Orisanmi Burton. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. University of California Press, 2023.
Jocelyn Simonson. Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. The New Press, 2023.
In 1969, a writer who styled his name as raúlrsalinas wrote an ode to the places he called home and an indictment of the forces that oppressed him. “You live on, captive, in the lonely / cellblocks of my mind,” runs the opening stanza of “A Trip Through the Mind Jail,” surveying the neighborhoods of Salinas’s youth. By the end, he visits California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and “all / Chicano neighborhoods that now exist and once / existed; somewhere . . . . . , someone remembers . . . . .” More than fifty years on, the poem has been widely anthologized as a singular expression of Chicanismo across the American Southwest.
“A Trip Through the Mind Jail” first appeared in the inaugural issue of Aztlán de Leavenworth, a Chicano newspaper produced at a federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, where Salinas was incarcerated on a felony drug charge. Prison was where Salinas became a poet. It was also where he became a revolutionary, thanks in part to the people he met at Leavenworth, including Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar Collazo and Rafael Cancel Miranda, whose respective attacks on President Truman in 1950 and inside the US Capitol in 1954 had called attention to the US colonization of Puerto Rico. “We immersed ourselves in the Puerto Rican history and united our struggles,” Salinas later said of the Chicano prisoners at Leavenworth. But this organizing was more than an expression of pan-Latinx unity: “Through that connection and the Black Muslims that were coming in, and the Republic of New Africa, and the Black Liberation Army people, we began to talk.”
They did more than talk. On September 16, 1971, militants incarcerated at Leavenworth went on strike to protest their working conditions in the prison’s brush, furniture, and clothing factories. There was more to the strike than that: rebels were also protesting the murders of imprisoned comrades, including Black Panther Field Marshal George Jackson in San Quentin on August 21 and the twenty-nine prisoners killed by state troopers at Attica Correctional Facility on September 13, where an uprising had been violently suppressed. For days afterward, hundreds of surviving dissidents at Attica were tortured by New York State Police and prison guards. The Leavenworth rebels joined a wave of incarcerated militants around the country who were rising up in revolt.
Participants in these protests, including rebels from Leavenworth, would soon become the inaugural cohort of a new experiment in human caging: the control unit, a special wing of the prison that combined isolation with a kind of psychological warfare officials called “behavior modification.” In 1972, prison officials from across the US transferred some of their most rebellious and troublesome charges to a single federal prison in Marion, Illinois. Shortly after their arrival, these charges formed the Political Prisoners Liberation Front. “The convicts of this institution of Marion prison have in the past experienced many difficulties which were resolved by a collective effort,” the group wrote in a July 1972 statement announcing a strike after the beating of a Chicano prisoner. “And this collectivism is being called upon for still another serious problem confronting us today that must be resolved by whatever means necessary.” Yet the control unit would require new forms of resistance. To reorganize the men’s minds, the “behavior modification” program at Marion imposed prolonged isolation (culminating in a 23/7 lockdown), coerced psychotropic drugging, and brute force. Edgar Schein, the MIT psychologist who helped create the unit, drew on the brainwashing techniques used by China and North Korea against US prisoners of war in the early 1950s. As chronicled by the scholar Alan Eladio Gómez, these practices included isolation, “spying on prisoners and reporting back private material, tricking men into writing statements then shown to other inmates, exploiting informers and opportunists, [and] the disorganization of all group standards among prisoners.” Prisons, Schein and his colleagues recognized, were war zones: they were in the business not of “rehabilitation” but of vanquishing enemies. As Marion’s warden declared, “the purpose of the . . . Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large.”
Abolition operates on a different timeline. Its unshakable demand for immediate freedom starts from the impossible conditions of the dystopian here and now.
That declaration could serve as a mission statement for mass incarceration itself. More than just an unprecedented physical expansion of the US prison system since 1973, mass incarceration has also long been a form of counterinsurgent warfare aimed at those who would upend the order of things. Buoyed by participation in Black and associated radical movements, cadres of militants in the early 1970s inspired broader groups of incarcerated people to make the US prison system ungovernable, through uprisings, strikes, lawsuits, unionization drives, and other means. The organized revolt and accompanying polemics — from a mix of dedicated revolutionaries, newly politicized bandits, and people who simply seized any opportunity to resist their captivity — put the question of prison abolition squarely on the table. But the control unit and similar efforts answered revolutionary challenges to authority with brutality. Policies of isolation and behavior modification built today’s American prison system, and Marion was part of an epochal turn in carceral governance that abandoned even the pretense of reform. The result not only sent massively more people to prison, but kept them in more atomized and austere conditions.
