Out of the Game and Into the Vanguard

"At some time in some joint, George Jackson read or heard or did or was done to something that was for him like a slow-fused madeleine. Some part of the puzzle lowered itself into place and initiated a descent into hell..."

No more auction block for

No more, no more

No more auction block for me,

Many thousand gone.

No more than George Jackson had lived in a vacuum prior to his final return to the California prison system, was he to live in seclusion in the joint--although much of his time was to be spent in solitary confinement.

Simply because Jackson was so often to be placed in isolation and invariably denied parole--both of which are judgment calls--it is impossible to view him apart from the people and procedures of the state's prison system and the forces that affect them.

On the basis of diagnostic tests given during the reception stage of his confinement, Jackson was assigned to the vocational school at Tracy. However, that school, like the one at Lancaster it was built to supplement, already was overcrowded: so the Youth Authority sent prisoner A-63837 to the medium security prison at Soledad.

Soledad is a part of the California that is not California, that is, it is a place not of movie stars or cablecars, but of pears and prunes, pear-pickers and prune-pickers. Walled in by the Diablo and Santa Lucia ranges, it is burned and dusty throughout the summer and rainy in winter. Soledad is not the kind of place to which one would go to leave one's heart.

Yet Soledad, no less than Watts, is physically a part of California, and as such, is a legatee of the state's allure. There is a sign on the side of Highway 101 that runs through the town which reads. "It's All Happening In Soledad." However, just as the black who fled from the East and the South in hopes of finding the good life in Watts have been forced to live in frustration, disappointment and neglect, so have the white dustbowl refugees who have settled in Soledad and the rest of the Salinas Valley.

The luckiest ones have gotten out, but for many physical escape was an impossibility. However, in 1952, the state of California presented the town with a means of internal escape when it built a prison there. A prison provides jobs which in turn distribute money. But more important, a prison provides power--or its illusion--and in Soledad the prison was providing power to people who could get it in no other way.

The fundamental characteristic of people who hold power is that they know how to protect it. If they didn't they wouldn't have it. For a guard or a warden, power means control. It is the ability to stop something from happening. While in other institutions, control is a means, as in the army where it is a means to "combat readiness;" control is an end in itself in the prisons of America.

Regardless of what correctional theories may advocate, a man is sent to prison neither to be reformed nor to be further punished beyond the punishment inherent in his removal from society. A con goes to the joint simply to do his time. This is obviously society's wish, for 95 per cent of the $1.5 billion that is budgeted for all prisons--both state and federal--is spent simply to maintain the prisoner in custody. To do his time as unobtrusively as possible is also the wish of the average inmate. He seeks only to survive his sentence, accumulate clean time and leave. Escape is on his mind, but it is seen more as a moral right than as a viable alternative. A poem by Ethridge Knight, a black writer who did eight of a 20 in the Indiana State joint at Michigan City, describes one of the most powerful deterrents to escape:

"The warden said to me the other day

(innocently, I think), 'Say, etheridge,

why come the black boys don't run off

like the white boys do?'

I lowered my jaw and scratched my head

and said (innocently, I think), 'Well, suh,

I ain't for sure, but I reckon it's cause

we ain't got no wheres to run to."'

Though this factor applies almost universally to black inmates, it also applies to the poor whites who make up the majority of America's inmate population.

However, simply to maintain physical custody over the inmate is to be no closer to having him under total control than was holding a slave the enslaving of the man. The uncontrolled inmate, though he may be safely in his cell today, tomorrow could be over the wall, just as the smiling and quaintly intelligent darkie of yesterday turned out to be Nat Turner.

When Nat Turners unleash their rage or when cons go over the wall, the system that failed to hold them invariably comes under attack. Although much of the attacks call for the further application of existing mechanisms of control, some advocate employing the opposite tack or even the abolition of the system. In any case, such criticisms threaten the system as it stands, and in so doing threaten the standing of the men who operate and directly profit from the system.

Thus, just as it was imperative for slave drivers to devise mechanisms for the total control of their slaves, so it is for the men who operate the prison systems.

In the California system, as it is in the federal and those of other states, the primary mechanism is the rules of the prison. Numerous, vague, often petty, and in all cases independently formulated for each of the state's 13 institutions, the rules give the prison authorities a triple leverage. First, they allow the officials to keep the behavior of the majority of inmates under control. Second, they allow them to identify early prisoners who are developing the consciousness of resistance. Finally, they provide a means of arresting this process before the con can convert evolving consciousness into embarassing action.

George Jackson spent a year in Soledad. In his first four months, he was accused of seven violations of prison rules. When he came up for parole after the expiration of his minimum sentence, his prison record classified him as "surly and intractable." A bad nigger who "flatly refused to obey orders." Parole was denied and con A-63837 was transferred to San Quentin.

In denying Jackson parole and transferring him to San Quentin, the state officials essentially were trying to impress upon him the power that was at their disposal. Soledad, a medium security prison, is by no means a pleasant environment in which to spend your twenty-first year on earth, but Q has long been notorious as the roughest joint in the state. By exhibiting their ability not only to deny him release but also to worsen the conditions of his confinement, the authorities hoped to drive defiance from Jackson by intimately acquainting him with the cost of such resistance.

