Free our friends! And everyone else: thoughts on prison and activism

Last year saw a lot of amazing struggles. Some of them got a lot of media attention; others received very little. One of the ones which was hardly mentioned in the mainstream media, at least in the UK, was the hunger strike by thousands of prisoners in California, which I think spread to other states, but it’s a bit hard finding anything about that now. It’s now been around a year since those strikes started, and a long time since they finished, but defiance among prisoners is still strong: prisoners in Georgia have been on hunger strike since June 10th, and they’ve now been joined by over 100 prisoners in three different institutions in North Carolina. As well as general resistance to mass incarceration, there’s also the steady trickle of anarchists and other comrades into the prison system: Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, sent down for her role in the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto, has recently written a great piece about the relationship between “political” and “ordinary” prisoners, then there’s the five people who were manipulated and entrapped by the FBI in Cleveland, the five people being held for alleged anti-fascist activity in Chicago, the case of CeCe MacDonald, the ten people who’ve just been sentenced in Italy for the G8 protests in 2001… The list goes on and on. Prison is undoubtedly a big issue. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
To start off with, this situation is one where it’s hard to generalise across different countries. In the US, according to recent figures, over 1% of the population is behind bars, and adding on the number of people on probation or parole takes that to 1 in 31 of the population. In comparison, the proportion of people in prison in England and Wales is nowhere near that high. Even without taking race into account, it’s clear that people in the US are much more likely to know someone in prison than people in the UK are. Still, our prison population is at an all-time high and still growing; and, as we move away from the old European social-democratic model and toward American-style capitalism, it’s likely that prison labour, along with workfare, will be a major stick for disciplining unproductive elements of the workforce.
So much for the general picture. But that still doesn’t tell us much about what we should do about it. I have to confess that this is not a subject that I have much practical experience with. There’s a few reasons why I’ve never made prisoner solidarity much of a priority in the past: for one thing, it just didn’t seem to have much to do with my life, or the people I know. The tendency to prioritise anti-prison struggles feels like it comes from anarchist ideology, where people decide that they’re in favour of freedom and against repression, and so decide to target the biggest, most obvious form of repression they can see, rather than starting out by looking at the problems that affect them and the people they know directly. And where activists are affected by prison, it’s usually for reasons that don’t have much to do with anyone else: if you do a lot of black bloc or other militant activism, you’re quite likely to know people who’ve been sent down, but this doesn’t necessarily translate to anyone outside of activist circles, so a focus on prison issues can become yet another factor making anarchists seem weird and inaccessible to outsiders. And I fully realise while writing this how inadequate it is to talk about these issues in a colour-blind way: just saying “outsiders” fudges over the very different experiences that black and white people are likely to associate with the legal system.
At this point, I also have to admit that I’m not really sure I believe in “prison abolition” as such: no matter how free and healthy a post-revolutionary society is, I can’t believe that it won’t contain a small minority of people who act in ways that are seriously harmful to others, and that at some stage, it won’t be necessary to put those people in a place where they cannot harm others. No matter how much that institution is wholly focussed on rehabilitation, and stripped of all the moralistic focus on punishment, it will still have some features in common with a prison. In short, I think there are lots of things about this society – banks, landlords, border controls, advertising agencies, managers, queens, kings, armies, and on and on – which are wholly useless and harmless, and could not even begin to exist in a sane world, whereas the notion of putting mass murderers somewhere where they can’t do any more murdering sort of makes sense to me, and so that feeds into my reluctance to make anti-prison stuff a big priority.
I’m aware that serious objections can and should be made to all these points, and that I’m speaking from a position of white privilege here, but there’s one more issue which is a bit of a deal-breaker for me: self-organisation versus activism. I don’t want to do anything that puts me in a position of power, as the wise and benevolent activist taking action on behalf of a helpless victim; I want to help others organise themselves, so the distinction between “activist” and “other” breaks down. I’m really not sure what people outside prison can meaningfully do to help prisoners organise – writing letters to prisoners can help cheer them up, and is very definitely worth doing, but beyond that I’m not sure what we can do to help. Other people with more experience of prisoner solidarity – not to mention prisoners themselves – are probably more qualified than me to expand on this point. (EDIT: See the comments on this post, where someone involved in prison solidarity stuff discusses it. That conversation drove me to look some of this stuff up – the US Anarchist Black Cross Federation seem to have a pretty decent collection of guides on this subject, with Building PP/POW Subsistence Programs and ABCF Guide To Political Prisoner and Prisoner of War Support the two most obvious starting points.)
