[News] Doing Time for Political Crime

[News at freedomarchives.org]

http://www.counterpunch.org/
August 5, 2004

Doing Time for Political Crime

Paul and Silas, Bound in Jail

By PETER LINEBAUGH

Dave Gilbert, serving a life-sentence in New York, has just come out with 
an important, wonderful book, No Surrender: Writings from an 
anti-imperialist political prisoner, and Staughton Lynd, counsellor to 
death row in Ohio, has just published the scathing j’accuse of our times, 
Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising.
Forty years ago they were prominent in SDS (Students for a Democratic 
Society), and around then they sang a song that had come up north with the 
civil rights movement and which became as appropriate to black power 
militants thrown into the penitentiary by COINTELPRO as it had been to ‘the 
beloved community’ suffering in the racist lock-ups of Mississippi.


Paul and Silas, bound in jail
Had no money for to go their bail
refrain:
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.


We have shut up more than two million behind bars, with almost five million 
on probation or parole. As the war and empire grow, so do the prisons. The 
one lurches recklessly about the planet, insanely flaying about like an 
ogre gone mad; the other swells behind green berms interlaced with gleaming 
razor wire where ‘stress positions’ are studied by social scientists and 
death is dealt out by injection needle. Empire and prison grow together in 
parallel. The ogre is two-headed in the USA: one head has just grunted in 
Boston, and during the pause before the other head starts to bellow in New 
York, let us bend our ears to these voices from below, from inside the 
belly of the beast.

David Gilbert is a political prisoner. Staughton Lynd writes about prison 
politics. Dave Gilbert is a lifelong staunch ally of the black 
revolutionary movement. Staughton Lynd has been a civil rights worker, lo! 
these many decades. Dave has long thought that the ‘white working class’ 
was on the whole hopelessly compromised by the white supremacy of the 
ruling class. Staughton shows that on ‘the race question’ the prisoners of 
Ohio’s maximum security prison – black and white - expressed themselves as 
“the convict race.” Dave writes now from his tiny cell about the whole world.

Staughton, a peacenik of the world (Palestine, Nicaragua, South Africa, and 
Youngstown), writes about eleven days in one prison down in Scioto county 
along the Scioto River.

The Dean of the University told the students “don’t go into Harlem.” David 
did, and he listened to Malcolm X. So much of his politics, the genius of 
his activism, came from the AfroAmerican struggle. Dave linked the cry of 
“Black Power” to the struggle of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. 
Dave Gilbert in 1965 founded the first anti-Vietnam war committee at 
Columbia University. He welcomed in 1967 into SDS the first pure statements 
of women’s liberation. He then helped lead the Columbia strike of 1968. In 
addition to being an activist, David was a man of words, a careful fighter 
in the battle of ideas, able to assemble convincing argument and to express 
moral indignation with dignity and righteousness without yelling, as I 
remember from editorial meetings of the graduate student union journal, 
Ripsaw. He helped SDS to see that the USA was an empire (Niall Ferguson, 
Michael Ignatieff, take note).

Dave Gilbert helped form the Weather Underground. Without killing anyone, 
the Weather Underground bombed military and corporate targets, during the 
early 1970s. Another voice from Columbia University at the time is provided 
by Barry S. Willdorf, Bring the War Home! A Novel About Resistance to the 
Vietnam War and Racism in the United States Marine Corps.


Only thing that we did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness so long
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.


Dave Gilbert wrote, “any white movement worthy of the name ‘revolutionary’ 
had to take on the task of building an underground that could carry on 
armed struggle against this criminal government.” This is the writing of 
historical agency, but it is also writing from too long a stay in the 
wilderness. What is a revolutionary? What court could bring “this criminal 
government” to trial? What is a “white movement”? These questions were not 
answered, though they remain on the table. As for the meaning of 
“underground”, and “armed struggle,” the answers became clear.