After nearly a half century, a new wave of antagonists rose to challenge the American carceral state amid the volatile political economy of the 2010s: Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, #NoDAPL, #Not1More antideportation campaigns led by undocumented people, and a rolling series of prisoner-labor and hunger strikes. Such efforts began to shatter the illusion of invincible police power in the 2010s, leading to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. These movements were the outcome of a fifty-year fight over human caging that began in the cells of places like Attica, Leavenworth, and San Quentin. As in all struggles between liberation and oppression, the battles have occurred on ideological and material fronts: as movements work to close prisons and free their captives, they call into question a society rooted in punishment. The grim conditions of incarceration have always lit sparks of solidarity, but the past half century of escalating state violence in the forms of prisons and police has revived the abolitionist spirit — both in prison and on the streets — in greater numbers than ever. And while the tactical terrain shifts as more nonincarcerated people join the fight against an expanding punitive state, the strategic imperative and moral urgency remain. Much as an earlier generation said the future offered two paths, “socialism or barbarism,” the closing decades of the 20th century and the start of the 21st have presented a choice: abolition or authoritarianism.
Two new books examine revolutionary challenges to different phases of the US carceral order, linked in purpose but separated by over four decades. Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear studies the prison uprisings of the 1970s that reached their apex in what Burton, an anthropologist at American University, calls the “Long Attica Revolt.” In Radical Acts of Justice, legal scholar Jocelyn Simonson surveys the past decade of grassroots urban resistance to police and the courts. Despite their different temporal and institutional areas of focus, both books examine abolition as an epistemology and a praxis, and both understand the organic intellectualism of antiprison movements: the way these movements ask us to think differently about justice, safety, and politics. Reading them together helps connect two eras of insurgent organizing against the prison state. Each text recognizes, as do their protagonists, that the carceral system makes manifest the logic of patriarchal racial capitalism in its most violent extremes, which is what makes antiprison organizing so perilous, but also so rife with potential. “Amid conditions of extreme duress,” Burton writes, “the dregs of the capitalist order began to fashion themselves anew.”
That self-fashioning exceeds the limited framework typically applied in evaluations of protest movements, especially those led by incarcerated people. Burton rejects the conventional focus among activists, journalists, historians, and others on what he calls the “minimum demands” prisoners make to improve prison conditions, drawing from Black studies thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter to consider the more profound political struggle in which prisoners have engaged. Denigrated as poor and racialized as disposable, these incarcerated radicals challenged a larger conception of human value. Tip of the Spear restores attention to prisoners’ own self-understanding and political objectives, and the overarching ideals of freedom to which they aspired. Burton calls these “maximum demands,” the holistic view formed through an accumulating process of struggle: at their most expansive, they are “communal, internationalist, and autonomous practices . . . presag[ing] a new social order, a new ethics, and new forms of human sociality.” Their visionary scope is integral to Burton’s project to “decarcerate the revolutionary meaning and significance of Attica” — to break from the “mind jail” that would see Attica only as a tragedy of state violence rather than a site of revolutionary possibility.
Burton achieves this larger view by extending the revolt beyond the four-day uprising in New York in September 1971. For Burton, “Attica” begins with a series of rebellions that convulsed the New York City jails in the summer and fall of 1970, more than a year before the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility. Many of the latter’s defining features were already evident in the crisis in the jails, where members of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords spearheaded a frontal assault on an overcrowded and abusive jail system.
Amid a moral panic about rising crime, the New York City jail population had nearly doubled between 1967 and 1970, and this rapid expansion meant that many people, too poor to post bail pending trial, ended up spending months or even years in jail. After more than a dozen members of the Black Panther Party were arrested as part of a sweeping COINTELPRO-generated conspiracy — among them Kuwasi Balagoon, Lumumba Shakur, and Kwando Kinshasa — the Panthers lost no time and began organizing throughout the city’s jails in concert with Muslim and Puerto Rican militants. Burton quotes Victor Martinez of the Young Lords, who told the Black Panther newspaper about the founding of the Inmates Liberation Front at the Tombs jail in Lower Manhattan: it “began as a committee of two people, which grew to four and then kept multiplying until we were able to organize the complete ninth floor.” The uprising spread until prisoners had seized most of the facility. Then, Burton writes, “they swarmed throughout the jail assaulting the physical expression of their degradation: they set fire to bedding, destroyed their medical records, smashed windows, and threw handwritten messages, burning trash, and dead rats onto the downtown Manhattan streets.” Even after they released the prison guards they’d taken hostage, the captive militants continued to plot their next moves. Their rebellious spirit soon spread from New York’s city jails to its state prisons — partly because the government transferred people upon conviction, and partly because state prisoners took inspiration from the sight of fellow captives challenging the institutions that controlled their lives.
