(2 of 4)
Nonetheless, a profligate inclusiveness tends to drain the phrase "political prisoner" of its specific (and still valid) meaning. To accept the idea that all black prisoners are political is to condemn implicitly the laws that sent them to prison and to suggest that they all be freed. But since an overwhelming majority of the victims of black crime are black, and since most blacks, in or out of ghettos, obey the law, the release of all black prisoners might strike law-abiding Negroes as a subtle kind of redoubled racism. Moreover, in demanding Angela's freedom, radicals forget that by their own definition there are all manner of political prisoners in the U.S. who are not black. If all political prisoners are to be released, what about
James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan bluntly answers that "if someone has committed a crime of violence because of his political views, he damn well belongs in jail."
-
Ultimately the question of who is, and who is not a political prisoner can only be answered by specific cases, and the case of George Jackson requires careful and difficult assessment. A product of one of Chicago's ghettos, he had been convicted twice on armed-robbery charges before he was sent to prison at the age of 19 for robbing a filling station of $70. The offense was, by almost any standard, criminal not political. Jackson received an indeterminate sentence of from one year to life. When it was first put to use, the indeterminate sentence seemed an intelligent reform in the comparatively enlightened California penal system. The theory was that convicts, instead of suffering through fixed terms, might be released whenever prison authorities thought they were rehabilitated. Unfortunately reform has proved to be a regression in many cases; indeterminate sentencing has given California prison authorities an extraordinary and often unjust discretionary power over their convict charges. Repeatedly, for the next eleven years, Jackson appeared before California parole authorities, and each time he was returned to his cell. There was an aspect of Jean Valjean in the procedure.
Even though he was a three-time loser, Jackson went to prison for a minor criminal offense that scarcely warranted an eleven-year sentence. Did the parole examiners who prolonged his term turn him into a political prisoner? Jackson filled his long stretch—more than seven years of it in solitary confinement—with an extraordinary self-education in languages, economics, history and philosophy. He concentrated increasingly on Marxist theory and did nothing to conceal his revolutionary politics, which called for the destruction of the capitalist system. His published prison letters, Soledad Brother, incandescent and often eloquent in their hatred, and his moving compassion for his people made him that contemporary incongruity—a literary celebrity in stir.