For many, particularly young cons with long sentences, simply seeing San Quentin is enough. To see its walls and buildings, some of which are over 100 years old, is to regard a place that radiates control. Control enforced by any means necessary.

Seeing San Quentin was practically all the authorities let Jackson do. After a brief stay, he was transferred to Tracy. Having let him see the whip, they gave him the carrot.

The carrot-whip option of the site of confinement ranks second only to the leverage provided by the indeterminate sentence as a customarily effective weapon at the disposal of the California penal officials. They can punish the prisoner with whom they are dissatisfied or by whom they are threatened by sending him to San Quentin or Folsom, the maximum security joint. On the other hand, it is also in their power to reward a con by transferring him to Chino or one of the other minimum security prisons-without-walls located in the southern part of the state. Moreover, the authorities have a whole range of institutions in between and joints catering to special interests. A homosexual, for instance, who has played the game right, would be rewarded with a transfer to San Luis Obispo where homosexuals are known not to be hassled. The vocational schools hold three advantages. First, they are not as tight as the penitentiaries. Second, they offer the prisoner training in skills that will be marketable after his release. Third, they put Chino, with its golf course and swimming pool, a mere step away.

However, George Jackson didn't bite the bait. He stayed at Tracy less than nine months before being transferred back to San Quentin in November of 1962 because he was "in need of control."

Not only did Jackson not take the bait, he now seemed to hold the offer of it in contempt. Officials reported that Jackson came back to San Quentin with a "changed attitude." Precisely what this change in attitude entailed is difficult to say. Jackson's prison record shows an escalation in the severity of the violations with which he was now being charged. According to the record, Jackson, who was not a small man, was beginning to throw his weight around.

Violence is the currency of action and reaction in prison. It is also a rite of passage. It is employed by guards and members of the convict establishment as a means of maintaining control. Other inmates find it the only way of preserving their anal virginity. For many--both prisoners and guards--it is as familiar and necessary as breathing. Yet, just as it is on the outside, violence is only a symptom of more fundamental stress or change.

It is difficult to say precisely when or where it began, but in his second term at San Quentin or before, George Jackson did begin to change. At some time in some joint, George Jackson read or heard or did or was done to something that was for him like a slow-fused madeleine. Some part of the puzzle lowered itself into place and initiated a descent into hell so intense as to jimmy the gates of heaven.

Largely, Soledad Brother is the log of that descent. It catches Jacks in mid-flight in June of 1964. He was still in San Quentin then, but the first letter of the book reveals that already he was vastly different from the aimless small-time booster California had flushed into its prisons three years before. He writes to his mother:

...I have made some giant steps toward acquiring the things that I personally will need if I am to be successful in my plans: aside from the factual material acquired from books and observations, there is, as you know, a certain quality of character needed to perform the thing that I have in mind. I have completely repressed all emotion; have learned to see myself in perspective, in true relationship with other men and the world. I have completely arrested the susceptibility to...give credence to...shallow unnecessary things...that lock the mind and hinder thinking.

Although at this point he had not totally succeeded in effecting it. George Jackson had come to the realization that the first thing he had to do to and for himself was to undergo a self-inflicted purgation. In this letter to his mother, he writes as if the process were already a fait accompli: "...neglect and loneliness have no effect on me anymore. I feel no pain of mind or body, and the harder it gets the better I like it." But then he adds in what is probably a more realistic reflection of his state of development. "I must rid myself of all sentiment and remove all possibility of love." He envisions that ultimately. "After I am finished with myself, an observer who could read my thoughts and watch my actions would never believe that I was raised in the United States, and much less would he believe that I came from the lowest class, the black stratum of the slave mentality."

Eventually, Jackson would not pursue some of the goals he was now outlining for himself or assumed that he had already reached. Eventually, he would regret the fact that forces outside of himself caused him to reach--or at least come disastrously close to--the point at which the possibility of love was expunged from his character. Yet in the emotional jungle of a prison, love or perhaps even the potential for it is a prohibitively high state of vulnerability. For the heterosexual man, love can find no physical expression. It becomes only one more item on the list, headed by parole, of things denied from without.

To deny from within urges that would be in any case frustrated from without is not so much repression as it is conditioning for self-determination. In an environment in which the restrictions on one's freedom to fulfill even one's most basic needs and wants are as severe as they are in prison, one can rebel in overt disobedience. However, disobedience has programmed liabilities of its own. Disobedience--defiance without direction--had put George Jackson into the prison system. There, further disobedience could only result in a further escalation in his state of captivity, for the prison system with its rules and punishment options is well-armed to deal with the directionless rebel. By compulsively disobeying, one is playing the system's game. The game the system was designed to win.