What David did wrong happened in 1981 when Thatcher and Reagan were in 
power, and the prisons grew. In fact it was the year when the “golden 
gulag” was placed around the neck of the republic, as Ruth Gilmore shows. 
David Gilbert was arrested for his role as a driver in a notorious attempt 
to expropriate a Brinks money truck in Nyack, N.Y., in which two police 
officers and one Brinks guard were killed. As an accessory he is now 
serving a life sentence in the N.Y. state prison system, shunted about 
according to the whim and ways of the Department of Corrections - now 
Elmira, now Attica, presently Dannemora.

At the opening of his trial in September 1982 he said to the court which he 
and his co-defendants, Kuwasi Balagoon and Judy Clark, refused to 
recognize, “We are neither terrorists nor criminals. It is precisely 
because of our love of life, because we revel in the human spirit, that we 
became freedom fighters against this racist and deadly imperialist system.”

We may identify three types of political prisoner. The first is defined 
well by Dave Gilbert. “A political prisoner,” he writes, “is anyone whose 
incarceration is a result of his or her actions taken, or positions 
espoused, on behalf of a political cause – specifically a political cause 
on behalf of the oppressed and downtrodden in society and against the 
powers that be.” He then proceeds to identify different types of political 
prisoners, viz., prisoners of war, resistance fighters, civil disobedience 
activists, and prisoners of conscience.

Staughton Lynd illustrates how prisoners may become political as a result 
of incarceration. This is a second sort of political prisoner. The 
prisoners learn to respect one another; the prisoners come to expect respect.

The story he tells began on Easter Sunday, April 1993, at the Southern Ohio 
Correctional Facility in Lucasville. A long train of abuses on the part of 
the prison authorities included over-crowding, racist double-celling, 
coaching witnesses, massive shakedowns, scrapped programs, increased use of 
snitches, deal cutting, criminal misconduct, and forced application of a 
type of TB tests which violated religious taboo. As a last resort, the 
prisoners, mostly black, took hostage from the mostly white guards, and 
over the course of the eleven day occupation of the prison one correctional 
officer and nine prisoners were murdered.

It was one of the longest prison riots in U.S. history, yet it was not 
publicized much at the time because Janet Reno, the lictor of the Clinton 
administration, ignited the conflageration at the Branch Davidian compound 
in Waco, Texas, where so many were consumed, white and black. The flames of 
federal destruction were more attractive to the media observers than the 
pathetic graffiti inside Lucasville – “Black and White Together 11 Days,” 
“Convict Race,” or hand-drawn press releases on bed sheets – “The state is 
not negotiating,” “This administration is blocking the press from speaking 
to us!!” Two members of the convict race, a white one and a black one, 
stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the yard, surrounded by the 
firepower of the State of Ohio and ignored by media bullhorns.

Five men are currently on death row for the murder of the correctional 
officer. They are George Skatzes (Aryan Brotherhood), Siddique Abdullah 
Hasan (Sunni Muslim), Jason Robb (Aryan Brotherhood), Namir Abdul Mateen 
(Sunni Muslim), and Bomani Hondo Shakur whose name means Thankful Mighty 
Warrior. These men are solid with each other.

There is a point at which the welder’s torch becomes so hot, and burns with 
such purity, that it’s flame is no longer yellow, orange, or red, but burns 
blue. Then it is capable of cutting through steel. Staughton Lynd has 
consumed the trial transcripts, he has patiently endured the hysteria of 
the media, he has listened to the men on death row for seven years, and he 
has lived the struggles of the rust belt. His torch has illuminated all the 
evidence, it burns well beyond heated anger and smoldering resentment, and 
by cutting through the state-sponsored lies, threats, evasions, 
harassments, racist provocations, snitching, and venality, it has attained 
the efficiency of the blue flame of truth.

If you want to understand the American gulag, if you oppose the death 
“penalty” of innocent people, if you can imagine honor, solidarity, and 
respect among the poorest and most degraded white, brown, and black, if you 
can imagine Aryan Brothers, Muslims, and Black Gangster Disciples in unity 
against a common enemy – the wall – then you are ready for this j’accuse: 
“I accuse the State of Ohio of deliberately framing innocent men.” This is 
state-sponsored terrorism, pure and simple. The goal is precisely to 
re-assert murderous race relations, for there are more parallels than one 
between the Lucasville rebellion and the Waco massacre.
Staughton Lynd explains that respect, derived as it is from the Latin verb 
“to see,” is at the base of two of the world’s profoundest political 
values, Satyagrah from the east, habeas corpus from the west. Satyagraha is 
what Gandhi believed in. It means clinging to the truth, and truth is the 
opposite of violence.

