George Jackson and Michel Foucault on Prison Writing as Resistance

• In Event: Black Political Thought (I)

Abstract

Michel Foucault’s 1974 Discipline and Punish famously traced the development of modern incarceration from torture to punishment to what he called the disciplinary society, establishing a theory of power and prisons that remains foundational for today’s activists and political theorists. Yet little has been written on what Foucault had learned from the many American prison movements of the early 1970s. In November of 1971 after the author and activist George Jackson was gunned down in an alleged escape attempt, Michel Foucault and several others published a series of pamphlets wherein they declared “the death of George Jackson is not a prison accident,” but a “political assassination,” “an act of war.” Jackson had been a prominent theorist and practitioner of black radicalism and Marxism, and a leader of the Black Panther Party. “George Jackson was my hero,” Newton said in his eulogy at the memorial service one week after his death: “he set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people.” Angela Davis wrote in her own autobiography that “George was a symbol of the will of all of us behind bars.” What then did black power mean for Foucault?

This essay forges historical and conceptual connections between Foucault’s writings on the prison and Jackson’s writings in Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye. Through this unlikely pair I seek to answer the following: what is prison writing as a form of political resistance, and what does it reveal of penal power structures? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault would argue that the roots of contemporary disciplinary society lay partially in older penal practices: “through the confession,” he wrote, “the accused himself took part in the ritual of producing penal truth.” And in the early twentieth century, programs like “bibliotherapy” sought to rehabilitate prisoners through writing and reading. But Jackson like fellow black radicals Eldridge Cleaver, Davis, Newton and others saw prison writing as a witness stand from which to testify against racial oppression and capitalism. This truthtelling sought not to reproduce but resist the punitive and disciplinary structures of modern prisons. Prison writing unlike the confession was a means of challenging penal power. Revisiting Foucault’s foundational writings in the context of 1970s prison movements illuminates not only what black power meant for his analysis but the potential and limits of writing as resistance against mass incarceration today.

Author

• Nolan Bennett, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay