Entering the brick corridors of San Quentin and the sweltering gates at Solano, it was not lost on me that almost no man I knew ever entered those gates willingly. For attorneys and visitors, like me, leaving the facility is a matter of waves and smiles; for many of the brothers inside, the only way they make it through those same gates is in a body bag - that is, under this system’s laws as they stand. We reject the conventional framing of our incarcerated community members as ‘inmates,’ but understand them and honor them as captives of a system intent on their isolation, repression, and destruction.

Our work in the last few years in San Mateo County proves that understanding incarcerated people as illegally detained captives has immense analytical value. I remember a court hearing about a few years ago where 8 of the 12 individuals in the court were Black men, in a county with Black Men consisting of less than 1.5% of the population and an arrest rate of Black individuals 6.6x that of White individuals. Just months ago, De-Bug filed a judicial complaint in San Mateo County showing that in 99% of arraignment hearings judges ignored the California Supreme Court’s orders about affordable cash bail and refused to properly explain the justification for denying release and mandating incarceration. The result is the continual denial of rights guaranteed by the California Constitution to any person unlucky enough to be arrested in the Bay Area, which from the data, are individuals more likely to be impoverished or from the zip codes of historically Black and Brown communities. To me, these individuals, without a legal justification for their incarceration, are captives of an arbitrary, racist system, not properly judged individuals in any type of fair system. Isn’t the unlawful capture and holding of a person by “force or fear” the basis of kidnapping according to California's own Penal Code?

This year, in commemoration of and during Black August, I entered courtrooms and law school classrooms with an empty stomach, a copy of Blood in my Eye (contraband in California prisons that might land you a three-month stint in the dreaded Secure Housing Unit “SHU”), and a photo of George Jackson, the martyred, incarcerated black theorist and revolutionary within my reach at all times. For the brothers and sisters inside, they can do nothing but face incarceration. For us outside of the walls, a minor sacrifice of food offers a small reminder of the totalizing nature of incarceration that those inside cannot escape for a moment. And in California within the past decades, the refusal to eat has been the one of the methods of resistance that is still countered with intense manipulation (including preparing unusually appetizing meals to tempt hunger strikers from their demands), criminal and administrative charges, and State violence. Black August calls the conscious individual to jump into the fight for local and national political prisoners, be insistent on their freedom, and emphasize the political circumstances of their incarceration.

Sometimes, political prisoners are framed by the government (like former Black Panthers Dhorouba Bin Wahad and Geronimo “Ji Jaga” Pratt who were exonerated after leaked FBI COINTELPRO files created to track them later provided exonerating information). Others have some involvement in revolutionary action or were targeted for advocacy in prison after conviction on an unrelated offense. In any case, the emphasis is not guilt or innocence, but rather, the State’s insistence on targeting individuals for their inherent, moral right to fight back against oppression. Modern history’s most famous political prisoner Nelson Mandela was ratted out by the CIA in 1962 for fear that the armed struggle against apartheid regime would force the US government to publicly intervene and crush a popular revolt to overthrow racial domination upheld by apartheid. Mandela was convicted of conspiring to overthrow the South African Apartheid government. Indeed, what is forgotten is that Mandela was guilty as charged.

Mandela was instrumental in creating the uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress that organized resistance in South Africa and helped other African countries fight the spread of apartheid. Mandela was within his international right and, more importantly, his moral right to overthrow the South African government on the basis of apartheid and the murder of those who resisted against it. Part of supporting political prisoners is normalizing their right to exist and not backing down from that right, guaranteed by the United Nations and international law.

Though the work of resistance occurs during all months, Black August is a commemoration of the sacrifices of the Black political prisoners who since the late 1960’s and until the current day have been in intense struggle against California and federal prison officials. Many of these same prisoners were killed by CDCR and California law enforcement for their politics. In celebration of Black August, we recognize those who were killed in assassination plots and suffer through continual incarceration by committing to:

• Fasting from sunup to sundown during the entire month August
• Studying political prisoners’ writings or relevant history for 1 hour daily
• Abstaining from substances
• Exercising for 1 hour daily
• Writing political prisoners and offering support for their continuous struggle

George Jackson’s indignant motto “they’ll never count me among the broken men” encapsulates the ferment of change still sweeping through the prisons and the streets to the chagrin of CDCR. Instead of identifying as victims of a broken system, deserving of justice, the Prisoners’ Movement has always been characterized by the empowering belief that justice was theirs to seize.

As we speak in honor of George Jackson, Jonathan Jackson, W.L. Nolen, and all those assassinated, we must speak the names of the living strugglers whose efforts to organize politically for positive change all but guarantee a denial from the Parole Board and condemns them to the worst conditions of solitary confinement that the State of California can concoct.

Black California Political Prisoners Remain
Joka Heshima Jinsai and Abdul Olugbala Shakur have kept the memory of Black Political Prisoners alive in California through their scholarship on the Prison Struggle. All to their physical detriment, having spent over 50 years in solitary confinement combined. Jinsai created the Autonomous Infrastructure Mission, a theorized, ready-made approach to building resilient community organizations to combat the social challenges Black and Brown communities face endemically in this system. Jinsai shows us that the forms of diplomatic association created inside can be modeled to greater effect in our outside communities. Much of the sourcing, here, is provided from the tireless efforts of incarcerated people as archivists, educators, theorists, and community organizers. Their perspectives on George Jackson and Black August are infinitely more developed and sophisticated than mine.

And those recently released, like famed organizer and revolutionary Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa whose representation of Black prisoners in the revolutionary document “Agreement to End all Hostilities” has resulted in a decrease in race-based violence over the past 10 years. The signers of the Agreement across numerous racial groups agreed that “old manipulative divide and conquer tactics” were deployed by CDCR to increase disunity and thus, decrease the collective ability of prisoners to create a movement for their short-term and long-term interests. The agreement called all incarcerated people to understand that the basis for continual hostilities across group lines was artificial and by that same basis, peace could be engineered by a cogent analysis of the State’s tactics and manipulations that had kept them apart for decades. From the Agreement to End all Hostilities:

            “If we really want to bring about substantive meaningful changes to the CDCR system in a manner beneficial to all solid individuals, who have never been broken by CDCR’s torture tactics intended to coerce one to become a state informant via debriefing, now is the time for us to collectively seize this moment and put an end to more than 20-30 years of hostilities between our racial groups.”

Since his release, Elder Sitawa founded the organization Liberate our Elders Support Services, focused on securing the compassionate release for elders by exposing the medical abuse and neglect in prisons, especially against our beloved elders with disabilities. Everyday, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to walk among Sitawa in the free world.

Elder Sitawa has been insistent on how a decade on from the Agreement to End all Hostilities, a separate federal indictment against Chicano political prisoner George Franco, a brave signed name on the Agreement, and other former hunger strikers is payback for peace. Together with White and Northern and Southern Mexican prisoners in the Short Corridor of Pelican Bay’s Secure Housing Unit (a silent, torturous hell), Sitawa and George Franco helped marshall Black and Brown Prisoners into a united front where they forced CDCR into reforms relating to solitary confinement and overcrowding, while using diplomatic means to reduce violence between races.

In a statement given to De-Bug organizer Jose Valle, Elder Sitawa suggested that the federal indictment is meant to prevent the spread of peace into the federal system and prevent an end to hostilities in our own communities. Sitawa stated the peace that he and others fought for will “carry on to the streets, which could manifest itself into a just cause. And the feds are trying to stop that, and trying to control and impede people’s futures and their lives and that's just simply wrong.”

Ironically, the Department of Justice’s statement “Indictment Describes the Prison Gang’s Nexus of Power Overseeing Thousands of Gang Members Throughout California” does not take issue with specific violence, but with the control exercised by incarcerated individuals outside of CDCR’s sanctioned channels. Imagine the public knew that these same individuals were pursuing peace inside through hunger striking and using the diplomatic avenues created between previously warring groups. Imagine if the public knew that CDCR, no one else, was to blame for the permanent state of danger in prisons. Imagine the benefits of a decrease in violence on the streets that could be created without the massive budgets that state and local officials tell us are necessary to occupy our communities. Imagine all the attendant police and State violence averted by a deeper form of community control.

More than individuals or leadership, we honor 29,000+ California prisoners who with their coordinated refusal of that first meal transformed into political prisoners, forever marked by CDCR. For, surely, the rules violations that prison guards may have stacked up on Strikers during the courageous protest may be used to deny parole or family visits, even a decade later. Over the past 10 years, the Agreement has brought at least a modicum of much needed order that has been absent for decades, owing partially to CDCR’s underhanded policies which unashamedly decrease order and increase violence. CDCR tries to break this unity, baiting racial tensions to derail grassroots efforts between racial groups to solve differences that have been resilient to this repression. If there was any justice in this world, these Strikers would be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, not solitary confinement, administrative punishment, and federal RICO charges.

George Jackson: The Immortal Dragon 
With racial discord as simply background noise to some street elements in their daily bid for survival, a young Black man George Jackson’s rolling life came to a halt with an alleged $70 gas station robbery on a road trip back from Mexico. Up to that point, George had been a problem for the system: conducting low-level robberies during his youth and escaping jail whenever he had a chance. Convicted to a 1 to life sentence, George would never again step a free foot outside of prison walls, as the Parole Board denied him release annually for over a decade. In an interview shortly before his death, George challenged the Press to find one person in the California penal system serving a 1 to life sentence who had been denied parole as many times as him. George asked those outside of the walls to see how his radical politics – not “lack of rehabilitation” – guaranteed that he would die inside those walls.

In prison, George organized the Wolf Pack, taking over the gambling and drug rackets and creating an organization whose mere mention, over 50 years later, might be a direct ticket to solitary confinement and a 5-year parole denial. George met W.L. Nolen, an up-and-coming boxer and Black prison intellectual, who helped introduce him to the Black anti-imperialist and Marxian traditions that would inform the magnum opus of George’s short life, Blood in my Eye. Weaving through texts of dialectics and military history, George’s unmatched genius and understanding of conditions shone through in his writing, sometimes smuggled out on cigarette paper to the outside world. With the political evolution of George and other Black prisoners, their main priority shifted from revenue to what George described as the attempt to transform the “black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.” George describes this ideological transformation in a letter in Soledad Brother:

“I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me. For the first four years I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I met black guerrillas, George "Big Jake" Lewis, and James Carr, W.L. Nolen, Bill Christmas, Torry Gibson and many, many others. We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality. As a result, each of us has been subjected to years of the most vicious reactionary violence by the state. Our mortality rate is almost what you would expect to find in a history of Dachau.”

Anthropologist Orisanmi Burton’s detailed exploration of the prison as an arena of warfare obscured from the public in “Tip of the Spear” underscores the unseen benefit the conscious squeezed out of their imprisonment: time to read and debate history, theory, and practice in what some euphemistically called and treated as revolutionary “college.” Of course, the measured use of prison as revolutionary college ran counter to the entire purpose of incarceration: suppressing and hiding away men whose "criminal" resistance to society's laws could easily be turned into revolutionary resistance with proper guidance and training.

Just months ago, CDCR banned “Tip of the Spear,” criminalizing the curiosity of incarcerated people who might want to learn about the devious State practices and political realities that confine them to a metal box. Instead, CDCR fills libraries with self-help books to emphasize the false idea of “personal responsibility” in a system without preventative treatment or back-end rehabilitation necessary to survive poverty, alienation, family separation, and the intentional violence of the carceral State.

George inhaled theoretical and historical works about revolution, taking trips in the pages to far off lands to retool their analyses for his struggle in America. One key conclusion of the analysis of this cadre of conscious Black prisoners was that the struggle, like that of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army with whom they were closely aligned, was international and interconnected to the revolutions dotting the globe that were being similarly repressed by Western States. At that time, the Black Panther Party maintained communication with Palestinian PFLP, the new Algerian state that bucked French colonialism and terrorism, the Vietnamese resistance who braved both French colonialism and American technologized slaughter, as well as other international elements. George understood his continued incarceration as tied to the plight of the Vietnamese in fighting decades of Western Imperialism, trending with the fall of traditional European Empires and the rise of the American Empire. This connection led to the most heavily criminalized American Political symbol (complimented by the defiant and criminalized symbol of the Huelga Bird): that of the Dragon.

