Prisons as diasporic sites

Liberatory voices from the diaspora of confinement

by Mechthild Nagel, SUNY Cortland, nagelm@cortland.edu

Dedicated to Tiyo Attalah Salah-El

A wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down.

-Assata Shakur

Neo-slave existence in the penal colony

In 2000, a film about Angola (The Farm) was shown on South African TV. South Africans were surprised to hear that the naming of this notorious prison in Louisiana had to do with the country of origin of those Africans brought to Louisiana to work on this plantation site.[1] After “emancipation” of the slaves in 1865, Angola plantation was swiftly transformed into a prison. We (in the U.S.) may be surprised to learn that a plantation was refurnished into a prison where prisoners are condemned to hard labor. After all, slaves were supposed to be freed, first through President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and then through the abolition amendment (13^th) to the U.S. Constitution. One may ponder about the meaning of emancipation with Mumia Abu-Jamal (2000), who echoes the famous words of Frederick Douglass by asking “What, to a Prisoner, is the Fourth of July?”

In their clarion calls for emancipation and demands for reparations Black political prisoners open a dimension in diaspora studies that could benefit from investigating the effects of the prison industrial complex, especially in the heart of the Empire of the 21^st Century. I argue that prisons in the U.S. are diasporic sites for Black men and women. In this article, I will use the trope of Bantustan to underscore the racist practices, which engulf prisoners and their families and communities. The forced resettlement of the criminalized Black youth and adults is reminiscent to the forced relocation of South Africans to Bantustans during white minority rule. I wish to invoke “diaspora” to describe the carceral phenomenon, rather than the more common metaphor “ghetto” to signal that despite the repression—and perhaps, because of the repression—faced by millions of people in this country through the mechanisms of law and criminal justice, Black prisoners are carving out a cultural identification, often with the African continent.[2] And it is precisely this double diasporic moment—of Africans living in the diaspora and of being held captive throughout prisons far away from loved ones and their communities—that compels Black prisoners to imagine a bond with ancestral homelands, the origin of their “scattered” existence. It is in prisons, i.e. being in a carceral diaspora within a wider (geographically dislocated) diaspora, that Black people relive the terror of the middle passage, the experience of being ripped away from home and stranded on a “slaveship that doesn’t move” (Shaka N’Zinga, 2000). One of the key expressions of diaspora culture in US prisons is resistance literature by captive political and politicized writers, who write on slavery, reparations, visions of a New African republic and importantly, of abolishing the penal system (cf. Hames-Garcίa, 2004; Rodriguez, 2006). Many of them write themselves into (Black) existence from the perspective of “a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting” (Wilderson, 2003).

Liberatory voices

Revolutionary captured people, such as New African political prisoners (Sundiata Acoli) or Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army members (Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jalil Muntaqim) in addition to slain politicized Soledad brother prisoner George Jackson, have inspired the diasporic imagination of a new generation of imprisoned Black people. In the wake of the prison rebellion years of the 1960s (cf. Gómez, 2006), they started pan-African studies and college programs, literacy education, legal rights education, AIDS awareness and health education, etc. Black muslims have organized and won religious recognition, even though their worship continues to draw suspicion from the authorities, in particular after the events of 9/11/2001.[3] Their subversive ideological persuasion lead them inevitably to two key pan-African leaders in the diaspora, whose deeds and professed beliefs were considered to be criminal or subversive by the US government: I am thinking of course of WEB Du Bois, a founding member of the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Marcus Garvey, the founder and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and “Back to Africa” movement. A third influential leader, Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, inspired some one million Blacks to convert to Islam in the 1960s (cf. Muntaqim, 2002, pp.98-99). Black Muslim convicts were singled out for repression by prison psychologists and guards, in particular for psychological and physical torture, dubbed behavior modification techniques (brainwashing, Skinnerian operant conditioning, sensory deprivation, and “(overdosed) chemical or drug therapy” (Gómez, 2006, p. 63). Much of this torture program has been “refined” over the last thirty years and brought to light anew through the “Torture Memo” (2002, issued by attorney general Roberto Gonzalez) justifying the Bush administration’s clandestine practices in the “Fight against Terror.”

