March 1999

Review: VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS

Editor's note: The author of this review, Luis Bato Talamantez, was a prisoner in San Quentin's Adjustment Center, California's first Security Housing Unit. In 1971 the Adjustment Center was the site of a bloody prisoner uprising which took the life of three guards and several prisoners, one of them revolutionary author George Jackson who just before his death had completed his book, BLOOD IN MY EYE. In the aftermath of the prison rebellion, Talamantez stood trial as one of the San Quentin 6. He was acquitted and released in 1976. Ever since he has worked with prisoners and is presently general coordinator with California Prison Focus, a prison human rights group based in San Francisco. Please see the literature ad on page 9 to order the book he discusses.

D.A. Sheldon's VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS brings to my mind the crimson face of imprisonment. I found references about prison activity that are as true today as they were back when this writer was incarcerated.

I can visualize prisoner Sheldon sitting in his cell year after year, setting down his grim observations. This prisoner's 72-page testament is offered as a survivor's manual for empowering and organizing the imprisoned class. Many of the imprisoned who shall read these pages, I believe, will uplift themselves from their abject enslavement and join the growing revolutionary struggle and consciousness that will free them.

Works of this nature done by prisoners are in short supply. Only a prisoner inside his steel trap could have written this book with its heartfelt message to every other prisoner. Deliver your mind from the prison depths of despair, I read between the lines, and leave your criminality behind.

The imprisoned class, now numbering 1.8 million souls, is perceived as the leading threat to the disintegration of society. Convicted felons have become expendable and are being permanently written off. Prisoners are thrown into a violent and lawless environment where deliberate dehumanization of the individual is part of the administrative agenda. Prison regimes attempt to break the person to gain collaboration of the imprisoned class. Snitches and debriefers, guard controlled trustees, are made into tools and pitted against other prisoners. This prison place is a growing part of the injustice system where constitutional rights no longer apply.

Many of our children are already prison-bound because they are poor, and cannot afford to buy justice or because they are people of color assigned different standards of justice.

SURVIVAL AND STRUGGLE

Freedom, injustice, inhumanity and state power are concepts spelled out in VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS from a convict's point of view. The everyday mechanics, dynamics and explosive ingredients that make prisons—particularly draconian-style lockup units of which there are now innumerable variations spread across America—horrible places within which to exist and somehow overcome are revealed.

Institutionalization has been a social and political solution in motion since the beginning of white society's establishing its social order. The American practice of locking people up so as to feel safe is an American-spawned neurosis. Today this lockup mentality dominates the administration of American justice. This deviant social practice, along with killing by the state, has its origins in racist ideology, the inherent inequality of American justice and economic exploitation similar to past slavery and indentured servitude legitimized by the law.

Few people become aware of the degrading, caged conditions until they themselves are brought into that harsh environment. BLOOD IN MY EYE, a more familiar account of struggle from inside the prison walls by the slain author, George Jackson, was never truer than today in its revolutionary message calling for unity of the imprisoned class. Sheldon's work has a similar ring to it.

BUILDING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Prisoners, we are told, are being relegated to a world of deliberately inflicted pain and institutional abuse because nobody cares and nobody dares to challenge the powers that be. Prisoners must be made to care about their own class condition. We must acknowledge their torment within this arena of isolation and confinement and let the world know the harm being done to them in our name. Rehabilitation is no longer allowed on the playing field. Institutional violence and the threat of violence is the only thing administered by prison staff in the name of the public good.

VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS is a well-executed prisoner treatise, laboriously organized by a prisoner who one can tell has felt the brunt and setbacks of prison life and managed, somehow, to overcome. He now extends the benefit of his experience to those around him. A dedicated comrade to his own imprisoned class, I would say. Read and believe. Leave your criminality behind, is the message I get, and join in your own liberation.

The author has written a credible work that looks at imprisonment from inside and explains the workings of the prison architects who utilize the tools in keeping large segments of people under institutional control and fighting among themselves. What can be done to loosen one's shackles and free one's mind while in confinement? VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS. Read it and believe it.

—Luis Talamantez

CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS