Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners

by Angela Y. Davis (Foreword), Sara Falconer (Introduction), Josh Davidson (Editor)

Dispatches from behind bars. Political prisoners speak out.

The official story is that the United States has no political prisoners. The reality is that there are hundreds of people rounded up, placed behind bars, and kept there for inordinately long sentences because of their political beliefs and activities. A project of abolitionist Josh Davidson and political prisoner Eric King, this book is filled with the experience and wisdom of over thirty current and former North American political prisoners. It provides first-hand details of prison life and the political commitments that continue to lead prisoners into direct confrontation with state authorities and institutions. The people Josh Davidson has interviewed include former radicals and Black liberation militants from the sixties and seventies, current antifascists, nonviolent Catholic peace activists, Animal and Earth Liberation Front saboteurs, and more. Their stories are moving, often tragic, yet deeply inspiring.

Collectively, these people have spent hundreds of years behind bars, and their experiences speak directly to the cruelty and immorality of our prison and so-called criminal justice systems. Although their sentences and the conditions they have endured vary dramatically, this wide range of voices come together to embody what bell hooks called “a legacy of defiance.” It is this legacy—of tirelessly struggling to right today’s wrongs and create a better tomorrow—that the prison system tries, yet fails, to extinguish. 

Contributors  Donna Willmott, James Kilgore, Mark Cook, Rebecca Rubin, Hanif Shabazz Bey, Chelsea Manning, Oso Blanco, Ann Hansen, Sean Swain, Martha Hennessy, Jalil Muntaqim, Jeremy Hammond, Kojo Bomani Sababu, Laura Whitehorn, Eric King, Rattler, Ray Luc Levasseur, Elizabeth McAlister, Malik Smith, David Campbell, Xinachtli, David Gilbert, Susan Rosenberg, Daniel McGowan, Linda Evans, Herman Bell, Jennifer Rose, Ed Mead, Jerry Koch, Michael Kimble, Bill Harris, Jaan Laaman, Jake Conroy, Marius Mason, Bill Dunne, Oscar López Rivera

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History

540 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 5, 2023

About the author

Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department.

Her research interests are in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s.

Reviews

[Corvus · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 blog.

[e v · Rating 5 out of 5]

any movement that does not support its political prisoners is a sham movement

any movement that extends into a revolutionary horizon will face the prison as the border wall of the future

even in the darkest places of confinement the struggle continues

it’s either over the wall or up against your captors

(hit up your local ABC chapter, write letters, send books, table prisoner writings, keep the commissary funds full)

[foxfire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most important book you will ever read about revolutionary politics and prison. 400 pages of insightful, charismatic reflection on prison and prison politics from the belly of the beast, by those who lived it. An excellent and timeless contribution to the abolitionist struggle. Required reading.

[Scout · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collecting the stories of prisoners incarcerated for actions they took as part of struggles ranging from anti-imperialism, to Black liberation, to Earth/animal liberation, to the Catholic workers movement and beyond, this volume showcases conversational insight on the realities of US prison conditions. There are many gems of wisdom scattered throughout, alongside revelations of how depraved these institutions are. For example, several contributors discuss the extents that prison administration goes to to practice psychological warfare on prisoners by pitting them against each other, through practices such as encouraging racial segregation, or the practice of gladiator fights in which the administration facilitates large-scale brawls between prison gangs and others.

A primary strength of the collection is the sheer number of stories told, reflecting many different circumstances. It can be easy from the outside to ask questions like, “what is the truth of what it’s like behind prison walls in the US?” But collections like this make it clear that there isn’t one answer. In a context where prison staff largely have discretion to do what they please, and prisoners and guards struggle for relative power, things look pretty different from place to place. Reading this book, we get a sense of how far-ranging those differences can be. And, we also sense the truth that, while many experiences are shared among those incarcerated, no two people experience it exactly the same way.