Vietnamese Freedom Fighter, former political prisoner, and academic Ho Chi Minh’s words hummed with George’s ethos paraphrased ‘no broken men here, only hardened ones.’ Minh marveled on the promise of incarcerated people to transform a broken society:

“People who come out of prison can build up the country. Misfortune is a test of people's fidelity. Those who protest at injustice are people of true merit! When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out!”

The Dragon represents a supernatural force, unburdened by unjust laws or heavy chains that batter the weak human form. It has stood as a criminalized symbol in prisons for over 50 years, representing George Jackson’s fighting spirit, but more relevant, the well of power within every incarcerated person gained by the day-to-day brushes with the true face of the State: The totalizing fascism of prison. To CDCR, the Dragon is revolutionary defiance embodied, taken as an explicit security threat and criminalized on that basis.

The Conspiracy Against New Afrikans & Tupac Shakur’s Bid for Street Peace
In 1969,  W. L. Nolen sued CDCR, putting the long-known but growing conspiracy between prison Nazis and prison guards to kill and maim black prisoners into writing as a legal claim:

“Prison guards are complicit in fomenting racial strife by aiding white inmate confederates in ways not actionable in court, i.e., leaving cell doors open to endanger the lives of New Afrikans; placing fecal matter or broken glass in the food served to New Afrikans etc., as these material factors would be difficult to prove.” W.L. Nolen, et. al. v. Cletus Fitzharris, et. al.

Nolen’s use of ‘New Afrikan’ occurs only one year after its first, wide use, showing the close relationship between the Black prison movement and the theoretical innovations of the outside movement. The insurgent prison movement hurdled past mainstream identity formations of Black and African-American. The conception of New Afrikan identity was popularized after the declaration of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika in 1968, a future Black nation that will exist in current Southern States. The decision hinged on the acknowledgement that since 1619 every governing force from the colonies to the United States has failed to regard its Black community (or New Afrikans) as human. Incarcerated theorist Abdul Shakur’s Poverty Crime and Government: How Amerikkka Criminalized A Race (New Afrikan Criminology 101) with an incisive introduction by Joka Heshima Jinsai explains how the history and formation of American criminal law endorses the idea that law, however written, will be enacted in a way to suppress New Afrikan communities. Many former Black Panthers and Black radicals identify with the New Afrikan project for its acknowledgment of conditions of oppression and resource deprivation which constitute genocide of New Afrikans, their undeniable connectedness to Africa and Third World as an internally colonized people, and a range of political programs based on this analysis.

In a recovered interview from 1989 by New Afrikan intellectual Haki Kweli Shakur, before Tupac’s fame, then-National Chairman for the New Afrikan Panthers Tupac Shakur talked about the need among his “New Afrikan brothers and sisters” to break their current chains in search of “serious freedom” and “liberation." False narratives portraying Tupac as becoming depoliticized and his political opinions have persisted in an attempt to make him a cautionary tale of real consciousness undermined and destroyed by the siren call of the streets.

In reality, Tupac shared political objectives with visionaries like George Jackson and the practitioners of the Hunger Strike, using political influence to create the conditions for peace and self-governance within communities and beyond racial lines on the streets of Los Angeles, all outside the view of the oppressive State. Together with his valiant step-father and long-time political prisoner Mutulu Shakur, Tupac launched into improving tense neighborhood relationships on the streets by publishing the “Code of Thug Life,” meant to create a basis for establishing order in the midst of poverty and violence. The Code stated that the “Boys in Blue don’t run nothing” and asked for neighborhoods to appoint diplomats to work through new and long-standing rivalries between neighborhoods. The 26-points of agreement revolved around certain principles: protecting the civilians, rooting out informants, classifying safe zones where people could unwind without fear, and etching out consistency for all who live in the community. Of course, Tupac was killed in Las Vegas under suspicious circumstances indicating police and informant involvement as argued by researcher John Potash and many New Afrikans close to the situation that helped support Tupac’s music career.

