1 For a detailed discussion of the term ‘imprisoned intellectuals’ and of the distinctions between ‘social’ and ‘political’ prisoners, see Joy James, preface and introduction to Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s political prisoners write on life, liberation, and rebellion (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Little.eld, 2003).
2.
2 Antonio Gramsci , Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith ( New York, International Publishers , 1985), p. 5-5. Gramsci writes: ‘When one distinguishes between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, one is referring in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional category of the intellectuals... although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non-intellectuals, because non-intellectuals do not exist’ (p. 9).
3.
3 Daniel Berrigan’s letter is reprinted in Imprisoned Intellectuals, op. cit.
4.
4 For example, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution legalises slavery for those duly convicted of a crime. Following the Civil War, under the convict prison leasing system, African Americans criminalised for their ‘blackness’ were worked to death in mines, .elds and forests in joint ventures between the state and private industries. See Matthew Mancini , One Dies, Get Another: convict leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 ( Columbia, University of South Carolina Press , 1996).
5.
5 W. E. B. Du Bois , Black Reconstruction in America ( New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company , 1935).
6.
6 Some accounts of the southern civil rights movement, for example, argue that pacifists were often provided with protection from Klan and police violence by armed and organised African men and women, such as those who formed the Deacons for Defense and Justice in North Carolina. See Anne Moody , Coming of Age in Mississippi ( New York, Dial Press , 1968); Robert Franklin Williams, Negroes with Guns (Detroit, MI, Wayne State University Press, 1998, reprint); and Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
7.
7 See Vincent Harding , There Is a River: the black struggle for freedom in America ( New York, Harcourt Brace , 1981).
8.
8 See Mike Ngo, under pseudonym ‘An Unknown Soldier’, ‘A day in the life’, prisoners’ ’zine, untitled (13 January 2000); see also Dylan Rodriguez’s ‘Interview with Mike Ngo’, in Joy James (ed.), The New Abolitionists: imprisoned writers on incarceration, enslavement and emancipation (forthcoming).
9.
9 For details of US foreign and domestic policies that instigated warfare, destabilisation and countless deaths in the post-second world war era, see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston, MA, South End Press, 1988); Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: the FBI’s secret war against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston, MA, South End Press, revised edition 2002); Joy James, Resisting State Violence: radicalism, gender, and race in US culture (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
10.
10 See Frank Wilderson, III , ‘The prison slave as hegemony’s (silent) scandal’, in Social Justice (forthcoming).
11.
11 On this point, see, for example, Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, op. cit.; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York, HarperCollins, 1999); David J. Brown and Robert Merrill (eds), Violent Persuasions: the politics and imagery of terrorism (Seattle, WA, Bay Press, 1993); Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, op. cit.; and Troy Johnson et al. (eds), American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the longest walk (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1997).
12.
12 His conviction ‘was based on the testimony of a frightened teenager and on explosives allegedly found in [we Langa’s] house’. A Federal Court of Appeals declared the search illegal, yet the Supreme Court ‘sustained the conviction holding that the Federal courts should not have reviewed the state court decision’. See Center for Constitutional Rights, ‘Political prisoners in the United States’ (September 1988). COINTELPRO is, of course, the acronym for the FBI’s domestic ‘ counterintelligence programs’.
13.
13 See Mondo we Langa , ‘Letter from the Inside’, Nebraska Report (May/June 1999), p. 9-9. For information on Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa (David Rice), see Can’t Jail the Spirit (Chicago, IL, Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, .fth edition, 2002).
14.
14 The article was .rst published in the International Association of Democratic Lawyers Bulletin (January 1990) and reprinted in Social Justice (Vol. 18, no. 3).
15.
15 See Anne-Marie Cusac, ‘You’re in the hole: a crackdown on dissident prisoners’, The Progressive (December 2001). The Progressive reports that on 26 October 2001, John Ashcroft signed the ‘National Security: Prevention of Acts of Violence and Terrorism’ order, which was subsequently published in the Federal Register. Cusac writes: ‘Under the new rules, the Department of Justice, “based on information from the head of a federal law enforcement or intelligence agency,” will select certain prisoners for “special administrative measures”... [including isolation, denials of correspondence, telephone communication, visitations and media interviews].’