And yet, prisoners continue to resist their own civil death. From the spiritual transformation of iconic figures, such as Malcolm X, and former gang leaders, such as Stanley “Tookie” Williams, executed in 2005, I wish to single out imprisoned intellectuals[4] who have left their theoretical and spiritual marks on prisoners in the US, such that their writings are feared and often censored by prison administrators while being unknown to civil society, media and academics.[5] For example, Abu-Jamal received thirty days in isolation for publishing Live from Death Row in 1995, a collection of essays originally intended for National Public Radio, which cancelled his contract after U.S. senatorial protests of airing the voice of a convicted “cop killer.” Tiyo Salah-El, also confined in Pennsylvania, authored “A Call for the Abolition of Prisons” in James’ anthology The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (2005), but the warden refused to allow Salah-El, a known prison abolitionist, to receive the book. Finally, it is worthy mentioning Assata Shakur who nowadays may be free to write on any topic she pleases; however, since her escape from a prison in 1979, she is wanted by the state of New Jersey with one million dollar bounty put on her person. She writes and speaks out against U.S. imperialism from Cuba, where she resides as a “marooned slave.”

Writing and agitating from the new diaspora of prison cages, these intellectuals and spiritual leaders inspire new ideas for the meaning of emancipation from bondage and the meaning of true freedom. Thus, prisons, which were meant to create a compliant populace (cf. Foucault, 1977), actually create a conscientized[6] imprisoned intellectual class writing in the neo-slave narrative tradition,[7] resisting enslavement and subjugation. John Edgar Wideman’s notion of polyphonic neo-slave narratives is very apt here (1996) as he introduces the reader to Abu-Jamal’s insurrectionist prose. He revisits how the freedom cry of “Up North!” during slavery times, has shifted or continued in narratives of today’s convicts. Joy James expounds that “not all penal slave narratives offer new visions of freedom. Some yearn for emancipation (parole, clemency) but not freedom (liberation from racial, economic, gender repression) and the political agency and risk-taking that could realize it” (James, 2005, p. xxiii). Abu-Jamal, Salah-El and Assata Shakur all exemplify the perspective of (radical) freedom in an “abolition democracy” (Davis, 2006), that is in a democracy where all institutions are meaningfully transformed so as to allow previously oppressed people to participate equally. Rather than focusing on self-improvement and enlightenment, their autobiographies criticize the evils of (prison) slavery and passionately invoke new frameworks of justice.[8] It’s noteworthy how John Edgar Wideman impassionedly invokes the diasporic moment in the continuum of resistance exemplified by voices writing behind bars and tearing the bars down psychically:

In a new world where African people were transported to labor, die, and disappear, we’ve needed unbound voices to reformulate our destiny—voices refusing to be ensnared by somebody else’s terms. … Listen to them, to ourselves, to the best we’ve managed to write and say and dance and paint and sing. African-American culture, in spite of the weight, the assaults it has endured, may contain a key to our nation’s survival, a key not found simply in the goal of material prosperity, but in the force of spirit, will, communal interdependence.

Because he tells the truth, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s voice can help us tear down walls—prison walls, the walls we hide behind to deny and refuse the burden of our history (Wideman, 1996, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv).

Assata Shakur’s autobiography (1987) also envisions institutional transformation—not just personal uplift—and it is not surprising the state is keen on recapturing her, announcing a bounty to bring her back to New Jersey dead or alive. Yet Assata Shakur, who describes herself as a run-away slave marooned on Cuba, explains in her autobiography, “a contemporary insurrectionist penal-slave narrative” (James, 2005, p. xxxii), it wasn’t until her experience of imprisonment that she understood the ideological underpinnings of a rights-bearing individual[9] in the U.S. Confronted by a guard who ordered her to work, Shakur, a pre-trial convict, disobeys, “You can’t make me work.” The guard’s retorted: “No, you’re wrong. Slavery was outlawed with the exception of prisons. Slavery is legal in prisons” (Shakur, 1987, p. 64). The guard’s response was factually wrong, since Shakur had not yet been convicted. However, Shakur did not contest that interpretation, she went on to re-read the 13^th Amendment and realized that anti-Black racism is part and parcel of the capitalist system—a system which promises the illusion of justice weighing onto the rights-bearing Black individual but whose institutions are racist to the core.

That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and third world people, why so many Black people can’t find a job on the streets … Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. … Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and third world people (ibid., pp. 64-5).