“Prisons are war,” Burton writes. “They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency.” As Tip of the Spear makes clear, however, the prisoner is not a helpless victim of war but a disadvantaged combatant within it. “Against carceral siege, revolting captives waged a people’s war, a counter-war.” Reframing the carceral context as one of war helps Burton take seriously both prisoners’ politics and their tactics. While the political thought of incarcerated people has recently received more attention in histories, memoirs, and journalistic accounts, serious analysis of their tactical choices — which in the 1970s included the taking of hostages and armed revolt — remains lacking. Incarcerated militants challenged the state’s monopoly of force with particular flair in that decade, opening a new front in struggles that in many cases preceded their incarceration. Black revolutionaries, sometimes joined by Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Indigenous comrades, seized guards as hostages in bold attempts to win their and their comrades’ freedom. These measures succeeded, at least at first: in the New York City jail rebellion of 1970, hostage taking led to an impromptu bail hearing that resulted in the release of thirteen people, many of whom had been held without trial for more than a year. The taking of hostages continued to accompany strikes at the prisons where some of the city-jail rebels — including Herbert X. Blyden, who would be elected as a spokesman for the Attica Brothers — were later sent: first Auburn, then Attica.
By the time the revolt reached Attica, many of the participants were battle-tested and ready to fight. And fight they did. Burton emphasizes the revolutionary convictions of the rebellion’s leading participants. Some were members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the clandestine offshoot of the Black Panther Party, which found new recruits among the prisoner ranks and whose outlook defined the public statements issued by the Attica rebels. Others, including a figure interviewed by Burton whom he dubs Bugs, saw themselves as “gangsters” who put their self-taught skills to use. (Bugs, for his part, helped blow up the prison’s chapel.) In fact the rebellion fused the revolutionary and the gangster, the propagandist and the saboteur, in a shared project that Burton describes as a “commune . . . of ecstasy, joy, love, intimacy, pleasure, and collective Black radical becoming.” Beyond the tactical drama, it is this process of self-actualization amid state repression that makes the rebellion’s image and memory endure. As Burton writes in the book’s conclusion, “more than fifty years later, Attica remains a living example that collectively, ordinary people can be more than the sum of their parts.”
To those in power, from the police to the governor, the scene of incarcerated people asserting their political will as part of a third-worldist revolutionary project was a crisis to be crushed by any means necessary. The Long Attica Revolt was killed in what Burton describes as a “war on Black revolutionary minds,” part of a coordinated program of “pacification.” In the book’s grim second half, he traces this pacification across three related domains: racist sexual terrorism against participants in the revolt; reformist counterinsurgency to defuse the revolt’s incipient sense of possibility; and new forms of captivity (including programs like the control unit) to preempt any future revolt. This tripartite regime of physical violence, co-optation, and renewed social control built the system we now call mass incarceration and soon spread nationwide, led by states with large prison systems — New York, as well as California and Texas — after they experienced their own episodes of revolutionary unrest. Prison officials looked to obstruct organizing through isolation and atomization, and used collective punishment to keep prisoners divided and demoralized.
Mao Zedong famously declared that the relationship between guerrillas and the people is that of fish to water. America’s policing apparatus worked to capture the fish and drain the sea. While the FBI targeted leftist leaders and organizations with particular intensity in the 1960s and 1970s, federal and state governments hardened penalties and expanded the bureaucracy of punishment beginning in the ’70s. The ensuing decades of get-tough criminal policy not only made it harder to be a revolutionary, but also undermined the communities that had nurtured such organizations and supplied their militant members. These policies targeted not just the fish but the water.