When we recognize the truth of another person, when we refuse to overlook 
them, then we respect them. Respect is tied also to the writ of habeas 
corpus, “the foundation of the Anglo-American system of justice, because it 
requires the state to produce the prisoner in open court so that friends 
and relatives can see the prisoner, and can confirm with their own eyes and 
ears that the government has informed the prisoner of the specific crimes 
with which he or she is charged.”

Marilyn Buck who herself has served twenty years in prison for political 
crime, writes of the difficulty of writing, “It is a never-ending effort to 
get hold of reading materials and to keep them, or to do research, much 
less to read, study, and think. Thought is constantly disrupted; arbitrary 
rules and interruptions create a chaos in which sorrow, discontent, and 
rage are the generalized response to and currency of the harsh cruelty, 
brutality, and absences of imprisoned women’s and men’s lives. Noise, 
stress, fear, even mental breaks fill the time and space of the prison world.”

The outstanding journalists in the American prisons are Paul Wright, Mumia 
Abu-Jamal, Ray Luc Levasseur, Marilyn Buck, Sundiata Acoli, Wilbert Rideau, 
Ron Wikberg,Jalil Muntagim, and Dave Gilbert, comparable to the 
revolutionary 1790s in England when an extraordinary assortment of ‘guests 
of His Majesty’ involuntarily gathered in Newgate prison – radicals, 
democrats, commoners, abolitionists, mutineers, Jacobins, vegetarians, 
Irish freedom fighters, union organizers.

Let us describe the virtues of No Surrender with the help of Ho Chi Minh, 
also a prison poet.


The body is in prison,
The mind escapes outside:
To bring about great things
The mind must be large and well-tempered.


David Gilbert’s mind escapes outside, to the whole world. He describes it 
in a nutshell. “Today’s world economy has evolved into a colossal system of 
debt peonage, with some 70 nations and billions of human beings in its 
cruel thrall. It’s a system that brings unprecedented wealth to the 
superrich while, literally, squeezing the lifeblood out of the people who 
can least afford it.”

He describes it in the round. He writes about extraordinary Sandinistas, 
twelve women in Nicaragua; he writes about young Palestinians and Israeli 
human rights activists during the intifada in Gaza; he writes about the 
trafficking of Burmese women and girls into brothels in Thailand; he writes 
with unalloyed admiration of the restrained testimony of Japanese American 
women; he writes about the disappeared in Guatemala and the deterioration 
of human rights in East Timor; he writes about the dirty war in Columbia 
and the democratatorship in Bogotá; he writes about Chico Mendes and the 
empate, or stand-offs, of the Brazilian rubber-tappers; he writes about the 
organ cancers of Navajo teenagers and ecological “sacrifice zones” of New 
Mexico; he writes with lyricism and fellow-feeling for the Zapatistas of 
Chiapas; he is open-minded about the Sendero Luminoso in Peru and distills 
a useful set of criteria for noticing when a revolutionary movement is 
going badly astray; he writes with passionate intensity about the eboli 
virus in Zaire and the prevalance of AIDS in Africa.

Indeed on that subject though the “body is in prison” it could as well be 
in Africa. He pioneered the system of AIDS education known as “peer 
counseling,” against bureaucrats of health as well as the bureaucrats of 
punishment. In this, he was like his forbears, Dr. James Parkinson, the 
English Jacobin who diagnosed shaking palsy and was a revolutionary 
democrat during the 1790s, or Dr. Che Guevara for whom the health of the 
body politic was foremost and whose clinic straddled the Atlantic to 
include Africa and America. Dave Gilbert has ‘brought about great things.’