Imprisonment radicalized her thinking about “aberrations” in the system. In a moving exchange with another prisoner, Shakur shares her notion of “freedom”—very much in the spirit of radical neo-slave narratives. It conveys a sense of that double diasporic movement—between the uneasy security of self in the streets (“walking while Black”) and the insecurity of personhood in the carceral:

[I’d] rather be in a minimum security prison or on the streets than in the maximum security prison in here. The only difference between here and the streets is that one is maximum security and the other is minimum security. The police patrol our communities just like the guards patrol here. I don’t have the faintest idea how it feels to be free (ibid, p. 60).

Furthermore, as Hames-Garcίa (2004) articulates, we see a “struggle” paradigm in her autobiography, which is a propos given her chosen “free” name: Assata- “She who struggles.” Hames-Garcίa notes, using Martin Luther King’s notion of justice, that Assata’s revolutionary philosophy embodies the following: “The very fact of freedom’s incompleteness (no one is free so long as others remain unfree) necessitates action directed at changing society. Freedom, therefore, is ultimately a practice, rather than a possession or a state of being” (Hames-Garcίa, 2004, p. 96).

Assata’s yearning for her African roots is strongly portrayed in Gloria Rolando’s documentary of her marooned life in Cuba in Eyes of the Rainbow:

Assata Shakur and Oya (1997). In the film, Assata identifies with the warrior spirit of the Yoruban orishas and to this day, she speaks out against injustice globally and particularly imperialist injustice perpetrated by the U.S. government.

Similarly, Abu-Jamal radicalized his thinking about democratic rights while appealing his death penalty from death row. Only after his appeals were unsuccessful, he came to the painful realization that he is not eligible to be a rights bearing individual afforded by the U.S. constitution.

Perhaps I’m naïve, maybe I’m just stupid—but I thought the law would be followed in my case, and the conviction reversed. … Even in the face of the brutal Philadelphia MOVE massacre of May 13, 1985, that led to Ramona Africa’s frame-up …, my faith remained. Even in the face of this relentless wave of antiblack state terror, I thought my appeals would be successful. I still harbored a belief in U.S. law, and the realization that my appeal had been denied was a shocker (Abu-Jamal, 1996, pp. xviii-xix)

Tiyo Salah-El, finally, remembers his journey towards radicalization that came from becoming meaningfully educated while incarcerated in a maximum security prison. For him, it was the path of becoming a Quaker and an abolitionist of the current penal system, which earned him the wrath of prison officials. In his autobiography (2006) he reflects:

I did not become an abolitionist over night. It took years of reading, studying, and asking lots of questions. Having teachers such as Monty Neill and Howard Zinn leading me into new fields of study was the key factor which in turn was indeed a blessing. Reading the works of Marx, Homer, Cervantes—looking at the powerful paintings of Picasso, Chico Mendes, African, Native American and Mexican art—listening to the powerful and beautiful music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, ..., Bach, List..., all played a part in my development. My imagination soared. I gained an international perspective regarding politics and prisons. I became a dialectical dreamer with my brain reeling with visions and dreams of a radically new society founded on a total transformation in human relationships and the abolition of prisons (Salah-El, 2006, p. 100).

I mention these three radical freedom fighters and their pursuit of justice because it seems to me that only in the diaspora of extreme deprivation (i.e. in a maximum security prison) did these writers begin to clarify their political and spiritual perspectives (e.g., on the structural, institutional persistence of slavery) and precisely because they refused their slave status in word and deed, they became anathema to the authorities.