But, despite all the doubts I’ve just spelled out, this isn’t meant to be an argument against prison solidarity, more an attempt to feel my way around various different sides of the issue. If I’m making any argument at all here, it’s that prison solidarity is both necessary and deeply problematic. At a very basic level, starting off from our own position as people in some way engaged in the class struggle, it’s going to become more and more vital simply as a form of self-defence; the student rebellion of 2010, the protest on March 26th last year and the August riots all left prisoners in their wake, and more will follow from any similar upheaval; although the anti-fascists sent down last year are all out now, the increasing trend for street confrontations with the EDL, Infidels and other groups makes it pretty much certain that more anti-fascists will end up inside soon; and if we do see any real workplace struggle, the laws against industrial action will see militant workers sent down for picketing and occupying. Beyond that, it’s also the case that, while prison might seem like a far-away abstraction to many white people, it’s a lot more relevant to people from ethnic minority or “underclass” backgrounds. The existence of these divisions within the working class pose a real problem for revolutionaries. From Bakunin onwards, some sections of the anarchist movement have tended to romanticise “that great mass, those millions of non-civilized, disinherited, wretched and illiterates”, while many socialists, and the union movement in particular, have tended to talk about the most skilled and comfortable workers as if they represented the class as a whole. But the point is not to celebrate one specific section of the working class, even the most oppressed sections, but to try and generalise and spread revolt among all those who have something to gain from the end of this society.
This might all seem a bit abstract, so here’s a concrete example: last August, some people, a very small minority of those who are fucked over by this system, took to the streets and rioted, and other people, mostly also people who are fucked over by this system, didn’t join in, and even actively supported the police against the rioters. The point of talking about this is not to condemn the rioters for acting too soon, and rioting instead of joining a trade union or voting for socialist candidates, and it isn’t to condemn everyone who didn’t join in the rioting for being hopelessly brainwashed reactionaries. It’s to think about ways we can overcome these divisions, and move towards a revolt that would draw in big enough numbers to be truly uncontrollable.
So, a lot of rambling, and not much in the way of real conclusions. I could probably go on contradicting myself all day, but instead I’ll sum up with a few points:
1. Prisons cause a lot of unnecessary harm and suffering. This means that, no matter what you think a post-revolutionary justice system might look like, the prison system as it exists now is mostly a negative thing, and we should support revolts against it.
2. Prisons cause more harm to some sections of the working class than to others. This means that focussing a lot on prisons will make us more relevant to some people, and less relevant to others.
3. There isn’t actually that much we can practically do to encourage self-organisation amongst prisoners most of the time. But, having said that, revolts like the current hunger strike in Georgia and North Carolina do happen, and are likely to become more frequent in the future. It’s worth thinking about how we can support those revolts when they do happen.
4. The law-and-order mentality is still quite strong among many people, and championing prisoner solidarity is not a short cut to popularity. But it’s still important, and we need to do it – both for our comrades who end up inside for class-struggle activity, and for the vast numbers of petty thieves, drug addicts and others who end up locked up for being poor (and often for not being white).
5. Owing to the many different factors that lead to different people having widely different experiences of the legal system, it’s hard to draw up a general strategy here. In general, where anti-prison attitudes exist, that’s a good thing and we should do what we can to encourage them; where support for “law and order” is strong, it might be more strategic to prioritise other issues – workplace, housing, benefits, etc. If we can organise effectively around them, it might win us respect, which would then make it easier to get a hearing for our more unpopular views; and either way, whenever people start to organise to improve their own lives, they’re likely to run up against the legal system in one way or another. No amount of anarchist propaganda can discredit the state as effectively as a first-hand encounter with the cops.