David’s mind has become large and well-tempered. He grapples with some of 
the thinkers on the outside who also aspire to do great things. He thinks 
with, rather than against or upon, Barbara Kingsolver, bell hooks, Manuel 
Castells, Walter Rodney, and Christian Parenti, in essays that are 
independent appreciations in respectful, intelligent conversation.

His essays on other political prisoners like Leonard Peltier or Mumia 
Abu-Jamal are tributes of intelligence and honor. His recollection of his 
comrade, Ted Gold, who died in the townhouse explosion on 11th street in 
New York on March 1970, and his tribute to his comrade Marilyn Buck doing 
twenty years in California prisons, are written with ardor and passion. His 
three haiku poems to Mumia I can compare only to E.P. Thompson’s homage to 
Allende. He reaches out to his fellow internationalist, the Belfast 
freedom-fighter of the IRA, Joe Doherty, who did nine years in the U.S. 
gulag quoting his poem,


Some say soon, my walls will fall
In the dust I’ll dance to the chorus of Mankind.


Joe Doherty was released as part of he Good Friday Agreement off 1998.

Gilbert is liberal with praise, and though criticism is always direct it is 
always gentle. His letters to his son, like Gramsci’s letters from prison 
to his son, are pure fancy, pure delight. The two of them, father and son, 
engaged in an epic creation on successive long-distance phone calls which, 
like the blind bard who told the story of Troy, they had to do so 
sightless. They call it “The Vortex.” As an introduction to the feeling of 
the Weather underground organization nothing exceeds the courage, cunning, 
suspense and righteous adventure of “The Vortex” except perhaps the South 
African novelist, Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep.

But David Gilbert was a Weather person, and doesn’t he deserve to suffer? 
This is the tune of the New York Times whose fulsome pleasure greets the 
surfacing of these revolutionary militants from the cold underground with 
odious little pills of hate setting in motion, as Wordsworth put it under 
similar circumstances, “the insinuated scoff of coward tongues.”

Radical chic to identify with the outlaws; social banditry became the icing 
on the cake; and of course it is easy to scorn these postures and 
pretensions are deservedly scoffed. The postures – “We are all outlaws”- 
claimed the Berkeley radicals, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. Are all 
prisoners political prisoners? No, but we held that all prisoners could 
become political prisoners, since inherent in times of change is the view 
and the experience that human beings can change, our sympathies may 
enlarge, our consciousness can be raised. Later, after the times changed, 
well then, we separate the sheep from the goats, and any fool can see that 
you were a sheep all along, and you, why you were born a goat!

At some moments in history it is not yet clear what is going to happen, we 
already know that our own actions help determine the outcome, we have a 
full sense of historical agency. It is not the times that are a-changing, 
it is we who change. It is the revolution which makes the revolutionaries. 
On the other hand, realism is the cry of repression; it clangs shut with a 
metallic finality, and we turn away, shoulders slightly sunk, scratching 
our heads sadly. If we look back in that mood feeling only “the melancholy 
waste of hopes o’erthrown” (Wordworth again), we begin to prepare the 
ground for apostacy. Realism is a mask that protects us from both. That 
scholarly stance is well represented by Cummins in his account of the 
California prisoner movement.

The course of Michel Foucault through this time had a similar starting 
point in the general strike of Mai ’68 and an apparent similar conclusion 
in the incarceration of its ultras by 1971. That year he formed Groupe 
d’information sur les prisons, whose methodology was to have those who 
suffered speak for themselves. In September was the Attica massacre, in 
December a prison mutiny at Toul, France. In November 1971 he shocked Noam 
Chomsky in debate by declaring, “The proletariat doesn’t wage war against 
the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The 
proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in 
history, it wants to take power.” It’s a point.

In contrast to the Marxist tradition which puts the concept of Value at the 
center of its critiques, Foucault put the emphasis on Power. This 
corresponded to a late 60s discourse that emphasized ethnicity in the Third 
World revolutions, black, and brown and red. In those days the word 
“nation” among revolutionaries carried much the same freight that the term 
“commons’ does today, a locus of collective resources, a place of 
cooperation, mutualism. Unlike the commons whose borders remain contested, 
the ‘nation’ was an ethnic, a racial construct.