Countering amnesia about the slavery of prisons

Not ever critic of the current criminal justice system looks at the state of confinement with the conviction of radicalized writers, such as Abu-Jamal, Salah-El or Shakur. Remarkably, few academics and journalists writing about the prison system make use of the “slavery” trope to describe current conditions of Black and Brown mass incarceration. Joel Dyer's best-seller The Perpetual Prisoner Machine (2000) avoids it explicitly, along with Marc Mauer’s popular treatise Race to Incarcerate (1999/2006). Noel Ignatiev's study How the Irish Became White (1995) describes prison revolts as working-class revolts rather than slave revolts—the term preferred by Black political prisoners and other imprisoned intellectuals. I find particularly useful the analysis of New African political prisoner Sundiata Akoli (1998) who gives a historical perspective of ghetto and slavery tropes. Some critics prefer the trope of the ghetto/hyperghetto (Wacquant, 2001; Mendieta, 2004) to make light of the racialized conditions of segregation, but their analyses do not clarify why it is that Black people are singled out for systematic overcriminalization. The silence vis-à-vis the “slavery of prisons” (Davis) in the majority of critical prison studies literature is perplexing, since post-1865 court decisions (e.g. Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 1871), Jim Crow, and lynch justice ride on the codification of slavery. On the other hand, prison critic Ruth Gilmore (2007) joins the debate by arguing that the slavery trope overstates the reality of work extracted from prison labor. Angola plantation not withstanding, the vast majority of prisoners in fact are idle (p. 21). Granted, privately run prison industries have been unable to capture effectively the potential labor pool of over 2 million captive people, nevertheless, slavery and involuntary servitude are codified into the U.S. constitution. So, prisoners have no right to object to forced work. And it should stir our conscience in ways we—on the outside—benefit from slave labor: The prison industry UNICOR supplies desks for public institutions and license plates. A convict can lose “privileges” for not cooperating in the daily routine of his carceral status, as Salah-El found out even as remand prisoner, when he audaciously organized a prisoner’s labor union (2006, pp.60-64) in the aftermath of the Attica rebellion.

The reality of the 13th Amendment looms large in the current era of mass incarceration, in particular of African American men and increasingly of Latinos and Black women. This constitutional amendment (1865) codified slavery, and enslavement by the state is the punishment reserved for those who are convicted of a crime: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The question to ask here is whether it is necessary to separate intent and meaning of the law. The exception clause to the abolition law was fought for rigorously by slaveholding politicians, followed by enactments of Black Codes and the convict lease system in the South. So, clearly they intended for slavery to be continued by any means necessary. The question for us today then is whether the law still means to enslave convicts, and I would err on the side of Black radical prisoners, such as Salah-El and Acoli, that in fact the literal meaning of being a slave of the state prevails—even in an era that has brought some limited prisoners human rights post Attica, 1971.

As one imprisoned intellectual puts it aphoristically: “Prison. The last bastion of the Klan” (Forde/Mattis, 2001, p. 10). The reality of codified slavery, have moved Joy James to speak of a “Penal Democracy” (James, 2005) and Angela Davis to call for an “Abolition Democracy” (Davis, 2005). The prison industrial complex has engulfed the contemporary polity just as slavery posed serious contradictions to the proclamations of freedom and democracy for all by the Founding Fathers. Drawing on Du Bois’s concept of abolition democracy, Davis points to a necessary transformation of existing social structures, so that out of the ashes of slavery, debt peonage, convict leasing, the death penalty, etc., “new democratic institutions would have to be created” (Davis, 2005, p. 72). The vestages of slavery have not been dismantled as the legal record clearly indicates. Ruffin v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1871) interpreted the 13^th Amendment to mean that the convict had “not only forfeited his liberty but also his personal rights, except those which the law in its humanity affords him,” so that the prisoner was “for the time being, the slave of the state.”[10] The infamous convict lease system was an outgrowth of the 13^th Amendment and Ruffin, so that the “prison of slavery” turned into the “slavery of prison” (Davis, 1998).

How do prisoners make light of their conditions? We might ask with Gayatri Spivak: “Can the subaltern speak?” Most of the prisoners lack a GED and basic literacy skills. One of my former students had dropped out of school in 4^th grade and received his GED in prison. He was one of the few prisoners who were able to get into my course and called “la crème de la crème” by the educational supervisor. Some of the first requests of any prison teaching are rather basic humanitarian ones: “how can I connect with the outside?” “Does the public really know what goes on here?” and “I need parenting skills!” Clearly, the convicts are refusing their slave status and prick the outsider’s conscience, demanding that they are taken seriously in their humanity. Precisely this, their humanity, is put in question, when most prisoners in the U.S. are not allowed to vote. As prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis ponders:

Why has the disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies become so much a part of the common sense thought structures of people in this country? I believe that this … has its roots in slavery. A white contemporary of slavery might have remarked: “Of course slaves weren’t supposed to vote. They weren’t full citizens.” In the same way people think today, “Of course prisoners aren’t supposed to vote. They aren’t really citizens any more. They are in prison.” (Davis, 2006, p. 38).

