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WRITINGS FROM PRISON

INTRODUCTORY COMMENT

J.H.O'DELL

The nearly five million prison population in America constitutes the third largest "city" in the U.S. Its size alone makes the prison system one of the major institutions in contemporary American society–and indeed this reality may itself be something of a commentary on American life in this age of much-boasted affluence. 

For Americans of African descent, the prison system in the U.S., throughout the history of our American experience, has been part of the politics of State oppression and exploitation. Beginning with its role as the dungeon for holding runaway slaves seeking freedom and the torture chamber designed to break the spirit of revolt in men like Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and many others, before the Civil War; then the enforcement of the convict-lease system, a form of slave labor used to "stabilize" the labor force necessary for the economic revival of the plantation system after the overthrow of the Reconstruction; down to our own day in which the local jails have been places of confinement for tens of thousands of civil rights activists, the prisons of America have held a special meaning for us. Even the Federal prisons have historically been jim-crow institutions, as the late Benjamin Davis, a New York Councilman, demonstrated in his legal suit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons while still in jail in the 1950's. Councilman Davis was being punished, under the Smith Act, for his belief in and advocacy of Socialism. 

Furthermore, the use of the jail as a weapon of intimidation, and a constant "threat," has been part of the psychology of "keeping the Negro in his place" in the American social order. It is no wonder there is a disproportionate number of black prisoners in the jails of our country today. Police brutality, the racist courts and the prison cell are inseparable parts of the State power enforcing the colonial status of the black population in the United States. Given this reality, in a certain sense we are all in jail. To be locked in the pov-

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