Slaying Dragons: CDCR’s Murderous Rampage
Some self-identified Aryans had open respect for George, rejecting attempts by prison guards to goad the Aryans into assassinating him - a wise tactical decision, nonetheless. George devised his own form of deadly martial arts he mastered in closets and the empty spaces of the prison library to defend the constant attempts on his life. Incarcerated white prisoner Alan Mancini recounted one such conspiracy where a white Prison guard told Mancini that his and George’s cells would be left open. Mancini did not follow through with the assassination, instead choosing to inform George of the plot against his life. At that time, such fraternization between Black and white prisoners was unheard of, something of a proto-unity was brewing inside those walls, something that CDCR was intent on extinguishing.

Just months after Nolen immortalized similar allegations of conspiracy against the prison guards in the California legal docket, Southern-born guard Opie Miller shot and killed Black prisoners W.L. Nolen, Cleveland Edwards, and Alvin Miller during a fistfight with Aryan prisoners, accidentally hitting a white incarcerated man with a ricocheted round. In a kangaroo court process mirroring our local processes for exonerating cops, a rigged grand jury exonerated Opie Miller in less than a week. In the hours after the grand jury’s decision was broadcast over radio, the incarcerated men had retaliated, beating and throwing a prison guard off the 3rd floor to his death.

And with that, the infamous Soledad Brothers were created, consisting of George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo. The latter two were charged with the murder in a failed attempt to turn them into State’s witness against George, the ultimate target of the political prosecution.

On August 7, 1970, George’s 17-year old brother Jonathan Jackson, who had not hugged his brother George in the free world since he was 8 years old, entered the Marin County Courthouse, and paid the price of freedom when his plan to exchange court officials for George was interrupted by unsanctioned law enforcement gunshots in the Civic Center parking lot. Later panged with guilt, former Black police informant Louis Tackwood explained how the California’s Criminal Conspiracies Unit, which was conveniently parked just outside of court, and San Quentin prison guards, who were suspiciously in the area after a stint at the firing range, had information about the plot, letting it unfold and shooting at the van against the Sheriff’s orders. Tackwood had firsthand knowledge of the plot as the informant that had traveled up to the Santa Cruz mountains to participate in preparatory training exercises months before the attempted hostage exchange. Sure, the State killed freedom fighters Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas, and James McClain, but at what cost?

Picture taken outside a Marin County courtroom in the Civic Center while supporting a family in court in 2024. Nothing much has changed since Jonathan and others took court staff hostage in a bid to exchange George Jackson over 50 years ago, including the condescending tones of judges and jail cells filled with Black and Brown men.

The sole surviving member of the squad Ruchell Magee, who was a brilliant jailhouse lawyer and the forgotten codefendant of the lauded Angela Davis, served 53 years in prison after the shooting. Magee, who took on the name Cinque in remembrance of Joseph Cinque’s slave revolt of 1839, passed away in October 2023, less than 3 months after receiving a “compassionate release.”

Judge Haley was killed as a result of CDCR’s murderous “No Hostage” policy, usually concealed by high prison walls, for that moment brought into the light of the ‘free’ world. Today, in Marin County, Judge Haley’s picture hangs behind the judge in many courtrooms. Predictably, any mention of foreknowledge by San Quentin staff and California law enforcement is omitted from the many memorials around courthouses. At De-Bug, we support individuals who serve life sentences just for alleged knowledge of a crime. In this system, any consistency in justice can never be expected when the State’s hired guns are involved. The premeditated killing of 1 Black Freedom Fighter is more valuable to this system than the lives of any judge or court staff who uphold and form this system’s edicts daily.

Just a year later on August 21, 1971, days away from trial, a series of clouded events occurred after a legal visit by George Jackson’s attorney that ended in the death of 3 prison guards, 2 white prisoners, and George shot from a guard tower, meeting the same heroic end as Nolen years before, as a martyr in the struggle for a new world. George’s killing sparked the Attica Prison Uprising a few weeks later, bringing with it a new era of promising prison expression, articulation of community ethics, and unity. Of course, followed closely by the hammer of repression and the furnishing of a series of rewards and punishments to create a feeling of complete panopticon, in reality, animated by the shaky lies of informants.