Yet following the 2008 financial crisis, as states looked to cut expenses and costly prisons were bursting at the seams, it became harder to sustain the illusion that safety was perpetually just one more jail cell away; the profound human (and fiscal) cost of pervasive incarceration came to seem too high. The attempt to solve political-economic crisis through punishment generated its own crises, and the past decade has shown once again that, in the words of Assata Shakur, “a wall is just a wall.” Long-standing organizing against the prison industrial complex by groups like Critical Resistance and the Prison Moratorium Project, as well as campaigns in support of political prisoners, reached new recognition in the 21st century as the concept of mass incarceration entered the popular lexicon. Against unchecked police power and the biggest prison system the world has ever known, the past fifteen years have seen a new anticarceral upsurge. The current revolt has many sources, including incarcerated people themselves, who have organized a wave of prison strikes, from Georgia and Alabama to California to Guantánamo Bay, that have taken on everything from labor exploitation to long-term solitary confinement to medical neglect. Formerly incarcerated people and their family members have waged campaigns against prison censorship, sexual violence, and death-by-incarceration sentences. And every day the pedagogy of the police officer’s truncheon continues to mobilize new generations of activists against the violence of austerity that cops uphold. These new militants, Jocelyn Simonson writes in Radical Acts of Justice, “redefine the concept of justice itself: perhaps justice is when the state provides communities with what they need to support each other and keep each other safe. Perhaps safety means freedom, not incarceration.”
Focused on bail funds, court watching, participatory defense (which “combine[s] collective advocacy in individual cases with the building of power to change public conversations and policies”), and solidarity budgeting (collective organizing to “demand that . . . governments play a part in supporting forms of justice and safety that don’t include punishment”), Radical Acts of Justice is a compact history of recent grassroots decarceral organizing that gestures toward the deeper roots of these strategies, each of which is the subject of a chapter in the book. Throughout this lively, hopeful, and well-reported work, Simonson shows how specific campaigns have won material changes in the lives of criminalized people and helped shift collective understanding of safety, justice, and “the people.” One story follows Tracy McCarter, the New York City nurse who was arrested for killing her abusive ex-husband in 2020. Members of the local feminist anticarceral organization Survived & Punished took up McCarter’s case, supporting her in court while pressuring the district attorney to drop the charges. At public events and on social media, they used her case to illuminate the linkages between state and interpersonal violence, highlighting the injustice of a city that would rather incarcerate survivors of domestic violence than provide for their needs. After more than two years, they won: McCarter went free and joined Survived & Punished. “They thought they were building me a cage,” McCarter wrote upon her release. “Instead they were building me a pulpit.”
Where Burton focuses on people’s attempts to overthrow or break out of prisons in Tip of the Spear, Simonson’s attention in Radical Acts of Justice remains on external efforts to get people out, or keep them from going in at all. Revolutionary vigor looks different in a world reshaped by the pacification programs used to crush the prisoner revolts of an earlier generation. On the surface, the hostage-taking, chapel-burning rebels of the early ’70s have little in common with, for example, contemporary court watchers — community volunteers who “sit in the audience section of criminal courtrooms to demonstrate support for the accused,” observe the proceedings, and publicize the actions of judges and attorneys. But court watching similarly defies authorities who are unaccustomed to being challenged, and at the point of their greatest power. Likewise, when opponents of mass incarceration reject prosecutors’ legal claim to represent “the people,” they continue the kind of political self-fashioning that Burton ascribes to the Long Attica Revolt. The tactics have shifted, but the purpose remains constant: to push the state to live up to its putative democratic values in the short term, and to delegitimize the state’s monopoly on violence in the long term. The insurgent forms Burton discusses had their parallels in clandestine revolutionary organizations of the ’70s like the BLA, which also operated in prison, much as contemporary prisons house the type of community organizers Simonson profiles — such as those of the Green Haven Think Tank, the in-prison study group that Simonson credits with developing a now common approach to studying incarceration rates in tandem with urban divestment. Though much of the United States has been organized to stymie the revolutionary challenges of the early 1970s, Burton’s and Simonson’s books voice a resounding echo between past and present. They also highlight the necessity of a certain kind of “inside-out” strategy that challenges the prison state from within while also working to block its tributaries.
Though much of the United States has been organized to stymie the revolutionary challenges of the early 1970s, Burton’s and Simonson’s books voice a resounding echo between past and present.