But, since these are political prisoners’ stories specifically, they bring to the table not only a highly informed analysis of the prison system on both a large scale and granular level, but also countless stories of prisoner resistance, people looking out for each other, and also the opposite, people throwing each other under the bus in desperation to save themselves. Following the thread through the different accounts of how isolated vs communal, individual vs rebellious the different cultures within the facilities were at different times is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

And, counter to how many books on heavy political topics might leave you feeling, this is one that brings with it a very clear next step if you are moved to take action: make contact with a political prisoner and/or the people outside supporting them.

I have two points to make on things that could have been improved or done differently. One, I wish there was a little more shared about the process of compiling this book, and reflections on the result. The editor, Josh Davidson, who worked to actualize political prisoner Eric King’s idea for this book while the latter was still locked up, contributes a brief preface, in which he’s less so trying to make some grand statement than just quickly establish some groundwork and then clear the way for the main acts, which I get. But while I don’t feel like Josh needed to make a grand statement, some more details on how he conducted this project could have highlighted how reproducible this type of educational endeavor is, and clarified some of what followed.


For example, the collection is subtitled with the phrase “Oral Histories,” but at least some of the contributions appear to be written. Not a problem really in itself, but I’d be curious to know how the interviews were conducted for each person. Beyond that, each contributor’s chapter is structured by three sections, “Prison Life,” “Politics and Prison Dynamics,” and “Looking Forward.” Within those, it becomes clear while reading the book that each prisoner was asked the same questions. You can work backwards to figure out what many of them are, for example “Did you feel prepared to go to prison, what most shocked you there, did you get in fights with guards or prisoners, how important is outside support,” etc. But I wish we could just read the prompts ourselves to see what each person is responding to, and know whether the info was shared over a phone call, in person visit, physical letter, jpay, or what.

On the reflection end of things, there were some dynamics within the collection that I feel could have used some framing in the preface. For example, almost all contributors talk about race and racism. However, the book has not only predominantly white contributors, but the relative lengths of contributions also vary a lot between race. In one example, Kojo Bomani Sababu’s 3 page contribution is sandwiched between two 20 page contributions from white former prisoners. While this is perhaps the most extreme moment, it is certainly part of a pattern. There are plausible reasons for this disparity that have nothing to do with nefarious intentions of the editors or anything like that. For example, since BIPOC receiving longer sentences is a key issue in the prison system, many white contributors are formerly incarcerated, while many BIPOC ones are still inside, and therefore would face more logistical challenges in participating in this project. But, like with my above comment on knowing the questions asked, I wish that I was not left to speculate on why these things are the way they are in the book, and that rather the editor(s) made an honest attempt to account for it.

My other suggestion is that it would have been wonderful to hear more about the contributors’ lives before prison. While as is the book has a very focused theme, it could have been amazing with so many people representing different struggles to have them speak to their relationship with those struggles from before their incarceration. (Obviously in many cases they aren’t going to be free to discuss every detail, but still.) This would have provided an opportunity for someone who got the book because they care about prison struggles to learn more about other struggles they may be less familiar with.

Finally, this isn’t so much a suggestion because there certainly isn’t a quick way to implement it. But, one thing I reflected on while reading is the different sort of result that you get when you send a cold-call-ish list of questions to someone, and an interview with that same person given by someone who really knows them. While reading some of these entries, I thought, “the person whose story I’m reading seems like they would have a lot of interesting things to say, but I’m not sure if what they are talking about right now would rank high among them.” In other words, this collection made me imagine what types of deeper insight would be possible in the context of deeper relationships with the contributors. When you are trying to get a bunch of people to participate, and you don’t know them before starting the project, having a one size fits all list of questions makes sense. But, someone conducting an interview with a close friend will think, “Oh, I know exactly what to ask to get them talking about what people need to hear.” And that’s a different quality of experience.

Overall, a very worthwhile collection. Many things I will stew on and plan to share with others.