In 1978, Black nationalist Khatari Ghaulden was playing football on the yard and hit his head on an exposed pipe. CDCR staff denied Ghaulden medical attention for hours, killing him through medical neglect. San Quentin erupted in protest. In solidarity with Black Muslims who were fasting in observance of Ramadan, Black August emerged in protest to the government assassinations of prisoners in the 1970’s and incorporated the fast into the practice of Black August. As in Islam, where fasting brings one closer to God by denial of life-preserving sustenance while the sun is up, the fast in Black August challenges the conscious to stretch the limits of body and mind.

In recent years, the fast’s dual meaning has emerged with coordinated 2011-2013 Hunger Strikes organized by the 4 representatives of the prominent racial groups and undertaken by mass sections of California’s valiant incarcerated population during that period to demand an end to overcrowding. Now, in a complicated age with a rightward shift and ever-rigged system, the resentencing pathways back to court and increased parole grants are direct descendants of the pressure the hunger strikes brought to the California legislature and the ever-present possibility of the hunger or labor strikes renewing.

Repression Continues
Being a community organizer gives us the perspective described by former political prisoner and New Afrikan Jalil Muntaqim described as being “at the tip of the spear.” Every person I have met in the system is downstream of social issues they had no role in creating and, certainly, had no ability to solve without the unity sought by the brothers inside. Working at ground-zero of the struggle against the system offers a lens into the immiseration the system - intentionally - brings its captives and to their families.

The contradictions are maddening and continue to drive my analysis. I have heard about the established channels through which prison guards bring in phones and drugs into prisons, controlling the reins of the drug trade and drug punishment at the same time; I have seen evidence of CO’s setting up “gladiator fights” forcing incarcerated people to fight for their survival, simply for their amusement, a side bet, or to reignite a past age of constant prison warfare. I have brushed against Corrupt Gang Task officers regulating the street drug and gun trade in the Bay Area through informants, rewarded with promotions and photo-ops with complicit, local politicians; and of course, Joanne Segovia, the former head of the San Jose Police Officers Association caught trafficking kilograms of what was thought to be fentanyl, but a recent “lucky” lab test claimed that was simply an “error.”

All these contradictions illuminate how our “justice” system exists to protect instances of major crimes that are politically inconvenient (like police killings) and bring the full force of the State against the incarcerated people who simply point out these contradictions to our society at-large.

George put it best: the “ultimate expression of law is not order — it’s prison.”

Looking at the Brothers with New Eyes
It is our natural unity and our unity borne from shared conditions that prison officials and law enforcement seek to break. We understand that one of the truisms of prison is that any organized activity, especially for scarce constitutional rights, is met with allegations of gang activity, true or not. The reality is that the collective unity of prisoners across and within racial groups has been vital in establishing diplomatic channels and improving conditions for all incarcerated people in California prisons. The State punishes these actions using criminal law of the courts and minimal evidence standards used in prison proceedings. Nevermind the overt Constitutional violations of the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and an Eighth Amendment violation of cruel and unusual punishment meted out for exercising the First Amendment. Isn’t the selective denial of rights to racial and social underclasses an immutable characteristic of fascism?

For the brothers inside, the only way that one can organize legally is hand-in-hand with guards and prison officials for milquetoast reforms to weaken naturally occurring unity in prisons built from shared slave conditions. While the public may talk vaguely about the specter of rising fascism with looming electoral outcomes, George forced us to recognize that fascism is and has been the everyday experience of our incarcerated community members for at least the past five decades. George’s letters to his dear mother and brother Jonathan Jackson were signed “From Dachau, with love.”

Facing assassination from conspiracies hatched by white prison guards using Nazi-linked white prisoners to conduct assassinations, George made clear for all how the day-to-day concerns of the Black prisoners in a so-called democracy looked remarkably similar to repression in the infamous concentration camp of Dachau. The same way in which Dachau entombed Hitler’s ethnic and political enemies (Poles, Jews, Roma, and Communists), George felt the racialized subjects and abject poor of America were being stuffed into cells as a solution for social inequities and waning consent for the State related to imperialism in Vietnam.

