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If Only All Barriers Could Be Removed...

George Jackson with arm around and holding hand of black woman, San Quentin Prison

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Soledad Brothers George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette were known as The Soledad Brothers. They were incarcerated at Soledad Prison, a little over an hour away from Santa Cruz, in Monterey County. They each had a high level of political education and understanding concerning systems of incarceration, both through their lived experience within the system as well as through connections to The Black Panther Party and Marxist-Leninist theory.

The three were charged with murder after the investigation into a guard's death. This was said to have been their retaliation for the exoneration of a sharpshooter that executed three inmates in the prison yard, the case ruled a "justifiable homicide". Jackson's writings from prison, published 1971 in Soledad Brother, coupled with the global outpouring of writing and solidarity together make a compelling argument that incarcerated subjects under unjust conditions are in fact political prisoners. A major takeaway is that George Jackson and the Brothers were specifically targeted for their attainment in political education and their radical beliefs, serving as the most visibly leveraged critique against the carceral state from within the depths of its most inhumane and invisible component: the prison.

To give an idea of George's position, I'd like to take the liberty to define radical as "denoting or relating to roots (of a word)", therefore making radicals those that engage the root of a problem toward future change. He found the prison at a fulcrum point of the state and its power over its subjects, and this is illustrated in a Ho Chi Minh quote, "When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out", signifying prisons as the critical site of resistance. The prison by definition contains a concentration of those that have come up against the state directly in one or many ways, thus, if the prisons were to be liberated, the dragon within them will fly out, and with it, bring the revolution. In today's context, this conception only becomes more relevant. As prisons continue to expand and new surveillance technologies seek to make positivism our code of ethics, we must leverage a critical understanding of these histories to keep up with the acceleration of power and injustice.

Scholar Joy James has traced Michel Foucault's famous work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison to George Jackson's ideas and praxis. With this established, we can then understand the root of Foucault's conceptual framework as starting with the Soledad Brothers case, and a rift between the free-bourgeois-intellectual and the political(-ly educated) prisoner comes into focus.

In a prison letter penned by Fleeta Drumgo and published in If They Come in the Morning, he outlines his understanding of the free world outside as a prison, stating that "...the only difference is that one is maximum and the other minimum security." This echoes James' point that the expansion of power through disciplinary punishment in society was something that prisoners were already acutely aware of and living through. He continues: "I like to express that there's a growing awareness behind the walls; we're seeing through the madness of capitalism, class interest, surplus value and imperialism, which this gestapo system perpetuates."

John Clutchette unfortunately is not represented in photograph form within this archive, but his pin-point analysis of prison reform and the broad nature of the carceral state is represented in a detailed and methodical letter also published within If They Come in the Morning... He likens simple prison reform to "...changing the frame on the wall but not the picture itself.", and further implicates the carceral state as something that definitely extends beyond just prisons. He writes:
"In prison we are governed and controlled by the same attitudes that govern and control the lives of the people outside of prison, the establishment...the system that excludes and debases the human rights of the people, the system that has no concern for the people's welfare or their lives; the attitudes of control by force—there is force all around us, above us."

Almost 50 years later, he was granted parole and released on June 6th, 2018. John Clutchette is the only surviving member of the three Soledad Brothers today.