FROM Berkeley to Bedford-Stuyvesant, scrawls of aerosol paint on ghetto walls demand: FREE ANGELA DAVIS. FREE THE SOLEDAD BROTHERS. FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. The phrase "political prisoner" is so laminated into the radical mind that, like "genocide" or "fascist pig," it has become part of an unconscious ritual. George Jackson's death last week at San Quentin raised some fundamental and difficult questions about the meaning of the term and to whom it applies.
Was Jackson in fact a political prisoner? And what about Angela Davis, accused of supplying guns to Jackson's brother Jonathan in last year's shootout at the Marin County Courthouse? Radicals and quite a few liberals, regardless of race, would emphatically answer yes. More than that, many would contend that all black prisoners in American jails are political prisoners in the sense that a "racist," white-dominated political and economic system has condemned them, in their poverty and blackness, to lives of crime.
There is a disturbing grain of truth in the argument. To be black in America is indeed in many ways a political and social condition. All too often it is a condemnation to poverty and political impotence. For too many black youths, a numbingly meaningless school system becomes a sluice into crime, narcotics, precinct lockups, courts, and then prisons, with all the disastrous expertise that they have to teach. The nation's judiciary, for which politicians presumably have the ultimate responsibility, too often seems a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Franz Kafka.
But the argument is indiscriminate—like a charge of buckshot. As Harvard Sociologist David Riesman observes: "Polemically, the term "is almost indefinitely extensible." It is also an elusive term with a sociological rather than a precise legal definition. Classically it refers to someone who is prosecuted or jailed—not for crimes in the ordinary sense of the word, but for harboring or expressing opinions antagonistic to an established order of government. There is no question that the U.S. has a long and frequently dishonorable history of persecuting its citizens who hold unpopular opinions. The record reaches back past the Joseph McCarthy era to Sacco and Vanzetti, the Palmer raids, the Wobblies, and the Haymarket trial of 1887. There is also the ambiguous case of the Utah Mormons, who were persecuted in the late 19th century for the "crime" of practicing polygamy, then a canon of their faith. In a certain sense, those Latter-day Saints arrested for refusing to divorce their several wives could be regarded as "political" prisoners.