Time Essay: WHO (AND WHAT) IS A POLITICAL PRISONER?

FROM Berkeley to Bedford-Stuyvesant, scrawls of aerosol paint on ghetto walls demand: FREE ANGELA DAVIS. FREE THE SOLEDAD BROTHERS. FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. The phrase “political prisoner” is so laminated into the radical mind that, like “genocide” or “fascist pig,” it has become part of an unconscious ritual. George Jackson’s death last week at San Quentin raised some fundamental and difficult questions about the meaning of the term and to whom it applies.

Was Jackson in fact a political prisoner? And what about Angela Davis, accused of supplying guns to Jackson’s brother Jonathan in last year’s shootout at the Marin County Courthouse? Radicals and quite a few liberals, regardless of race, would emphatically answer yes. More than that, many would contend that all black prisoners in American jails are political prisoners in the sense that a “racist,” white-dominated political and economic system has condemned them, in their poverty and blackness, to lives of crime.

There is a disturbing grain of truth in the argument. To be black in America is indeed in many ways a political and social condition. All too often it is a condemnation to poverty and political impotence. For too many black youths, a numbingly meaningless school system becomes a sluice into crime, narcotics, precinct lockups, courts, and then prisons, with all the disastrous expertise that they have to teach. The nation’s judiciary, for which politicians presumably have the ultimate responsibility, too often seems a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Franz Kafka.

But the argument is indiscriminate—like a charge of buckshot. As Harvard Sociologist David Riesman observes: “Polemically, the term “is almost indefinitely extensible.” It is also an elusive term with a sociological rather than a precise legal definition. Classically it refers to someone who is prosecuted or jailed—not for crimes in the ordinary sense of the word, but for harboring or expressing opinions antagonistic to an established order of government. There is no question that the U.S. has a long and frequently dishonorable history of persecuting its citizens who hold unpopular opinions. The record reaches back past the Joseph McCarthy era to Sacco and Vanzetti, the Palmer raids, the Wobblies, and the Haymarket trial of 1887. There is also the ambiguous case of the Utah Mormons, who were persecuted in the late 19th century for the “crime” of practicing polygamy, then a canon of their faith. In a certain sense, those Latter-day Saints arrested for refusing to divorce their several wives could be regarded as “political” prisoners.

Nonetheless, a profligate inclusiveness tends to drain the phrase “political prisoner” of its specific (and still valid) meaning. To accept the idea that all black prisoners are political is to condemn implicitly the laws that sent them to prison and to suggest that they all be freed. But since an overwhelming majority of the victims of black crime are black, and since most blacks, in or out of ghettos, obey the law, the release of all black prisoners might strike law-abiding Negroes as a subtle kind of redoubled racism. Moreover, in demanding Angela’s freedom, radicals forget that by their own definition there are all manner of political prisoners in the U.S. who are not black. If all political prisoners are to be released, what about

James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan bluntly answers that “if someone has committed a crime of violence because of his political views, he damn well belongs in jail.”

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Ultimately the question of who is, and who is not a political prisoner can only be answered by specific cases, and the case of George Jackson requires careful and difficult assessment. A product of one of Chicago’s ghettos, he had been convicted twice on armed-robbery charges before he was sent to prison at the age of 19 for robbing a filling station of $70. The offense was, by almost any standard, criminal not political. Jackson received an indeterminate sentence of from one year to life. When it was first put to use, the indeterminate sentence seemed an intelligent reform in the comparatively enlightened California penal system. The theory was that convicts, instead of suffering through fixed terms, might be released whenever prison authorities thought they were rehabilitated. Unfortunately reform has proved to be a regression in many cases; indeterminate sentencing has given California prison authorities an extraordinary and often unjust discretionary power over their convict charges. Repeatedly, for the next eleven years, Jackson appeared before California parole authorities, and each time he was returned to his cell. There was an aspect of Jean Valjean in the procedure.

Even though he was a three-time loser, Jackson went to prison for a minor criminal offense that scarcely warranted an eleven-year sentence. Did the parole examiners who prolonged his term turn him into a political prisoner? Jackson filled his long stretch—more than seven years of it in solitary confinement—with an extraordinary self-education in languages, economics, history and philosophy. He concentrated increasingly on Marxist theory and did nothing to conceal his revolutionary politics, which called for the destruction of the capitalist system. His published prison letters, Soledad Brother, incandescent and often eloquent in their hatred, and his moving compassion for his people made him that contemporary incongruity—a literary celebrity in stir.

