Reflections on Inside/Out Organizing

AS PRISON ACTIVISTS, WE KNOW A LOT ABOUT MEN IN PRISON, BUT MUCH LESS about women. There are far fewer incarcerated women, and they are seldom in the news. My purpose here is to briefly reflect on certain events during three decades of prisoners' rights activism: first, the early days of activism in California, through which I identify seven organizing and unifying principles, and second, more recent activities in Canada. Years ago, I lived, worked, and studied in a variety of countries. Everywhere, I saw criminal justice systems as instruments of injustice. In the United States in the late 1950s, it was Blacks who were getting rounded up. In France in the 1960s, it was North African gypsies; in Eritrea it was Muslims. In Jamaica in the 1970s, it was Rastafarians and other anticolonialists. Globally, the patterns have been clear -- the people most likely to be criminalized, incarcerated, and tortured are primarily young men of political minority groups. In the late l960s, the civil rights, black power, antiwar, and women's movements spawned other social movements, such as organized homemakers, midwives, farm workers, welfare recipients, people with physical disabilities, and antiwar Vietnam War veterans. From within this melange of issues, prisoners' rights movement surfaced with a certain clarity and political force that recognized prisons as a key convergence of social injustices. While the prisoners' rights movement was taking shape as an offshoot of antiwar, anti-racism, and socialist movements, academic research and university courses were producing data and critical analyses of carceral enterprises. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I was an undergraduate (and later a graduate student), economist John Isbister and psychologist Ted Sarbin were producing empirically grounded critiques of prisons. In the Bay Area, attorney Faye Stender was exposing the lawlessness of prison regimes. The fledgling Crime and Social Justice journal (now Social Justice) became a valued aid in examining the intricacies of punishment as a state enterprise. Prisoners' writings and defense committees, especially those of war resisters and black power figures (particularly George Jackson, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Huey Newton), were stirring the public consciences of liberals and radicals alike. By the time the FBI went on a shoot-'em-up cross-country rampage against the Black Panthers, political prisoner support groups had been sprouting all over California and throughout the U.S. At U.C. Santa Cruz, we were being influenced by the writings of Richard Quinney, Jessica Mitford, and the Quakers' abolitionist book, Instead of Prisons. Educators such as Rafael Guzman, for whom I worked as a teaching assistant on campus and at Soledad prison, were taking students into prisons and bringing newly released prisoners to the university, three of whom were teaching assistants in his popular on-campus prison course. Prisons and universities represented antithetical institutions, and the contradictions between them exposed fundamental societal inequities and the mechanisms of social tracking. Taking the university into the prison felt like a revolutionary act. I also studied with, and later assisted, Herman Blake in a Black History course, which presented a perspective on the disproportionate numbers of African Americans in prison. These sorts of liberatory educational experiences were not uncommon in the 1970s, when, for example, Women's Studies was in its nascent stage. Benefit concerts, rallies, and grass-roots conferences on prisoners' rights generated extensive networks of activists with a primary focus on prisoners in the hardcore maximum-security men's institutions, such as Soledad, San Quentin, and Folsom. Many women, including self-identified feminists, participated in defense committees and other prison-related work, which most commonly focused on men. In the early 1970s, few people knew anything about women who were locked up. …

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