Curiously, their slave/convict status has reverberations post-release: In some 13 states, ex-convicts are not enjoying their fully restored civil rights, instead they are permanently barred from voting. Amnesia continues to shield the beneficiaries of white supremacy from the destructive psychic, political, economic powers of the “post-slavery syndrome” which may have to be relabeled “neo-slavery syndrome,” to indicate that the plantation of yesterday is the walled fortress of today. And still, the spirit of resistance in the diaspora of the prison-bantustan is alive. Political prisoner Acoli makes these connections succinctly:

The Afrikan prison struggle began on the shores of Afrika behind the walls of medieval pens that held captives for ships bound west into slavery. It continues today behind the walls of modern U.S. penitentiaries where all prisoners are held as legal slaves—a blatant violation of international law… (1998, p. 1).

Prisons as diasporic sites

Instead of fulfilling the reparative gesture of “forty acres and a mule” free Black people received the “gift” of the thirteenth amendment, and very quickly thereafter, convict leasing in the South, supplanted the terror of lynch justice. While lynching subsided through the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, prisons continue to be the receptacle of a disproportionate number of people of African descent—all the while the white man finds himself to be an endangered species behind bars. Note the case of Paul Hamill, a thin and white man who was sent to a drug treatment center, not to prison, because Judge Florence Foster took pity on him: "he is thin and white, he would be a target for sexual assault" (quoted in Maasha, 2001). This justification for rehabilitation rather than casual retribution (reserved for Blacks?) is only remarkable as it is made public. As Angela Davis (1998) has observed a Black male is more likely to be put into prison than a law-breaker (p. 105);[11] another telling statistic is that a Black drug offender is likely to get a jail term (80%) while a white offender is more likely to get probation (80%) in New York State. Geographer Ruth Gilmore (2007) gives this important definition of racism:

Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Prison expansion is a new iteration of this theme. Prisons and other locally unwanted land uses accelerate the mortality of modestly educated working people of all kinds in urban and rural settings and show how economic and environmental justice are central to anti-racism. (2007, p. 247).

In her recent study on California’s prison expansion before the turn of the 21^st century, she also notes that the five county Los Angeles region alone is origin of 60 percent of state prisoners, and she notes that especially Black men in urban centers have experienced lower employment rates (ibid., p. 75). These prisoners tend to be housed in rural, predominately white landscapes. Looking at the other state that experienced similar escalation in prison construction, New York State, prison intellectuals from Sing Sing prison studied the geographic makeup of prisoners in “upstate” New York and found that, remarkably, 75 % of prisoners come from New York City—all of them are poor and most of them are African American and Latino.[12] An average of 3000 men from Harlem alone is incarcerated any given year. While none of them is allowed to vote, their bodies are counted in order to boost the political power of sparsely populated (white) rural areas where most prisons are located—another reminder of an era when African American slaves were considered 3/5ths of a person for apportionment purposes.

Whole populations are uprooted and shipped to these rural bantustans where they don't have the right to vote or the choice whether or not to work (work counts as “good time,” “good behavior” for parole decisions). These bantustans increasingly harbor women and men indicted under minimum sentencing laws which contributes to an incarceration rate “of blacks in all state prisons [being] 7.66 times that of whites” (Dyer, 2000, p. 183). Salah-El makes sense of this re- and dislocation from his prison in rural Pennsylvania:

[In 1977, t]he prison population was approximately 900-950 men, all of whom were single celled. As of November 2004, the population has soared to 2,250 men half of whom are now double celled [and very few remaining single celled as of December 2006, MN]. The staff was and remains 98 percent white. Most of the prisoners are minorities from the inner cities of Philadelphia, Chester, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and smaller towns […]. One need not be a rocket scientist to assume that such a mix of people in a prison setting will at times bring out the worst in some if not the majority of prisoners and staff (Salah-El, 2006, p. 65).

These bantustans are big business for the white towns: State prison Clinton in North country is a case in point--the town Dannemora, NY survives on prisons. The prison provides 1,198 jobs, 2 million dollars per week of payroll. Dyer notes that the entire Northern New York region went from 2 prisons in 1970s to 18 prisons in the 1990s which includes $1.5-billion in construction costs and $425 million a year in salaries and operating expenses (Dyer, 2000, pp. 16-17).