[Abdullah T · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a 400-page book so it took me some time to read. That being said, it's almost like little advice columns from multiple prisoners so each excerpt is max of 10-15 pages long so it's an easy read too. NoName's bookclub gave it to me as they highly recommended it. The book inspired me. Someone in the book mentioned how being a prisoner is intrinsically political. There are only political prisoners. Throughout each account, there are common threads that everyone touches on that are inspiring. Most prisoners have these ingredients to success. One of them being is to maintain contact with the outside world, ideally loved ones. Many prisoners don't have folks to stay connected to, and that is why it's important to send letters even discussing your day. Human interaction and community is so integral to survival and just writing about your day can change some of these people's lives. I once tried to write, but it seemed like many men just wanted a woman to write to. I'm going to reach out and figure out how I can write a letter. They also cited the idea consistently to have hope. Be a glass half full kind of person. That was really inspiring to me as I tend to be that, and sometimes, I wonder if I am being naive, and this book solidified how that mindset is truly life saving and sustaining. Another them of the book is to not divide yourself in race. Many of the white prisoners talked about how they had to specifically tell their white counterparts that they don't mess with that, and they viewed all people with respect. Racial solidarity is helpful when you are a minority experiencing oppression. Racism is rampant in prisons, and it's only a reflection of larger society. Racism is a social construct, and we should treat other human beings with respect and dignity. However, because it exists, those that are marginalized have a right to build solidarity with one another. One of the prisoners wrote how racism is a white people problem, and it is their responsibility to fix a problem they made. The book was cool too because I just read Leonard Peltier's book, and it just solidified how big of a name he was. I need to do more of a deep dive on Oscar Lopez Rivera, Ohio 7, Sundiaita Acoli because they were repeatedly mentioned. The book is also cool because it is current, and it touches on the Biden administration and COVID. While at the same time, it had prisoners who had been there for decades and touched on how mass incarceration really started in the 80s. In 1999, the amount of women increased 8 fold. So many little tidbits of information that I learned from the book like that. It reminded me how staying educated is powerful, and many treat prison like a university. I think being on that outside, we have so many resources to educate and better ourselves, and it makes me not dismiss reading to the movement. I've talked to organizers who almost dismiss book clubs because they aren't mobilizing in the way demonstrations or actions do. These conversations are so important, and I think these spaces create a space to have the conversation that leads to action, and these conversation are an action in itself. The final point I want to bring up is that someone mentioned how you are the same person behind the cage and outside of the cage, and that the organizing never stops. I think that can be applied to life, and it is inspiring. We're going to be in tough situations, and it's our responsibility to remind ourselves what we believe in and act in that belief. Overall, this book was super inspiring, and I enjoyed reading it.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Not a history of people's cases, but the story of their life inside of prison. You can't get a better cross-section of the US prison system than 36 political prisoners who have done time in all different places and times.

What most fascinated me was how anti-racists deal with rigid racial segregation in men's prisons, typical facilitated by the prison but enforced by gangs. How do they balance survival and solidarity?

Also nuts is the level of snitching. Usually when I hear people talk about how bad snitching has gotten, I think of "music was better when I was a kid" type statements. But the change came up repeatedly in this book, and most vividly when someone described people reading other inmate's legal paperwork behind their back, then contacting the prosecution to offer evidence. It sounds like the vast majority, at least in men's prison, are ready to snitch by any desperate means necessary.

None moreso than the gang leaders, who maintain power thru a balance with the guards / administration and even through secret alliances with their enemies. That was another thing mentioned by multiple people: when a gang wants to kill one of their own, it is contracted out to their rivals.

Idk, way more in here, and I've never read anything like this. I appreciate how every person is eccentric in how they live their beliefs, handle themselves, and write these stories.

Two notes:
- This book speaks to those going to prison for political acts and for those who support political prisoners. It's also very well organized so you can read it without knowing anything before hand.
- Almost all the authors are free. Some from 2 year sentences and some who did half a century. They were locked up for anything from prison breaks to bank robbery to hacking to animal rights.

[Emje McCarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an important book, & i almost finished it.
it is kind of redundant, which is probably to be expected as it seems the subjects were asked similar if not the same questions.
nevertheless, i found it very inspiring & tragic & hope filled.
i also found it very informative as an anarchist.
i hope i will follow through & start, at least, being available to correspond with political prisoners.

[Colleen Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve read in the last few years. It’s lengthy but oral histories make it accessible and the content is so intriguing and important that you do not want to put it down.

[Scott Neigh]

Check out my short video review here.