In weakness we create distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
Which we perceive, and not which we have made.


The study of the labor theory of value leads to the understanding of the 
global nature of capitalism without the puny boundaries. This has become 
clear with neo-liberalism. The second significance of this concept of value 
is that in raising the problem of the transformation of value into price, 
it enables us to understand the re-distribution of surplus-value as rent, 
interest, and profit, and the continuous struggle for unity within the 
capitalist class.

Five years after the massacre Foucault visited Attica concluding, “Attica 
is a machine for elimination.” Prison was a place of exclusion and 
marginalization. In contrast to ‘workers,’ it contains ‘plebeians.’ This 
was a distinction that ran parallel to a Marxist contrast between 
‘proletariat’ and the ‘lumpen-proletariat.’ In England at the time the 
Warwick School distinguished ‘social crime’ from ‘crime without 
qualification.’ I don’t think either the French scholars nor the ones in 
England fully absorbed American experience, which, as Gilbert points out, 
is the experience of slavery and genocide, the preconditions for the 
economic and technological base of the continent and the cultural and 
political superstructure of the regime. In America the prison was seen in 
continuity with the plantation, while in Europe its progenitor was the 
workhouse. In America simplification gave us white and black rather than 
pleb and prol or worker and lumpen. Foucault’s microphysics of power became 
totalizing, and petrified in American academia. Hence, Foucault’s epigones 
were seriously flawed.

Hence, also, as Staughton Lynd implies, the fallacy of essentialist 
whiteness studies which the ‘convict race’ overthrows.
Foucault’s last lectures were on Diogenes, the ancient Greek slave 
philosopher, who faced with imperial warfare sought to serve the cause, or 
reflect it back to the citizens, by incarcerating himself in a barrel. 
Truth is always embodied.

At the end of Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer makes a game with Huck about the 
escape of Jim. “I was studying over my text in Acts Seventeen, before 
breakfast.” Tom Sawyer is such a jerk - his reference to scriptures should 
be to Acts Sixteen, and he is such a white jerk, right out of “O Brother, 
Where Art Thou?” But Acts sixteen records a serious liberation episode.

But about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise 
to God, and the prisoners were listening to them; and suddenly there came a 
great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison house were shaken; 
and immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s chains were 
unfastened. (Acts 16: 25-6)

It is not just the apostles or the political prisoners who were freed, 
there is no sharp distinction here between the political prisoner and the 
other kinds.

There is a third meaning (I think) to political prisoner, in addition to 
the one Dave Gilbert defines or that Staughton Lynd describes. The prisoner 
may be freed, or released, or amnestied, as a result of political changes. 
The act of freeing the prisoners, the opening of the jails, may be an act 
which in itself politicizes prisoners at the instant that they cease to be 
prisoners, and it is not an attribute of individual. This we could call the 
jubilee moment. Isaiah (6:1) explains, “he hath sent me to bind up the 
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the like opening of 
the prison to them that are bound.” Later when the carpenter’s son returned 
to his birthplace, he preaches to the poor the very words, “he hath sent me 
to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the 
recovering of sight to the blind, and set at liberty them that are 
bruised.” (Luke 4:18) Later we learn that this particular son of man will 
separate the sheep from the goats:


“when I was hungry you gave me nothing to eat, when thirsty nothing to 
drink; when I was a stranger you gave me no home, when naked you did not 
clothe me; when I was ill and in prison you did not come to my help.” 
(Matthew 25: 42-4)


How can we contribute to the climate of opinion which will look upon 
amnesty favorably? We must be prepared to discuss regime change at home. 
How do we get Diogenes to come out of his tub? We have some inspiring 
experience. For instance, Staughton Lynd concludes his j’accuse with a 
chapter on Attica and amnesty.

Armed forces of the state, governed by Rockefeller, killed 29 prisoners and 
10 hostage guards on September 1971. Within a mere five years scandal broke 
out in the prosecutor’s office, and amnesty was declared to all concerned. 
Since the scandal of prosecutorial misconduct is as serious in Ohio as it 
was in New York, Lynd can call for amnesty for the Lucasville Five on death 
row, innocent of killing.


