Blood In My Eye by George L. Jackson

Author:George L. Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub

Amerikan Justice

For their freedom to prey on the world’s people . . . whatever the cost in blood.

Dear Greg,

In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources (the international wing of the repressive institutions has spent one and one-half trillion dollars since World War II), whatever the cost in blood (My Lai, Augusta, Georgia, Kent State, the Panther trials, the frame-up of Angela Davis)! The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.) are no less determined. The mayors that curse the rioters and the looters (Mayor Daley of Chicago has ordered them summarily executed in the streets) ignore the fact that their bosses have looted the world!!!

I refuse to make any argument with statistics compiled by the institutions and associations that I indict. Yet it is true that even official figures prove the case against capitalism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation compiles and indexes almost all information on crime in the United States—I have the figures as it states them right here: Vital Statistics—FBI Crime Report—property crimes, 87 percent of the total in 1969, 28 percent of these crimes occurring in the ghetto. Since 1960, the number of men and women prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries has fluctuated slightly around the quarter-million mark. These statistics conceal the living reality.

This is my eleventh year of being shoveled into every major prison in the most populous state in the nation—and the largest prison system in the world. What I have seen in these eleven years is the living situation. The experience is quite different from the columns of figures neatly arranged to give the impression of well-studied, detached, scientific and calculated analysis. Hidden are the facts that, at each institution I’ve been in, 30 to sometimes 40 percent of those held are black, and every one of the many thousands I’ve encountered was from the working or lumpenproletariat class. There may be a few exceptions, but I simply have not met any of them in my eleven years. Where I am confined now in San Quentin Prison, California, awaiting trial for two alleged crimes1 conviction on either of which would subject my lungs to the poison-gas treatment, there are seventeen cells in what is euphemistically called “the adjustment center” but is far more accurately known as the hole. The A./C. is San Quentin’s triple maximum security, and all of these cells are filled—eleven of them with black men—every one of them without exception from the working class.

I’ve been arrested, interrogated or investigated more times than I care to count. I’ve learned ten times more about the process than the most expert single groups of inquisitors. From the first moment I’m brought into this scenario, I attempt to establish control over the exchanges that will take place between myself and my captors. Depending on the situation, one learns to feign either indignation, surprise, idiocy or fear. At times the peasant-philosopher face will work.

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