Political Prisoners

Political Prisoners
Author: United States. National Minority Advisory Council on Criminal Justice
Publisher:
Total Pages: 88
Release: 1981
Genre: Government publications
ISBN:

Political Prisoners

Political Prisoners
Author: Roger Smith
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 1681461013

As you read this, thousands of men, women, and even children are in prisons around the world, not because they have committed violence, theft, or broken drug laws, but because they spoke against their government. They are political prisoners: in some cases, they did not even intend to cross their nations' leaders-they just happened to get in the way of schemes of which they were not even aware. This book tells many stories of political prisoners, both past and present. Some of them have become leaders in their countries, like Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel. Some have "disappeared" and may no longer be alive, like sixteen-year-old Panchen Lama. Many of these political prisoners are people of tremendous courage and inner strength, like Wei Jingsheng, Leyla Zana, and Aung San Suu Kyi. An imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi has urged the world, "Please use your liberty to promote ours." The true accounts of political prisoners in this book are both heartrending and inspiring: every informed citizen of our world should know about them.

With Liberty for Some

With Liberty for Some
Author: Scott Christianson
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 422
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781555534684

From Columbus' voyages to the New World through today's prison expansion movements, incarceration has played an important, yet disconcerting, role in American history. In this sweeping examination of imprisonment in the United States over five centuries, Scott Christianson exposes the hidden record of the nation's prison heritage, illuminating the forces underlying the paradox of a country that sanctifies individual liberty while it continues to build and maintain a growing complex of totalitarian institutions. Based on exhaustive research and the author's insider's knowledge of the criminal justice system, With Liberty for Some provides an absorbing, well-written chronicle of imprisonment in its many forms. Interweaving his narrative with the moving, often shocking, personal stories of the prisoners themselves and their keepers, Christianson considers convict transports to the colonies; the international trade in captive indentured servants, slaves, and military conscripts; life under slavery; the transition from colonial jails to model state prisons; the experience of domestic prisoners of war and political prisoners; the creation of the penitentiary; and the evolution of contemporary corrections. His penetrating study of this broad spectrum of confinement reveals that slavery and prisons have been inextricably linked throughout American history. He also examines imprisonment within the context of the larger society. With Liberty for Some is a thought-provoking work that will shed new light on the ways in which imprisonment has shaped the American experience. As the author writes, "Prison is the black flower of civilization -- a durable weed that refuses to die."

Abolition Democracy

Abolition Democracy
Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1609801032

Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

Rattling the Cages

Rattling the Cages
Author: Josh Davidson
Publisher: AK Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1849355223

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 include: 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

Prisons that Could Not Hold

Prisons that Could Not Hold
Author: Barbara Deming
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780820317373

Prisons That Could Not Hold weaves together diary entries, letters, and interviews to provide a very human portrait of the evolution of an individual activist and the development of contemporary "movement" philosophy. The centerpiece of this volume is the acclaimed Prison Notes, a powerful account of the twenty-seven days Barbara Deming and thirty-five others spent in an Albany, Georgia, jail during their Canada-to-Cuba Walk for Peace in 1963 and 1964. Demanding that black demonstrators and white demonstrators be able to walk together, the peace marchers were imprisoned, leading many in the group to fast and employ other nonviolent techniques of protest. Their presence and discipline had a lasting effect on the Albany Movement and other nonpacifist civil rights groups in the South. The remainder of the book relates Deming's final protest walk some twenty years later in 1983 with the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment, a group of women-only peace marchers scheduled to walk from Seneca, New York, the site of the first Women's Rights Declaration in 1848, to the missile base in Romulus, New York. This nonviolent march in honor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminist heroines was interrupted by protestors. Deming and fifty-three other women were arrested and spent five days in a Waterloo, New York, jail. These events are told in "A New Spirit Moves Among Us," an essay written in letter form to a friend in defense of women-only actions, an interview with Deming conducted after her release from jail, and a statement of purpose issued from jail by the Waterloo Fifty-Four. As Grace Paley notes in her introduction, Prisons That Could Not Hold is "the story of two walks undertaken to help change the world without killing it. Barbara Deming was an important member of both. Twenty years of her brave life lie between them. . . . That difference between the two walks measures a development in movement history and also tells the distance Barbara traveled in those twenty years."