The very moment we thought we was lost,
Dungeon shook and the chains fell off.
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.


In the middle ages it was an aspect of kingcraft: opening the jails at 
coronation! In the coronation charter of Henry I for instance 5 August 1100 
he pledged, “I forgive all pleas and all debts.” Also, “I remit all 
murder-fines which were incurred before the day on which I was crowned 
king.” The world celebrates 14 July, Bastille Day, when the hated prison of 
the French monarchy was opened by the sans-culottes in 1789. At the 
beginning of that decade Newgate prison in London was opened up by the 
London crowds. The first long poem of the American Revolution was a poem 
about POWs and the British “prison ships.” In 1796 when Paul became Tsar of 
Russia he opened the prisons releasing all the captives including Tadeusz 
Kosciuszko, the Polish patriot and one time artillery officer for George 
Washington. In the February revolution in 1917 when the Tsar fell, Lvov 
freed the political prisoners in St. Petersburg, and the proletariat of the 
city completed the work he began by opening the prison doors for all. Thus, 
the dungeon can shake!

In a December 1990 meeting in New York of former political prisoners, 
Dorubha, the former Black Panther, took a race line, and began to “mau 
mau,” or berate, the predominantly white audience concerning the inherent 
racism of the white working class. We sat in silence. Who wants to defend 
the white working class? In the following months, however, here’s what we 
noticed.

With the downfall of Duvalier, Fort Dimanche was opened in Port-au-Prince 
just a few days before Titid was inaugurated president. The Free Mandela 
campaign had vast planetary effort which opened the door for him in 1990. 
In 1991 April three dozen more political prisoners were released from Roben 
Island. Then the Birmingham Six were released in England . In June 1991 a 
guerrilla attack freed 131 people incarcerated in San Salvador’s largest 
prison: dynamite blew a hole in the wall, guards and guerrillas battled for 
an hour, with four guerrillas and two soldiers killed. The Good Friday 
Agreement of 1998 between Britain and Ireland provided for the release of 
prisoners. Thus the chains may fall off!

So much of American history takes place in the prison, the plantation, or 
the factory. Dave Gilbert has been inside too long, listening to the 
discussions outside without being part of them. His politics is expressed 
sometimes in a kind of shorthand or formulas which derive their meaning 
only from a living context . He often laments the absence of the “mass 
base.” Once such shorthand was necessary in the heat of the times. However, 
the context has cooled considerably. The formulas are left, like fossils. 
We find them, beautiful in their detail, embedded in rock at various strata.

We have to deduce their context, and think to ourselves, for example, 
something like: ‘ah, there must have been an ocean here once: must have 
been zillions of beautiful critters: looks like something came down on them 
heavy, seems that over here it was sudden, over there it was gradual. The 
compression is the result of the weight of time and the heavy toll of 
repression – COINTELPRO, assassination, cocaine, betrayals.

“To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what 
stuff he is made of,” Samuel Beckett wrote. Let the lava be white supremacy 
of the ruling class. Then the steadfast hair may be John Brown, or George 
Skatzes, or David Gilbert. Anyone who has taken this journey has met such 
living fossils, tiny signs, which as soon as you get used to looking, seem 
to be everywhere. History is moved forward by such exceptions. At the time 
of the Roman empire, I think the number of exceptions was twelve, though 
most of them turned a hair when the heat came down. When Gandhi visited 
with the King of England he did not wear trousers, and I do not believe 
that a single hair on his spindly legs turned either.

Not lava, but an eroding mudslide was provided by William Bennett’s Book of 
Virtues which we search in vain for an entry on “love,” or one on 
“generosity,” or on “solidarity,” or on “hospitality.” These are some of 
the virtues of Dave Gilbert’s book. Jason Robb on death row in Lucasville, 
Ohio, provides Staughton Lynd with the “Noble Virtues” and the “Nine 
Charges” of the Aryan Norse which begins with the oath: “to maintain candor 
and fidelity in love and devotion to the tried friend: though he strike me 
I will do him no scathe.”

