I’m working on a project that will be happening this fall. I’ll share more about it later. In the meantime, I am reading A LOT of the writing by black political prisoners from the 1920s through 1970s.

Anyway, John Clutchette who was one of the Soledad Brothers, wrote a letter that was excerpted in the book “If They Come In the Morning.” I wanted to highlight his thoughts about the need to abolish prisons because it illustrates the theorizing and analysis that prisoners offered in the late 60’s-early 70’s in particular.

Today’s prison system should be abolished because it is a system predesigned and constructed to warehouse the people of undeveloped and lower economical communities. Under the existing social order men and women are sent to prison for labor (free labor) and further economical gain (money) by the state. Where else can you get a full day’s work for two to sixteen cents an hour, and these hours become an indeterminate period of years. This is slave labor in 20th-century America. Repeat! Men and women are sent to prison for free labor, not for what contributions they might make to their communities, under the guise of rehabilitation. Ninety-eight per cent of (all) people held in U.S. concentration camps are people of oppression, we are the people who come from the under class of the system, we are the people castigated and barred from the productive arenas of social employment, decent housing, correct education, correct medical care, etc., etc., a war of survival… Bear with me, I don’t intend to sound bitter, but only to relate the truth; we must come to know the truth, we are the people left to the crumbs of the system… we are the people who lay prey to the criminal elements of the system. The choice — survive or perish! The first always being to survive. It is a fact that man is a product of his environment; that the character and state of mind of a people, a race, a nation, the world, depends essentially and decisively on being able to control their economic environment in relation to controlling the fruits of their labor (production) in essence this is the determining factor of one’s social, political and economical power. Again ninety-eight per cent of all the people in concentration camps are members of the oppressed class. You won’t find members of the ruling-clique in places like this, but you will find their victims.

[…]

Building more and better prisons is not the solution — build a thousand prisons, arrest and lock up tens of thousands of people; all will be to no avail. This will not arrest poverty, oppression and the other ills of this unjust social order. But the people, working in united effort, can eliminate these conditions by removing the source that produces them. We need people who will stand up and speak out when it is a matter of right or wrong, of justice or injustice, of struggling or not struggling to help correct and remove conditions affecting the people, all I ask is that the people support us, I will break my back in helping to bring peace and justice upon the face of the earth.