However, there is an alternative, and it was this alternative that George Jackson, as Malcom X had before him, was now discovering. He had come to the realization that all his life he had been playing on the assumption that the system's game was as fair as it was advertised, and moreover, was the only game in town. He saw that he had been betting his life on the promises of the pot unaware that the game was winner deals and dealer wins. And each time he had lost he had lashed out, angry and ashamed that he had again been taken. But when the call went out again to "place your bets, please," he had invariably anted up once more.

Since it is not within your power to change the rules of their game, you can not change its results. However, you can change the game that you will play. Jackson saw the truth of this maxim manifested in the liberation struggles of African peoples. In their struggles, he saw men and women who, though they were black and oppressed, had discovered a way to disengage themselves from the cultural and psychological oppression that American blacks still suffered under. Once disengaged, the Africans were able to devise successful ways of terminating colonial tyranny and establishing their own independence.

Jackson attempted to apply this logic to his own life. Rather than trying to win an education in one of the prison vocational schools, he inaugurated a program of intensive self-education. This does not mean that he stopped going to prison classes. To a large degree, he did not have such an alternative. But he purged himself of all vestiges of the feeling that if he did not learn through the system he would not learn at all.

To be sure there were inconsistencies in Jackson's thought at the time. Although he was an advocate of liberation, he was unwilling to see women as full partners in the struggle. "Their job is to train the children in their early life to be men or women...This is a big job, to train and propagate the race!! Is this not enough?"

Yet, unevenness is inherent to growth, particularly to growth in an environment as repressive as is prison. Had George Jackson been on the outside at this point, he might well have had the kind of experiences that later were to allow him to expand his view of a woman's role and potential. Moreover, Jackson's temporary chauvinism was not so much an intellectual conviction as it was an emotional response to his family situation.

As a part of his purgation, Jackson was giving a lot of thought to the condition of his family and the black family in America. He saw the slave mentality as a disease passed from black generation to black generation by the roles which the economic system of America forced black men and women to play. The black man was submitted to a dual castration: the economic one which he had to endure on the job or in unemployment, and the emotional one, endured at home, largely a by-product of his financial impotence. Emasculation was bequeathed to his sons because, like their father, they were dominated by their mother and were without a suitable model of masculinity they could emulate.

Without this model, the black sons "resist and rebel but do not know what, who, why, or how exactly they should go about this. They are aware but confused...they end where I have ended. By using half measures and failing dismally to effect any real improvement in their condition, they fall victim to the full fury of the system's repressive agencies."

Jackson was not merely analyzing this process as a means of purging himself of its effects. He hoped that by indicating to his parents the mistakes they had made in rearing him he would convince them not to repeat those mistakes on his younger brother Jonathon.

According to popular conception, the prisoner is always a man in segregation. Forced aloneness is seen as the punishment he pays for his crimes. A soul on ice, he goes to the penitentiary to seek a personal absolution. In the spare quiet of his cell, isolated from his fellow men, he contemplates his crime and punishment. However, the process of purgation and change which Jackson was undergoing was not occurring in a human vacuum, nor even in an atmosphere of rational calm. He was still in the joint, and in the joint there are always forces that try to make sure you don't escape an awareness of where you are.

In April of 1965, George Jackson was charged with knifing another inmate. Jackson, who claims never to have employed violence except in self-defense, wirtes in Soledad Brother that the charge was just one in a number of attempts to undermine his growing influence with other cons. "This is all a well-thought out effort to frighten me...I guess they want to show me and those around me here how powerless I am in their hands." However, the ploy, Jackson asserts, is not going to work:

"Fear, the emotion that stiffens and inhibits the minds of most men, causing them to be totally incapable of acting in their defense at the moment of trial, is totally lacking in me. I could look upon my total ruin with as detached an unconcern as I look upon theirs. The payment for life is death."

Yet though Jackson was confident "I'll come out of this as I have everything else. I'll see Ghana yet;" he was also aware of the cumulative attrition resulting from his indefinite confinement:

"But how much longer will this last for me in and out of prison, for you in and out of debt, for the others of our kind who suffer jail, mental institutions and the like. How long will we be forced to live this life, where every meal is an accomplishment, where every movie or pair of shoes is a fulfillment, where circumstance never allows our children to develop past a mental age of 16. I've been patient, but where I'm concerned patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice."

Perhaps the most difficult thing with which Jackson was trying to deal was this uncertainty. Under the indeterminate sentence law, he had no way of knowing when or if he would ever be released. Charged with assault on a fellow inmate, he faced the added possibility of serving the next few years in isolation. Each day that he spent in prison was a protraction of his state of terminal vulnerability. "I go to bed each night, hoping, trying to avert the storm that is now coming on. I find each morning as I found this one, freighted with the possibilities of my own disaster." Chained to the flaps of an institutional Icarus, "I begin to weary of the sun."

Yet just as this experience had "engendered in me a flame that will live, live to grow, until it either destroys my tormentor or myself," it also nurtured compassion and empathy:

"The early hours of morning are the only time of day that one can find respite from the pandemonium caused by these the most uncultured San Quentin inmates. I don't let the noise bother me...because I try to understand my surroundings. I've asked myself, as I do about