prisons
1891: Miners against prison labour
Howard Zinn's account of American miners' struggles against the use of slave prison labour.
There were eruptions against the convict labour system in the South, in which prisoners were leased in slave labour to corporations, used thus to depress the general level of wages and also to break strikes.
1966: The Blake prison escape
A short history of the miraculous prison break of Soviet double-agent George Blake from a British jail, organised by two libertarian activists.
In 1966, the most notorious prisoner in Britain was sprung from jail. George Blake was a British double-agent serving 42 years for spying for the Soviet Union. At the time this was the longest jail sentence ever imposed by a British court.
Panopticism - Michel Foucault
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” This is chapter 3 of Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish, which details the growth of surveillance and disciplinary power alongside the utilitarian logic of early capitalism.
From Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan © 1977
The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.
1971: The Attica prison uprising
Against the background of the mass revolutionary, black power and prisoners' movements in the US, a four day revolt began on September 13, 1971 at the Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, NY in the United States. Its repression left 39 people killed.
"If we can't live as men, we sure as hell can die as men"
- Attica prisoner
19. Surprises
Helen Keller had said in 1911: "We vote? What does that mean?" And Emma Goldman around the
same time: "Our modern fetish is universal suffrage." After 1920, women were voting, as men did,
and their subordinate condition had hardly changed.
Japan's prisons of torture
A Japanese town council has decided to introduce new rules allowing the jailing of householders who don’t paint their homes a chosen colour for up to a year.
The threat is a strong one for people who don’t like the preferred shade of green, for those incarcerated in Japan’s prison system life is systematised daily torture.
James Carr, the Black Panthers and all that
"Jimmy was the baddest motherfucker..." - George Jackson.
A look at the life and times of James Carr and the Black Panthers and their relationship to the prison struggles and wider social movements of the 1960s.
Roussenq, Paul, 1885-1949
A short biography of French anarchist Paul Roussenq, who spent much of his life in prison camps.
Paul Roussenq
Born 1885 - France, died August 1949 - France
The jailbird of Saint Gilles
Imprisoned in New Orleans
Jordan Flaherty and Tamika Middleton report on the fate of prisoners in New Orleans prisons since Hurricane Katrina.
When hurricane Katrina hit, there was no evacuation plan for 7,000 prisoners in the New Orleans city jail, generally known as Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), or the approximate 1,500 prisoners in nearby jails. According to first-hand accounts gathered by advocates, prisoners were abandoned in their cells while the water was rising around them.
1929-1939: 25 Concentration Camps in England - ICG
The recurring theme of forced work for the unemployed.
