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This chapter focuses on George Jackson, prisoner A63837, who wrote “Soledad Brother,” a collection of letters he wrote to his parents, sisters and younger brother while he was in prison. It became a bestseller and was considered the most popular literary expression of black prison radicalism during this time. He wrote that attacking the racial problem with intellectualism would be giving away their advantage they had in numbers. His other brother became an armed militant and was killed in a hostage situation. The brothers' literary and militant approaches happened during a time of massive waves of prison riots. Jackson became the voice of prisoner discontent which provided coherent narrative through which more people could understand the increasing number of protests. Jackson wrote another book “Blood in My Eye” which was about his ideas on politics, economics, and military strategy. Jackson, like most other prisoners shared a common desire to escape while evidence showed that the prison system wanted him dead. Jackson, armed and in control of section of the prison along with several other inmates, was killed while trying to escape.

The chapter explores how memorial constructions of George Jackson’s resistance against California’s prison system provide a discursive symbol of prisoner liberation that stretches across time and space. Writing between traditions that have both excoriated Jackson as criminal and celebrated Jackson as an intellectual, the chapter takes up Jackson’s activism within the framework of his lived experience as a California prisoner whose choices were always restricted by prison’s bondage. To break free of prison’s metaphorical and physical walls, Jackson’s activism was rooted in a transnational struggle for Black Liberation that equated the prisoners’ plight alongside Marxist movements for national revolution and independence in Vietnam, Cuba, South Africa, and South America. After his 1971 death at the hands of California prison guards, Jackson became a cultural martyr and a palimpsest as a memorial and symbolic inspiration to future abolitionist and protest campaigns against carceral regimes. Drawing on the transnational cultural memory of Jackson as ardent prison abolitionist, the chapter discerns a new era of prison protest where California’s prison hunger strikes in 2012 and 2013 share Jacksonian inspiration with the first-ever national prison work strike in 2016.

As a child, Rita Brown found sanctuary from the violence of her home in the bookmobile that visited her school. One of the first books that made an impression on her was a biography of Captain Jack, or Kintapuasch, the Modoc leader who catalyzed his people in a heroic defense against white immigrants and the Union Army. Captain Jack defined Brown's conception of dignity and became her first role model. In 1964, when Brown was seventeen and in her last year at Klamath Union High School in Oregon, she and a sixteen-year-old named Janice became lovers. In 1971, Brown was arrested for mail theft at the Post Office, where she was working as a clerk. She was sentenced to imprisonment at the nearest federal correctional institute for women: Terminal Island in San Pedro, California. This chapter relates how Rita Brown got involved with crime and how she was introduced to the political thought of George Jackson in time to understand the significance of his death.

Chapter 2 analyses Angela Davis’s written reflections on her transformation into the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state. A spectacle in the most consequential sense, the iconic images of Davis telegraphed across American visual culture in the early 1970s, many of which highlight her Afro, demonstrate that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies of racial and sexual difference can take visual form. Beginning with the FBI’s ‘Wanted’ poster of her, this chapter tracks the images of Davis that circulated through the American media and came close to inscribing the accusation of her criminality into legal truth and commonly held belief. I argue that Davis’s ordeal demonstrates that visual culture serves as a site where the pathologies of racism and sexism compound each other and force black women into positions of subordination, and that it therefore offers a powerful context for understanding the stakes of Piper’s textual interventions into the iconicity of the black female body. Reading a range of Davis’s writings (her autobiography, her letters to George Jackson, her own defence statement) in relation to Piper’s artwork, this chapter shows that Davis also deployed language to contest the legacies of ‘ungendering’ and undo the visual logics that have determined black women’s visibility..

In the fall, the collective relocated from their working-class digs in southern Seattle to the more middle-class north Seattle. As usual, the banks robbed by the members of the George Jackson Brigade were far away from their home, including the Old National Bank in Juanita and the Skyway Park branch of the People's National Bank. The proceeds from these and other recent bank robberies funded a new campaign, one in support of automotive machinists in Bellevue who had been on strike since May 18. Brigade members walked with picketers at five different automobile dealerships and concluded that the workingmen would be amenable to some old-fashioned American labor violence. The Brigade launched attacks against the Westlund Buick-Opel-GMC, S.L. Savidge Dodge, and the BBC Dodge dealerships. It sent a letter addressed to the Automotive Machinists Union claiming responsibility for the three automobile dealership bombings. While the Brigade took its potshots at the owning class in the United States, a parallel formation in West Germany involving the Red Army Faction was shaking the country to its foundations.