Many of the men incarcerated in Central, Western and Northern New York have no geographic, mental mapping on where they are being held. This is often expressed in their first letters home (“Where am I?”). Once I brought maps to my students, but they were confiscated after class by the guards, even though it was the Peterson’s World Map—perhaps the guards were worried that the prisoners would use them to plan an escape route. What is even more troublesome is the rate of illiteracy at a staggering 70 percent of the prison population. It certainly strikes me as a continuation of the slave master’s desire to keep his docile workforce in cognitive bondage. In the film How Do You Spell Murder? (A. Raymond & S. Raymond, 2003), Nathaniel tells of his trials of repeating second grade five times and ending up in state prison on a murder charge. We see his arduous and successful journey towards simple reading comprehension guided lovingly by another prisoner-literacy teacher. In the end, he reopened his legal case and his life sentence was dismissed, because the court discovered that he was illiterate when he “signed” his confession as a teenager.

Prisoners are geographically isolated from their communities and their children. This is contrary to the spirit of the United Nations’ Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment (1988) and contrary to rehabilitative principles that stipulate that prisoners housed in vicinity to their families may be able to continue affective bonds which reassure their reintegration into society post release. Take for instances the distances traveled by families of prisoners in New York State. The vast majority of prisoners come from borrows of New York City. Almost all state prisons are in upstate New York. It takes eight or more hours by bus to get to Elmira prison from Port Authority, NYC. The Albion medium security prison for women is located on the Northern NY border. Women are the primary care takers of their children. 75% or more of women prisoners are mothers, and most of them come from New York City. Since the 1997Adoption and Safe Family Act, which intended to benefit foster children neglected by parents who were drug addicted, it has become harder for women convicts to keep custody over their children. How can children travel 16 hours a weekend or more, to keep “emotional bonds” to their mother alive and well, traveling from New York City to Albion by bus? Attempting to provide “better homes” for children of prisoners, the state’s child welfare service cuts off all contact if the biological mother cannot prove that she has provided adequate emotional service. The memory of chattel slavery looms large. The child may lose her mother, if she has been incarcerated for 15 months.

The North (of the U.S.) developed its own version of Jim Crow justice after 1945. As ex-political prisoner and former Panther Lawrence Hayes has noted Blacks were hardly represented in the prisons in the Empire State before the 1940s, so that no racial statistics were kept. With the return of Black GIs from WW II who demanded equal rights to housing, jobs, and education, Black men were perceived as uppity, and they were duly criminalized and incarcerated (Hayes, 2000). So, prison populations in New York State slowly started to change their racial makeup, till the advent of the Rockefeller Drug laws in 1973 drastically accelerated this trend by targeting Black city youth and adults. Today, the vast majority of people, in fact over 92 percent, convicted for a non-violent offense under the punitive Rockefeller Drug laws are African Americans condemned to sentences ranging from 15 years to life (Drop the Rock, 2006).

Structural adjustment policies have led to the destruction of health care and primary education (especially for girls) in the global South. In the US, such policies have resulted in the dismantling of social services (welfare) and higher education and funds have been siphoned off into the frantic construction of new cages. The neo-colonial, criminalized, disenfranchised subject is ejected from her neighborhood (e.g., Queens, Harlem, Bronx) and transported to the white, rural outskirts of the state, the North country—geographically completely cut off from her family and community. These prisons create new sites of resistance and, in fact, new cultural diasporic sites, which transform into new “homes” for many. The few reporters who gain access to prisons today are able to do so because their purpose is fairly apolitical; they photograph well decorated prison cells, with crochet blankets draping toilets and beddings. Leading a life on the “installment plan,” when convicts return to the prison, they are often greeted with a hearty: “welcome home.” The prison symbolizes the extended family of the “street life” of criminalized city youth and adults. Soffiyah J. Elijah (2007), a prominent attorney for political prisoners, recounts her story of traveling “upstate” New York to see her boyfriend in various state prisons before she got involved in the movement to free political prisoners in the 1980s. She noted that the guards were all white and the convicts mostly Black. She was struck how many high school mates she recognized in the visiting room (Elijah, 2007, p. 13). “Recidivism. Welcome back home. That’s what it seems like to me,” opines prisoner-poet Forde/Mattis (2001, p. 11).

Of course, politically astute prisoners, like Forde/Mattis, refuse to make their cage “home” so as to refuse to grow accustomed to their imprisoned status. However, they are also singled out for further punishment: censored correspondence and even of authored books (as Salah-El’s and Abu-Jamal’s cases exemplify), no “contact” visitation rights, no phone calls to loved ones which manifests “a racial geography of distance and alienation” (Rodriguez, 2006, p. 30).