These values can help us recover from ‘Vietnam syndrome.’ We have tried 
increasing the number of capital punishments, only to learn that it leads 
to more war. We have tried increasing the number of prisoners as a means of 
combating crime only to become more frightened. The ‘Vietnam syndrome’ is 
the result not of defeat, for in truth, we (you and I, dear reader) were 
not defeated. The corporate, ruling class was defeated. A ‘syndrome’ is a 
cluster of pathological symptoms. In this particular syndrome, dread and 
shame are outstanding components, to wit, the shame of the criminalization 
which we have perpetrated within our own class, and the dread that some 
time, some way, we will be held to account. “While there is a soul in 
prison, I am not free,” said Debs.

Huge amounts of social complicity and political denial are required to be 
‘good Americans.’ It happened two hundred years ago at the time of the 
French Revolution; let us call it ‘the Jacobin syndrome’ which Wordsworth 
diagnosed:



 mid indifference and apathy
And wicked exultation, when good men
On every side fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness (disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers
On visionary minds) 
 in this time
Of dereliction and dismay


The ‘Vietnam syndrome’ cannot be overcome with more wars (Grenada, Panama, 
Kosovo, Iraq). The wars are prepared - we are softened up - by the exercise 
of capital punishment. At first just one or two - the hood is placed over 
our eyes - like Ricky Ray Rector, (you will not find this death in 
Clinton’s My Life), but then with legislative sensitivity making more 
capital punishments possible, as in the 1996 Effective Death Penalty Act - 
the electrodes are attached to our fingers - until the possibility is 
realized by the Governor of Texas who kills more than one hundred - we are 
placed on a little box and told that an abyss awaits us. We ignore the 
judicial slaughter, the lord high executioner then becomes President, and 
the public - hooded, electroded, pushed to the edge, and now suffering 
itself to be barked at - is sufficiently softened to be taken to war, 
cowering, stunned, and ever so soft, only to find 
 the Hard Site at Abu 
Ghraib. There one of the imperial torturers, one of the softeners up, had 
learned his trade as a guard at S.C.I. Greene where Mumia Abu-Jamal had 
been locked down.

 From Pennsylvania to Baghdad! From the Alleghenies to Mesopotamia! O my 
people!

Regime change in the USA? ‘Regime’ does not mean government or 
administration. ‘Regime’ means the set of conditions by which the system is 
maintained. This helps us understand our tasks. While imperialism runs on 
oil it is not driven by it; while a gang of neocon free marketeers usurps 
the government, it does not control the capitalist regime or the production 
of surplus value. The death penalty and the growth of the gulag have been 
essential to the form and function, the soul and spirit, of the global 
empire. Our movement must free our political prisoners and abolish the 
death penalty, two preconditions of the regime to come. Otherwise, we may 
tumble uselessly in our tubs.


Only thing that we did right
Was the day we begun to fight!
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.



Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the 
author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with 
Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the 
Revolutionary Atlantic. Linebaugh asks that any readers who have cases and 
stories of amnesties, and getting out of jail, by all the variety of means, 
contact him at: plineba at yahoo.com

FOR FURTHER READING

Daniel Burton-Rose, Dan Pens, Paul Wright (ed.), The Celling of America: An 
Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry (Common Courage Press: Monroe, 
Maine, 1998)

Richard Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement 
(Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 1994)

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage: 
New York, 1979)

Michel Foucault and John Simon, “On Attica,” Telos 19 (spring 1974)

David Gilbert, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political 
Prisoner (Abraham Guillen Press: Montreal, 2004)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalization and US Prison Growth: from military 
Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism,” Race & Class 40, 2/3 (1998/9).

Neil Gordon, The Company You Keep (Viking: New York, 2003)

Lee Griffith, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison 
Abolition (Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1993)

Staughton Lynd, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising (Temple 
University Press: Philadelphia, 2004)

Barry S. Willdorf, Bring the War Home! A Novel About Resistance to the 
Vietnam War and Racism in the United States Marine Corps (A Gauche Press: 
San Francisco, 2001)

Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of 
Crisis (Verso: New York, 1999)
</blockquote></x-html>

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