Image: The cover of the book is a black background with an illustration of a hand reaching up from the bottom of the cover to pull the cord to turn on a light bulb that extends down from the top of the cover in yellow. Across the top of the book and large yellow block letters is rattling the cages. Hello that in smaller white letters is oral histories of North American political prisoners. In the bottom right corner and white and yellow letters is foreword by Angela y Davis, introduction by Sarah falconer, and edited by Josh Davidson with Eric King.
I was really impressed with Rattling the Cages and how well thought out and organized this collection of political prisoner interviews was. It's a hefty volume and includes a lot of people. The book was composed in tandem with some political prisoners which really increases it's ability to cover many of the things that prisoners deal with and endure.
To speak on the organization of it first, I really love that this book was written with everyone in mind. What I mean by this is that there are copious footnotes, a glossary, and many other descriptors describing what various movements, political prisoners, abbreviations, slang terms, and many other things that a person who isn't super familiar with the history and present of various forms of resistance may not know about. Speaking from my own experience, there are many prisoners here that I remember their stories because I was alive during them and watching them happen in real time. I'm 41 years old and so I recall people like Daniel McGowan, Chelsea Manning, etc as well as many of the people that came after them. However I was not alive for people who were arrested in the '70s for instance. It was really helpful to have all of the different movements and their participants briefly but well described for me as I went along. I really wish more texts were written like this. It can be very frustrating to read far left texts, especially about populations of people who lack access to academia like prisoners, be written in a language that very few people can actually understand. It can also become easy to forget what we didn't know before we became active and use a bunch of jargon. The people who wrote and edited this book definitely had these things in mind which I appreciate. I feel like you could hand it to anyone who is able to read English and they would be able to grasp what's going on.
There are a lot of different threads that move throughout these entries. Some participants talked more than others but they were all answering similar questions. There are many things that differ from person to person and from prison to prison (or sometimes jail to jail.) But, there are also many currents that ran through almost every entry. One of the most common was the racial division and prisons and how it could be dealt with based on whether it was a men's or women's prison. There were a couple of people who were in specific situations such as Chelsea Manning being in a military prison where she was one of the only white people or David Campbell in Rikers Island where this isn't as big a thing. But, almost all white people were initially expected to hug up with white supremacists. In women's prisons it was often a place where white prisoners could challenge this very directly and in men's prisons, the retribution was often far more violent and dangerous, so they would have to be more careful and how they approached resistance to white supremacy. Another common theme is how much compromise you have to have with other people in prisons. In some ways I kept thinking how much we could learn about conflict resolution from prisoners because of this. Movements of all types can often end up being a niche echo chamber with lots of people with exactly the same beliefs. At the internet to that and it's even more extreme. How much can we learn from people placed into a hell hole microcosm with a wide range of people all packed together like sardines who managed to find a way to navigate through that and in some cases even organize people and get them to overcome some of their prejudices? That said, everyone was very clear that you should not go in as an activist talking about how you're going to organize everyone and instead, if you have not been in prison before, to be quiet, observe, and treat the prisoners who've been there as the ones who know what's up.
As I mentioned, there were a lot of differences between men's and women's prisons. There are a lot of differences between different men's prisons and different women's prisons as well, but the gender and general seems to have an effect. Women were more likely to be doing care work and taking care of one another than men. This is perhaps unsurprising, but stands out as a more controlled study of human behavior since everyone is in this box they can't escape. There were some male prisoners who took on a more macho role, but many others who carried this sort of care work to other prisoners behind the scenes. Ed Mead impressed the shit out of me. I honestly didn't know much about him before this, but reading about his efforts to combat prison rape, homophobia, etc were pretty amazing. I would never expect you could start a men against patriarchy group in prison, but he did it somehow (and a lot of other really cool things.) There are lots of people that stood out to me and lots of people who did great things organizing people. To list them all would make this review for too long.
One thing I'm really grateful for that this book did for me was get my ass in gear about spending more time with writing my prisoner pen pals. With all of my recent struggles in life I have put it off. I know it's important. However, reading every single prisoner talk about how critical outside support is really reminded me why I started doing it in the first place. People talking about it being the one time they got to escape the place, sitting there reading letters from other people, was motivating. Jake Conroy even gave me some great ideas on conversation starters. This week I sent my prisoner pen pals "desert Island questions" as he described one of his pen pals sending to him. If you aren't already writing to someone, consider making it a regular thing. There are organizations like anarchist black cross, certain days, black and pink, etc who have nifty guides on helping you get started. It truly is life-changing to have that connection. Every single entry mentions this.
Another action point that was mentioned multiple times, and described in depth by Daniel McGowan, was the issue of how prisoner support and politicization has gone downhill over the recent decades. There is some support for more famous political prisoners like Mumia and Peltier, but tons of political prisoners today aren't even known by name let alone supported. Apparently during the civil Rights era, the amount of prisoners that were radical was also much higher. So you have a less politicized prison population and less support for political prisoners right now. This is something that needs to change. It can start by doing little things like donating to their commissary, writing, visiting, etc as individual actions, but there also needs to be coordinated organizing to support political prisoners. We cannot allow the state to just lock people away who are taking the biggest risks in terms of organizing and activism.
I think this is a book that pretty much everybody should read. This is one of those things where human beings are locked behind these giant structures and so easily hidden away. It is easy for those on the outside to forget about them because it's designed that way. It's designed to break people down turn them into numbers, slave labor, etc. I think empathy is a good exercise in general, but very particularly here, thinking about and embodying the words collected in this book really helps drive home how even the little things we could do can really make big impacts. I hope folks will read this book and also take action to connect with political prisoners however they're able.
This was also posted to my Goodreads.
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