The carceral system is vastly larger and more pervasive now than it was a half century ago. When the revolt began, the United States incarcerated approximately two hundred thousand people; today it imprisons almost two million. This expansion in turn presents contemporary abolitionists with different challenges. Simonson outlines a multipronged movement strategy of people working within, alongside, and against the criminal legal system. She offers no electoral solutions to end mass incarceration and is critical of the move to elect “progressive prosecutors,” whom, because they seek to apply the levers of the existing system more equitably, she sees as already captured by the system. Instead, her focus is on the ways collective organizing outside and against the system remakes our sense — and the very infrastructure — of justice itself. She acknowledges that bailing people out of jail, observing a criminal trial, or influencing city budget priorities also necessarily engage with the system as it is — but they do so in order, one hopes, to limit, change, or even eradicate it altogether. And as the prosecutorial targeting of bail funds shows, working to subvert the system from within can make people a target of the legal apparatus they wish to diminish.
Resisting jail and prison expansion also refashions questions of safety and social priorities. Restorative and transformative justice organizations implement collective and reparative models of accountability without punishment that, as one of Simonson’s respondents put it, “look backward” to move forward. “When movement actors come together to bail someone out, to observe courtroom proceedings, or to create a video for their sentencing hearing, they enter the carceral space of the courtroom as a collective, as the community,” Simonson writes. “The public becomes a concrete presence” in spaces normally organized around individualizing and isolating punishment. In turn, activists from groups like Court Watch Baton Rouge, Philadelphia Bail Fund, or California’s Faith in the Valley participatory-defense hub “inevitably understand what they see and do from a collective perspective.” The same could be said of incarcerated organizers, highlighted only briefly in Simonson’s book but central to Tip of the Spear: their resistance collectivizes justice, seizing power from a system accustomed to treating justice as a bludgeon against the disenfranchised.
A few years before the uptick in anticarceral organizing that Simonson chronicles, I went to visit a former BLA member at a federal prison in the Catskill Mountains. The bucolic drive up a windswept road culminated in a medium-security facility whose hilltop location obscured much of the surrounding natural beauty. The person I was there to visit had already spent forty-five years in various prisons. Through our mail correspondence, I had accompanied him for a dozen of those years as he was shipped from one federal prison to another. He was now in his seventies and I was concerned about his health; one of his BLA comrades had recently died in prison. I did not want him to suffer the same fate.
“How do we get you out?” I asked him on that visit.
“Time was,” he smiled, nodding toward a small patio outside the window of the visiting room, “I would have said a helicopter on that yard.”
I smiled back. Long before reading Burton’s book, I had heard tell of the many daring, almost cinematic prison-escape attempts of the 1970s: the time BLA members tried to bust out their imprisoned comrades with acetylene torches, or when a long-planned escape effort was foiled by a rival group of prisoners who were caught attempting their own comparatively haphazard escape. The ’70s were not short on bold efforts. But three decades later, the carceral state had vanquished armed struggle. We both knew there would be no helicopter. But we would not accept the grim condemnation passed down by the state decades earlier, either.
In the next few years, an intergenerational group of organizers worked tirelessly for my friend’s release and that of several other political prisoners who had spent decades in some of the nation’s worst prisons. They did so through the kinds of strategies highlighted in Radical Acts of Justice. They launched public campaigns targeting the cruelty of “death by incarceration.” They protested the police capture of parole boards. They wrote letters and made visits and kept prisoners at the heart of organized communities. “WE ARE ONE PEOPLE,” reads a political statement from the New York jail rebellion that initiated the Long Attica Revolt. By the 2010s, abolitionists had put this message into practice as a form of solidarity between inside and outside. Cumulatively, their efforts led to the release of more than a dozen aging revolutionaries, my friend among them. Many of them had been serving life sentences.
Such hard-won freedom was once unthinkable — not only to the state, but to the pundit-brain logic that measures political efficacy purely in polls and ballots. These were people who were meant to be buried under the prison. Abolition operates on a different timeline. Its unshakable demand for immediate freedom starts from the impossible conditions of the dystopian here and now. Free them all, abolition now, defund the police: the concepts dismissed as political immaturity bestow a sense of possibility. “We cannot underestimate the movement visions that emerge from these experiences,” Simonson notes toward the end of her book, “if for no other reason than because these visions are possible. They are the fuel for everything.” Yesterday’s tactics are unlikely to secure tomorrow’s victories. The past offers an orientation, not an instruction manual, and successful struggle often requires an improvisational response to the moment. But abolition continues to promise an escape from the mind jail that Salinas named decades ago. And in making or even attempting that escape, we can know freedom.