The Carceral State Attacks Tongan Unity
I come from a background of Tongan men assailed by the system for their unity, their devotion to their community, and their refusal to send others into the bloody maw of the carceral State to trade their life for another. Brilliant Tongan academic and Stanford lecturer Esiteli Hafoka explained that Siale Angilau was surreptitiously charged with federal RICO after taking a plea deal on state charges with the assurance that he would not be charged federally for the same alleged crimes. Supposedly hallowed promises of officers of the court are cast aside when it concerns the freedom of our Black and Brown men.

Siale was killed by US Marshals in standing on the principle of non-cooperation, during his 2014 Salt Lake City federal RICO trial. With his defense attorney’s pen, Siale attacked the informant who took the stand for leniency after the informant, as an older member of the community, allegedly commanded a young Tongan man to commit the killing of another young Tongan. Family and friends of Siale established the “Raise Your Pen Coalition” to provide a voice for disenfranchised Pacific Islanders and counter the narratives that make it easy for Utah’s mostly white juries to send young Tongan men into a lifetime of incarceration.

The system did not care if the morally culpable man was in the cage – only to maximize the number of Tongan men being sent into that cage for the maximum number of years possible under the law. The beloved martyr Siale was executed by Marshals as an innocent man. Our unity, while betrayed by some, is unbroken in the face of 20-year federal sentences and some life sentences. Many of the men coming home today are scholars of the oppression of Tongans in America, exposing the “legal fiction” the State invents to lock away whole Tongan communities, this time in Glendale through RICO. I keep a picture of Siale in my backpack during every law class or court date; Siale, despite what they would have you believe, embodies a strong political expression of community unity.

In this sense, all incarceration is political and so is the decision to inform on another. The effect of informing is trading one’s freedom for another for the condition of speaking. For Black and Brown snitches, they do so with a special understanding of the unfairness of the system and brutality of conditions, offsetting the emotional and physical cost of incarceration onto another person and their family.

George’s Prognosis: This is (Still) Fascism!
However, many of those masses inside, with a total inability to escape what George Jackson knew as a fascistic condition, offer – at the expense of their life and freedom – an invaluable analysis that we must pay attention to. Each has a suppressed and ignored story about how the patchwork of federal constitutional exceptions, oppressive state law, and boundless discretion of Police, DA’s, and Judges has condemned them to life in a box.

We remember Tookie Williams, a foundational leader of the Crips, executed for his moral and political opinions developed in search of the rehabilitation the system told him to seek. Tookie devoted his later years to pursuing grassroots peace among Los Angeles neighborhoods and unflinchingly citing George Jackson as his inspiration for this path. In 2006, Schwarzenneger executed Tookie Williams not for his initial crime, but for his invocation of George Jackson, suggesting that praise of George was “a significant indicator that [Tookie] Williams is not reformed.” Tookie always maintained his innocence throughout his 25+ years of incarceration. Of course, Tookie could have avoided execution, still, if he conceded to the “torture tactics” of solitary confinement deployed by CDCR mentioned in the Agreement and informed to prison authorities about the alleged associations and crimes of incarcerated people through the process of “debriefing.” Tookie would never do that and maintained his resilience to the very last moment of his life.

The moral inversion of this justice system is that criminal acts are excused through informant immunity regularly on the off-chance the information gathered might, some day, be helpful to destroying incarcerated peoples’ unity.

In four decades of Black August, CDCR has sharpened its technological and psychological swords. The spirit of George Jackson – the spirit of the Immortal Dragon – is alive in all our solid people behind walls, unplied by either the rewards or punishments CDCR offers. Fortifying themselves against the wave of repression and pledging to “exhaust all diplomatic means” when possible, formerly incarcerated people tell me the difference before the Agreement is night and day, but of course, not at all perfect.

As George would tell us, progress is not linear and organized action breeds intense repression, which George interpreted as the true mark of progress. Repression gives the community the chance to see the true face of the State - a security apparatus sitting on a pile of gold and protecting capital from the just cries of the poor and desperate. With the 2023 defeat of the Ashker settlement by Trump’s reconstructed 9th Circuit Court, CDCR’s boundless powers under the California Constiution to torture prisoners without legal recourse was affirmed and strengthened.