Harvard Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset is probably right in defining Jackson as a “politicized” rather than a political prisoner. Initially he was held in prison for his defiant intransigence. Eventually, it could be argued, parole boards may have kept him locked up because to them his radical political views were evidence that he had not been rehabilitated. For his part, Jackson rejected the entire notion of rehabilitation. He saw it as the prison system’s conspiracy to turn him into a subservient “good nigger.” It is easy to understand a parole board’s collective bafflement as it tried to decide what to do about this unabashed advocate of revolution who, like a 19th century anarchist bomb thrower, denied the legitimacy of all laws (“white, fascist, capitalist”) and regarded himself as virtually a prisoner of war.

Clearly his political views were offenses against the system. But just as clearly, if he was being kept in prison solely for those offenses, he was being denied due process of law because he had not been convicted for his opinions. Plenty of other radicals today advocate the violent overthrow of the American system. In theory at least they cannot be prosecuted until they act upon their beliefs in some overt way.

Under radical influence, a number of black convicts are placing their crimes —even acts of violence against their fellow blacks—in a political context. Similarly, some youthful white radicals tutored by Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, practice shoplifting and other crimes, which they justify ideologically as “ripping off the Establishment.” Exiled Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver took this process to rather grotesque lengths by explaining that he used to rape white women because he was so incensed by “the white-racist American system.” The rationale may be metaphorically interesting, but it is one that no free society can accept if it hopes to survive. A democracy—or a dictatorship, for that matter—obviously could not function under the radical assumption that a crime ceases to be a crime if the perpetrator can persuade himself that it has political intent. The revolutionary’s aim is to destroy the system, but a society naturally protects itself against those who want to overthrow it. The problem is how to avoid repression while achieving social stability and liberty even for would-be revolutionaries.

To many American radicals, white and black alike, the truth about what happened at San Quentin does not matter; they are convinced beyond doubt that George Jackson was a political martyr. It is sad that many of those who mourn Jackson are oblivious to the fact that three guards and two other convicts died with him. It is equally disturbing that Angela Davis’ defenders forget that, whatever her innocence or guilt in the episode, four people, including a judge, Jonathan Jackson and two convicts, died in the Marin County Courthouse gun battle. Surely white racists suspected of purchasing guns to use against blacks should be brought to trial. Why, then, should anyone accused of supplying weapons that were ultimately used for the murder at the courthouse not expect the same justice? Since Angela Davis was a fugitive for two months after the killings, it hardly seems unreasonable to deny her bail now. Her partisans have tried to invest her forthcoming trial with an exclusively political meaning. But if a political prisoner is one jailed solely for his ideological opinions, then it seems likely that neither Angela Davis nor George Jackson rates the label political prisoner.

A far better example would be Martin Luther King, who invited his arrests for a quite specific political goal. Or Bobby Scale, who underwent a political trial as a member, for a time, of the Chicago “conspiracy”—but not as a defendant in the New Haven trial, where a murder was involved. Or the Berrigan brothers, whose destruction of draft cards was a symbolic action directly intended to change the political course of the U.S. Undeniably the U.S. can and does manipulate the law to punish political dissenters. Yet unlike the ideological prisoners of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, America’s antiEstablishmentarians have been able to use the legal system to defend themselves, often with success. Dr. Spock’s conviction for conspiring to counsel young men in draft evasion was reversed. The Black Panthers, who see “politics” in every prosecution attempt, have an extraordinarily successful acquittal record. Even Angela Davis has written: “We will not infer that fascism in its full maturity has descended upon us. We must continue to make use of the legal channels to which we have access, which, of course, does not mean that we operate exclusively on a legal plane.”

Unquestionably, decent Americans have reason to complain about the persistence of a double standard of justice for blacks and whites, rich and poor, which reflects the wider pattern of discrimination throughout the nation. But that does not legitimize a rhetoric that equates violence with politics, rape with revolution. The gradual, painful struggle of the U.S. to make equality a fact instead of a broken promise lacks the seductive appeal of revolutionary apocalypse. But for the majority of Americans, regardless of race, it nonetheless remains the only way to conquer hypocrisy. It may also be the only way to prevent the waste of other George Jacksons.

Lance Morrow