The meaning of slave revolts in the diaspora

If all prisoners stopped working today, would the prison machinery collapse? It seems it would be on the brink of collapse, if we think through the questions posed by the organizers of the Y2K strike:

Why should we be the raw materials in the DOCS [Department of Correctional services] prison industrial corporation which only serves the interests of politicians to be elected into office, and to provide jobs for rural Northern New Yorkers? Why should we work to maintain the prisons as porters, cooks, plumbers, masons, welders, tailors, roofers, painters … or in any capacity necessary to keep DOCS prison corporation functioning properly? (cited in Gonnerman, 1999)

When one of my Black students in an upstate New York prison mentioned the impending Y2K strike, to begin January 1, 2000, that was organized by downstate prisoners in 1999 he ended up in “the box” for several months. Even though he got a majority vote to be on the prisoners’ grievance board, the authorities also pressured him to resign, or, else, they would impeach him—democratic rights may be a security breech and must be suppressed. This prison, as others, is 85 % black and brown, but the grievance board is made up of white prisoners only. To advocate a strike in the post-Attica era prisons will jeopardize your parole eligibility; it is one of the disturbances prison officials fear most.

A conscientized prison population that understands the function of work, the gaze of the guards, regimentation of minute bodily movements, etc., in the total institution is truly hard to manage. Greenhaven prison, which was the center of the Y2K work strike, was a case in point. It was frightening for guards to watch a thousand men file into mess hall quietly consuming their meal in preparation for the strike. Or, en masse not showing up at all to meals. Over 300 suspected organizers were shipped to upstate prisons where prisoners were considered to be more docile (Gonnerman, 1999).

Racist practices by the administration, however, are used to further conflict among prisoners. Friendships across racial boundaries are hard to build or maintain, especially when whites are perceived to get substantial perks: white convicts enjoy better work opportunities, for instance doing maintenance work, rather than janitorial tasks, they get to drive the lawn mower trucks, they get paid better and also for overtime. Furthermore, there is religious discrimination: Muslims and Rastafarians and other religious minorities need to sign up for call-out, whereas Christians can go to their church services without giving prior notice. Native Americans may be denied altogether their religious right to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony, even if it is for their “last rite” before state execution (Peltier, 2003, p. 317).

The collective strikes by prisoners, from Attica, Folsom to the ostensibly civil disobedient action in Greenhaven, invoke principles of humanity and a spirit of community which break walls and overcome geographic distances psychically and symbolically. As today’s hunger strikes and brutal force feedings endured by Guantánomo Bay prisoners of war stir our collective conscience, prison takeovers and manifestos, while often futile in the short run, demand ethical and solidary responses from civil society, teachers, clergy and media, to name a few. However, prison writers, such as Piri Thomas (1994) who reflects on the futility of rebellion, often are the only voices of conscience that are being heard by the public. Hames-Garcίa notes: “Indeed, prison uprisings demonstrate the ultimate example of defiance for its own sake. Without a realistic hope of changing conditions, rebellion participants must find meaning in the act of rebellion itself” (p. 152).

Recall the immense moral outcry of the public of Governor Rockefeller’s brutal suppression of the Attica brothers’ take over of the prison. In its aftermath, public hearings were held with survivors testifying to the abysmal, retributive and racist conditions of Attica and many other state prisons around the U.S. Reforms followed which established prison law libraries, GED and college level education, etc. in New York State and beyond. College education, however, was abandoned with the passage of the 1995 Omnibus Crime Bill. Federal prisoners responded to this particular bill with their feet, protesting the severe Crack cocaine sentences—100 times more severe sentencing guidelines than for the possession of powder cocaine. Aware of the racist statistics that no whites were ever convicted of crack-related federal offenses, 16 federal prisons experienced peaceful protests after the House vote (ibid., p. 253).

Not surprisingly, many of the collective actions have been led by political prisoners, who after the Attica rebellion are particularly scrutinized and often spend years, if not decades, in solitary confinement. Mumia Abu-Jamal is a case in point for remaining on death row, despite the fact that his death sentence was vacated in 2001. Officials also suspect political prisoners involvement even where none can be proven.

