Reviews

Dan Berger

On prison organizing

Orisanmi Burton. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. University of California Press, 2023.

Jocelyn Simonson. Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. The New Press, 2023.

In 1969, a writer who styled his name as raúlrsalinas wrote an ode to the places he called home and an indictment of the forces that oppressed him. “You live on, captive, in the lonely / cellblocks of my mind,” runs the opening stanza of “A Trip Through the Mind Jail,” surveying the neighborhoods of Salinas’s youth. By the end, he visits California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and “all / Chicano neighborhoods that now exist and once / existed; somewhere . . . . . , someone remembers . . . . .” More than fifty years on, the poem has been widely anthologized as a singular expression of Chicanismo across the American Southwest.

“A Trip Through the Mind Jail” first appeared in the inaugural issue of Aztlán de Leavenworth, a Chicano newspaper produced ata federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, where Salinas was incarcerated on a felony drug charge. Prison was where Salinas became a poet. It was also where he became a revolutionary, thanks in part to the people he met at Leavenworth, including Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar Collazo and Rafael Cancel Miranda, whose respective attacks on President Truman in 1950 and inside the US Capitol in 1954 had called attention to the US colonization of Puerto Rico. “We immersed ourselves in the Puerto Rican history and united our struggles,” Salinas later said of the Chicano prisoners at Leavenworth. But this organizing was more than an expression of pan-Latinx unity: “Through that connection and the Black Muslims that were coming in, and the Republic of New Africa, and the Black Liberation Army people, we began to talk.”

They did more than talk. On September 16, 1971, militants incarcerated at Leavenworth went on strike to protest their working conditions in the prison’s brush, furniture, and clothing factories. There was more to the strike than that: rebels were also protesting the murders of imprisoned comrades, including Black Panther Field Marshal George Jackson in San Quentin on August 21 and the twenty-nine prisoners killed by state troopers at Attica Correctional Facility on September 13, where an uprising had been violently suppressed. For days afterward, hundreds of surviving dissidents at Attica were tortured by New York State Police and prison guards. The Leavenworth rebels joined a wave of incarcerated militants around the country who were rising up in revolt. 

Participants in these protests, including rebels from Leavenworth, would soon become the inaugural cohort of a new experiment in human caging: the control unit, a special wing of the prison that combined isolation with a kind of psychological warfare officials called “behavior modification.” In 1972, prison officials from across the US transferred some of their most rebellious and troublesome charges to a single federal prison in Marion, Illinois. Shortly after their arrival, these charges formed the Political Prisoners Liberation Front. “The convicts of this institution of Marion prison have in the past experienced many difficulties which were resolved by a collective effort,” the group wrote in a July 1972 statement announcing a strike after the beating of a Chicano prisoner. “And this collectivism is being called upon for still another serious problem confronting us today that must be resolved by whatever means necessary.” Yet the control unit would require new forms of resistance. To reorganize the men’s minds, the “behavior modification” program at Marion imposed prolonged isolation (culminating in a 23/7 lockdown), coerced psychotropic drugging, and brute force. Edgar Schein, the MIT psychologist who helped create the unit, drew on the brainwashing techniques used by China and North Korea against US prisoners of war in the early 1950s. As chronicled by the scholar Alan Eladio Gómez, these practices included isolation, “spying on prisoners and reporting back private material, tricking men into writing statements then shown to other inmates, exploiting informers and opportunists, [and] the disorganization of all group standards among prisoners.” Prisons, Schein and his colleagues recognized, were war zones: they were in the business not of “rehabilitation” but of vanquishing enemies. As Marion’s warden declared, “the purpose of the . . . Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large.”