prison as a building mystifies the underlying social formations, those gendered, racialized, capitalist relations, that actually produce and reproduce the carceral state in our lives” (168). They do so through the system of disappearance they create, and through other methods such as extractive capitalism, framing, and denial. “They mask their own contingency, concealing their emergence out of particular struggles, debates, and crises that are themselves rooted in (relatively recent) historical transformations” (Story 168). Therefore, to resist reification, the embodiment of power dynamics is possibly understood through prison narratives as Story suggests looking everywhere “but the actual penitentiary” (Story 170) for a possible deconstruction of the concept of prison. Doing so will enable the understanding of abolitionism, anti-carceral activism and Black Radicalism. Story points at zoning rules that favor White areas over Black ones and at the act of camouflaging prison facilities which are sometimes removed from Google Maps or simply designed to look similar to warehouses or other urban compounds (Story 167). In order to support this imposed erasure, the system actually “shapes the narratives, even the discursive identities, of imprisoned people” (Rolston 123) but “prison found its way into … autobiography” (Rolston 125) anyway. This interplay between the captor and the captive is hence articulated in the latter’s insurgency through either radicalized prison movements or through prison writing as in the case of Geroge Jackson who inspired the Attica uprising and motivated what became known as the Age of Jackson.

5. Conclusion

29In sum, one cannot help but notice a carceral continuum between a colonial past and a post-colonial present in the way the Prison-Industrial Complex—a term coined in the 1990s by social historian Mike Davis—in the US justice system functions using colonial tools of repression. Incarceration is indeed a governance mechanism but is also one that was used against specific “racialized” individuals. The literature produced by African-American political activists of the 1960s serves as a counter narrative to the official discourse produced at the time to showcase the way the US government tried to dismantle politico-social movements and to shed light on today’s neoliberalism’s use of private prisons. This practice exists in authoritarian regimes through the use of secret prisons. Today’s growing debate about abolishing prison in the US is a result of this development of an aspect of the justice system from a colonial exploitative enterprise to a neocolonial repressive one.

30To further emphasize the historiographical and scholarly relevance of political prison writing in general, it is worth noting that one of its relevant implications is to discuss aspects of carcerality with respect to socio-political dilemmas. In 2003, Angela Davis wrote one of today’s most telling pieces about the relevance of prisons in the US justice system, Are Prisons Obsolete?, in which she underlines the profiteering aspect of the Prison-Industrial Complex targeting mostly what she describes as “racialized” populations. She also calls for a rethinking of the justice system in the US and was one of the pioneers in popularizing the complex relationship between the state, capital and the justice system that systematically uses incarceration as a way to “deal with” social issues. This evolution of Black activism emerged from the body of literature that was produced by African-American activists after jail time. In this book, Davis believes that anti-racist movements remain incomplete as they are not inclusive of what she describes as “prison politics” (Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 84). She also draws connections between slave struggle and Black activism of the 1970s in her text “Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation” explaining the essence of radicalization, breaking the law and fighting oppression. In this piece, Davis exposes frame-ups and unnecessary murders of Black activists, such as Joe Hill (from the Industrial Workers of the World), pointing that these people die for violating “the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism” (66). Davis thus connects what she calls a “racist legal apparatus” to “reformist and revolutionary” (66) activists saying that if the latter are captured, they become political prisoners in the collective memory despite their label as criminal in state records.

31Later publications on the matter, such as Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), address issues related to the largest carceral state in the US, California. Gilmore sheds further light on prison politics that lead to the construction of more and more prison facilities utilizing available idle-land and employing low-cost labor since the 1980s. In this book, she links criminalization of political activists to the change and growth of prison politics in the state of California and points at the legislative and politicized change therein moving from rehabilitation and reform towards a politics of punishment. Gilmore’s book and many other recent reads show more awareness of prison politics which will contribute, as Davis suggests, to a more comprehensive anti-racism campaigning, organizing and scholarship.