Marilyn Buck was put into solitary for several weeks along with other political prisoners nationwide on September 11, 2001 and writes on these experiences in her poem “Incommunicado: Dispatches from a Political Prisoner”:

9/11 no prisoner may speak to you

you may not speak to any prisoner

9/12 overheard voices

there are terrorists here

who are the terrorists?

Silence, everyone behind her door listens

9/14 a legal call

small relief: it’s political—Washington—

not something I did

9/17 no more calls

no visits

no mail

until further notice

(Buck, 2003).

Buck, a former Weather Underground member, has been imprisoned since 1985 for the offense of liberating Assata Shakur from prison in 1979.

While agitating from within for social change and social justice, political prisoners also inform and shape political action in the “free world.” For example, in 1998 political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim encouraged students and other supporters to engage in a Jericho march (inspired by a biblical passage and a spiritual)[13] for the liberation of political prisoners in the U.S. The march grew into a sustained Jericho Movement. Jericho chapters around the nation continue to thrive and they raise the public’s awareness that there are indeed political prisoners confined in U.S. federal and state prisons. Thanks to Jericho, political prisoners and POWs are not forgotten, and due to vigorous organizing, especially among Puerto Ricans, several prisoners received release (with conditions), pardoned by President Clinton when he left office in 2000.

Recapturing faith in the diaspora of confinement

Writing in the neo-colonial and neo-slave era, prison intellectuals have shed light on the predominant black populace, as poignantly noted by Mumia Abu-Jamal in an essay "Fade to Black" (in Live from Death Row) where he recounts how a Native American prisoner on death row comments bewilderedly that he has appropriated a Black vernacular while incarcerated. Native people “turn black.”

In his book Faith of our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People, Abu-Jamal (2003) turns from his earlier socio-political analysis to a moving narration of African-based spirituality, which had inspired his ancestors to survive and even resist slavery in the Americas. The African gods and orishas may have gone dormant in Anglo-protestant North America, but Christianity was profoundly altered in slave quarters where African captives re-imagined the Jewish Jubilee (a year when all social differences were supposed to be leveled and every man to be returned to his family; Leviticus 25: 8-10) to deliver them from their enslaved status (Abu-Jamal, 2003, pp. 22-28). It is even more astounding that Islam, first brought to US shores by a few Muslim West Africans who were subsequently pressured to convert to Christianity, has become a cultural force in the Black community.

It is a kind of poetic justice that a faith, which faded some two centuries ago, is experiencing a resurgence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. With roots stemming from West Africa, Black Islam has had a long and remarkable history in the Americas. Whenever it would re-emerge, it would have a distinctly nationalistic character (Abu-Jamal, 2003, pp. 48-49).

Incidentally, Black muslims and their imams are again under attack post- 9/11, with a heightened insecurity over the tentacles of Al Qaida’s network, which apparently has unleashed its belief system into the U.S. prison system. A federal study warned that “[r]adicalized prisoners are a potential pool of recruits by terrorist groups. The U.S., with its large prison population, is at risk of facing the sort of homegrown terrorism currently plaguing other countries” (cited in Jordan, 2006). Familiar refrains are utilized again from Cold War and fear of Black insurrection rhetoric of yesteryears.

Beyond exile

Clearly, despite the geographic discontinuities, prison-bantustan sites are also diasporic cultural sites: Besides the plethora of prison intellectual literature, there are also many other cultural productions which have influenced civil society in the US and globally, appropriating linguistic, musical and clothing styles. Some of them are not entirely meant as resistance commodification, as the popular jeans label “Prison Blues” attests to (Nagel, 2002). A political issue that has picked up tremendous momentum is the reparations movement, spearheaded in part by Black prisoners. The call for reparations is a key issue that ties the diaspora back to the continent. As New African prisoner of war Abdul O. Shakur argues: “As long as this government refuses to pay reparation for slavery, Jim Crow, COINTELPRO, and all crimes committed against the New Afrikan nation, we have the right to impose armed restitution/reparation until they pay” (Shakur, 1999, p. 17). Prison resistances, from work strikes to rebellious manifestos, have divergent aims and ideologies, yet, fundamentally, are united by one goal: to refuse slave status and demand respect and recognition for one’s humanity. Perhaps some of the goals are a long way from accomplishing the break down of the walls, as envisioned by Assata Shakur, or by the Jericho Movement to free all political prisoners. However, these courageous voices from prisons and exile might just mobilize a new abolitionist movement in the long run—to end state-sanctioned slavery.

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Notes