Prison organizing as tradition and imperative: a response to Sarah Haley, Toussaint Losier, and Waldo Martin.

• Date: 22 September 2017
• Author: Berger, Dan
• Published date: 22 September 2017
• Author: Berger, Dan

I BEGIN BY THANKING SARAH HALEY, TOUSSAINT LOSIER, AND WALDO Martin for their invaluable comments in this forum. It is an honor to have such generative and generous readings of my work from colleagues whose own pathbreaking scholarship has influenced me considerably. Likewise, I offer my thanks to Tony Platt for arranging this forum and to the editors of Social Justice for hosting it. In researching this book, I spent hours sitting around Tony's kitchen table pouring over flyers and newspapers from the 1970s; I relied on much of the work he and his colleagues in Social Justice completed during and since those years to analyze the revolutionary prison movement and the counterrevolutionary prison industrial complex.

Captive Nation is a history of the role prisons, prisoners, and political repression played within the Black Freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century. When I began this project, I wanted to understand why prisons motivated such radical antiracist mobilization prior to mass incarceration, when prisons became so plentiful and so clearly filled with people of color. I wanted to understand how people such as George Jackson and Angela Davis--widely quoted yet rarely historicized--emerged within prisons as powerful figures of Black radicalism. And I wanted to examine the ways in which prisoner organizing during this period might help modern society reorient its understanding of the origins of the carceral state and possibly bring about its undoing.

Recognizing the work of Black radicals as organizing was an important first step, which allowed me to work against prevailing wisdom that saw imprisoned political activity begin and end at violent rebellion. Although the prison movement produced several contemporaneous journalistic monographs, the primary historical study available to me was Eric Cummins's (1994) well-researched but deeply problematic The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement. Like many books concerning events of the 1960s published in the 1990s, Cummins's book treats Black Power as a violent deviation that catered to or was conjured by naive white leftists. Cummins ignores the robust print culture that emerged from prisons as well as the ways in which this activism anchored the larger politics of 1970s radical internationalism. As with other retrospective dismissals of Black Power from the 1990s, Cummins misses the centrality of women's labor to the prison movement, often viewing it as an elaborate psychosexual con between criminal Black men and naive white leftists. Drawing both on the plethora of new work on Black Power and on what Sarah Haley calls in this forum a "Black feminist methodology," I wanted to demonstrate what Waldo Martin terms "the catalytic and thus crucial roles played by Black prison organizing" in the larger Black Freedom struggle.

As Haley and Losier acknowledge, I am...