This same California Constitution allows slavery for our incarcerated community. They force incarcerated adults to pay restitution, offer them cents an hour for backbreaking work, and delay the release of any worker who decides to strike against these conditions. California built these prisons in the hottest conditions, hidden from the mass of the California population. In towns whose fiscal budget is intentionally and undeniably linked to bodies filling cages, the path to successfully closing these cages is grim.

The recently defeated Proposition 6 put the issue of ending slavery to the California voters, who failed our incarcerated family at the ballot box this November. At a recent rally in San Mateo County, De-Bug organizer Xavier España recounted his experience with legalized slavery, explaining that he was paid 8 cents per hour, which amounted to a mere “12 dollars and change” at the end of the month. His entire month of backbreaking work was less than California’s hourly minimum wage - this is pure, unadulterated slavery. In this new era of backsliding constitutional rights, political prisoners will be created from repression and organizing against torture. It is our job to protect their brave sacrifices and link our fates with theirs.

Sleeping Through a Revolution
Martin Luther King, Jr. would certainly not line up with George’s prescriptions for ending this system, but he summarized the final cost of at-large ignorance of the churning waters of revolution. The same fable applies to American Political Prisoners, the basis of any future movement, through the fable of Rip Van Winkle:

“The thing that we usually remember about this story is that Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years. But there is another point in that story that is almost always completely overlooked: it was a sign on the inn in the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the mountain for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip looked up at the picture of George Washington, he was completely lost; he knew not who he was. This reveals to us that the most striking fact about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not that he slept 20 years, but that he slept through a revolution.”

For those watching, it won’t come as a surprise when the Marin County Courthouse is morally refurbished with pictures of our George – not George Washington. That infamous edifice turned from the genteel front door of a glorified human slaughterhouse to a community museum honoring former political prisoners and those who had the nerve, like Jonathan and George, to bleed for a society they knew they would not see. It won’t be a surprise because we were not asleep during a revolution. We didn’t sit on our mountaintops or ivory towers, waxing about how our membership in an oppressed group should let us control the reins of the law to “progressively prosecute” Black and Brown people in a less offensive way. The outright refusal of supposedly “Progressive Prosecutor” Larry Krasner to grant beloved political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal release, retrial, or public support exposes this class of “Progressive Prosecutors” as just a smiling mask plastered over the same evil beast. The defeat of every Progressive Prosecutor and the defeat of the entire project places the burdens of progress on us – the people.

The halls of the Civic Center where pictures of George Jackson and Jonathan Jackson are conspicuously absent.

Our new society will require much more imagination, bravery, and moral sense than that approach. It is because we came to earth, felt the ground, and built the unity that CDCR, Police, and the California political machine cannot stomach and cannot defeat. We are in harmony with our incarcerated brothers and sisters as necessary builders of our lasting, community peace.

We return where we began, with George’s imperishable analysis.

We cannot imagine what society will come next, but Ho Chi Minh’s words come to us as prophecy, not as possibility. Remember that.

“When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out!”

Free all my brothers. The Dragon Lives ON.

Some Political Prisoners:

• Joka Heshima Jinsai
  • Sign the petition to Free Joka Heshima Jinsai
• Kevin Rashid Johnson
  • Check out his blog rashidmod.com) about the repression and his contributions to Black Liberation theory
• Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown)
  • Call prison authorities to ask for a transfer to a medical facility
• Shaka Shakur
  • Write a Letter to Lake County Prosecutor Bernard to ask for Shaka Shakur’s release
  • Check out Shaka Shakur’s new book on the convergence of the Palestinian and Black Liberation struggles titled “From Republic of New Afrika to Palestine: National Liberation in Context”
• Sitawa Abu Jamaa
  • Tune in to Elder Sitawa co-hosting Prison Focus Radio podcast
  • Support Elder Sitawa’s nonprofit Liberate Our Elders Support Services
• Jericho Movement:
  • For a list of some Political prisoners with their mailing address and case information at https://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners

Booklist:

• Blood in My Eye by George Jackson
• Soledad Brother by George Jackson
• Who Killed George Jackson by Jo Durden Smith
• The Glasshouse Tapes by Louis Tackwood
• Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton
• Social media accounts to follow:
• Haki Kweli Shakur
• George Jackson University
• AIM (Autonomous Infrastructure Mission)