“Don’t be shocked when I say that I was in prison. You’re still in prison. That’s what America means: prison.” – Malcolm X

Two books had a profound impact on my political consciousness. One of those books was “the Autobiography of Malcolm X.” It was sitting on my dad’s shelf when I picked it up for the first time at 11 or 12 years old. I was never the same. I just finished Manning Marable’s new book about Malcolm titled “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.” I read the book with the eyes of a grown woman instead of the eyes of a pre-teen. I am even more admiring of Malcolm now because I am more comfortable with complexity and nuance. I know that my touchstones are not perfect; that they are human and therefore fallible.

I was particularly interested in the chapter of Marable’s brilliant biography that focuses on Malcolm’s incarceration experience. One of my writing projects is focused on how prison has been perceived in the black American imagination. As part of that, I am immersed in prisoner writing of the 60s and 70s. I want to encourage anyone who is interested in our current mass incarceration epidemic to go back and read the work of American prisoners of that period. You will be in for a major education.

Many incarcerated people of that era were connected to the Black Arts Movement. Malcolm X was an inspiration for many of the artists and prisoners of that era. They made the case in their writing as Malcolm had that prisons and the police were tools to oppress and dominate poor people and people of color. Malcolm’s radical critique of the criminal legal system was itself inspired by Marx and Gramsci. Later other participants in the Black Arts Movement would also be inspired by Althusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”.

Writing in 1970, Zayd Shakur, the deputy minister of information for the New York State chapter of the Black Panther Party, echoes Malcolm’s contention that “America means: prison” as he makes the case that life in prison is an extension of life in our communities:

Prisons are really an extension of our communities. We have people who are forced at gunpoint to live behind concrete and steel. Others of us, in what we ordinarily think of as the community, live at gunpoint again in almost the same conditions. The penitentiaries, as they call them, and the communities are plagued with the same thing: dope, disease, police brutality, murder, and rats running over the places that you dwell in. We recognize that most of the militant-dissatisfied youth are off in the penitentiaries. Eighty percent of the prison population is black, brown, and yellow people. You look around and say, “what happened to my man. I haven’t seen him for a long time,” then you get busted, go to jail, and there he is. Prisons are an extension of the repression. In these penitentiaries are the Malcolms, Cleavers, Huey P. Newtons, Bobby Seales and all other political prisoners. Now the inmates are moving forth to harness their own destinies. They’re not relying on lying, demagogic politicians to redress their grievances. Of course, the courts didn’t redress their grievances in the first place, so there’s no sense in relying on them either. There’s very little difference between the penitentiaries in California and those in New York, New Orleans, Alabama, or Chicago. It’s the same system — America is the prison. All of America is a prison where the people are being held captive by the real arch criminals.”

I came across an interesting interview by the Liberated Guardian (L.G.) of two prisoners who had recently been released from Attica in March 1972. There were many interesting and important insights that the former Attica prisoners shared but I wanted to highlight one particular section of the interview. A former prisoner identified as Joe responds to the following question posed by the L.G.: “Do you think it’s true what George Jackson says, that the best of our kind are in the San Quentins and the Folsoms?”

The conditions produce revolutions. They don’t just happen. You can take Rap Brown. You can take him out of the ghetto, he can talk all the revolutionary bullshit he wants to, but nobody’s going to riot cause the people got their basic needs met. But he says that same thing in the ghetto and the people will react cause he is serving their needs now: showing them who’s the enemy and how they can go about meeting their basic needs. So it’s the conditions that produce the men that are leaders of the society or push the society to a higher stage of development. The George Jacksons, the Malcolm Xs, the Stokely Carmichaels, even myself. We are all products of society that we live in. And once you become aware of certain things, we say now wow, now you dig society, you got to go forth and change your conditions. Once you become hip to what’s going on, you’re going to want to change it.

Anyone who has read any part of Karl Marx will recognize the underpinnings of Marxist theory in this response. What I find particularly interesting about both of these passages is that both suggest that there is no real difference between political and nonpolitical prisoners. They also illustrate quite clearly the type of intellectual work that was happening in the late 60s and early 70s inside and outside of prisons. They suggest what we miss when we isolate prisoners from the broader society.

At the same time that conservatives were shifting the criminal legal system towards a “law and order” focus, the culture of American prisons was becoming more radical. This is a seemingly contradictory phenomenon of the 60s and 70s. One has to ask whether the increasing political and cultural engagement of American prisoners of the 1970s can be reinvigorated in the 21st century. It seems that we need a revival of prison revolutionaries in order to turn the current tide of hyper-incarceration. We should probably heed Louis Farrakhan’s words once again echoing Malcolm’s: “All of us are in prison. Those locked up are merely in solitary confinement.” Put another way, the liberation of those of us on the “outside” is distinctly linked to the liberation of those behind bars.

For more background on the nexus of arts and politics in prison, read Lee Bernstein’s book “America Is the Prison” which I wrote about several months ago.