Edward Allen Mead and Bruce Seidel both found their May 31, 1975, bombing of the Division of Corrections headquarters in Olympia empowering. In the absence of immediate repercussions, Mead and Seidel continued on their course. The next “mass struggle” that they perceived to be in need of armed support was the American Indian Movement on the Sioux reservations of Pine Ridge and Rosebud in South Dakota. There, a violent and uneven battle was being waged between traditionalists and compradors on land drenched in the blood of over a century of conflict. Mead and Seidel broke into the Federal Bureau of Investigation offices in Tacoma and the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Everett on August 5 and 6, respectively. They took turns planting pipe bombs; both devices detonated as planned. This chapter discusses how a furtive effort to launch a guerrilla cell out of an anarchist bookshop ended in disaster and how the George Jackson Brigade became Public Enemy Number One after its two bombings of the Safeway Store in Washington.

On January 28, 1976, a month and a half before John Sherman's escape from prison, Jill Kray attended the arraignment of her ex-boyfriend, Edward Allen Mead, with her two-year-old daughter Odessa. Upon seeing Mead, Odessa cried out: “Daddy!” One federal marshal, on hand to maintain order in court, rushed out of the room; minutes later, he returned with a subpoena for Kray from the grand jury that had been convened to investigate the Tukwila bank robbery. Peter Lippman, a younger brother of Mead's mentor, the former Weatherman Roger Lippman, accompanied Kray to her first grand jury appearance. He, too, was subpoenaed. U.S. Attorney Stan Pitkin told Kray, who refused to testify, and her attorneys that she had relevant information and hoped that she would testify to get herself out of the mess she was in. Another person subpoenaed to the grand jury investigating the George Jackson Brigade was Michael Withey, a leftist lawyer. By the time the Brigade grand jury investigation hit Seattle, it was clear that a national initiative was under way to disrupt the activities of left-wing activists.

On February 26, 1976, an inmate tried to give Edward Allen Mead a note. Written on it was a proposal to riot, take hostages, and escape. The author of the proposal, Mark LaRue, had been involved in the takeover attempt at the Washington State Penitentiary on New Year's Eve of 1974. The takeover was intended to enforce the collective demands of the inmates—the same demands that the George Jackson Brigade would make six months later when it bombed the offices of the Washington Department of Corrections in Olympia. The state of Washington charged Mead with first-degree assault on police officers Joseph L. Abbott and Robert W. Mathews. Though he had indeed shot at the men, Mead claimed he was not guilty as charged. He argued that he had not shot with “intent to kill,” so it was second-degree assault of which he was guilty. During his trial, Mead took the U.S. government to task for its imperialism, but he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. He was headed to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

One evening in October 1975, Rita Brown and a companion were sitting in a Pioneer Square bar across from the train station on Jackson Street in Seattle, Washington. Suddenly everything went dark. Power to the whole area was out after a fuel truck crashed on the Alaskan Way viaduct, the coastal rim of downtown, and was pouring flaming oil onto a terminal of City Light, the public utility, below. City light workers, who had been on strike since October 17 demanding a retroactive pay raise and the negotiation of a new contract, refused to repair the damage. Their obstinacy prolonged the power outage. The next week, different members of the George Jackson Brigade walked the picket line with the rank and file of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 77, a common way of demonstrating solidarity. This chapter focuses on the bombings carried out by the George Jackson Brigade on New Year's Eve of 1976, one against City Light and two against a Safeway Store.

In the midst of the storm of criticism, Rita Brown received an intriguing invitation from Bruce Seidel, a fellow prison organizer with whom her girlfriend Therese Coupez had first became acquainted on the University of Washington campus. “Would you like to meet with the George Jackson Brigade?” Bruce asked. Brown and Coupez first heard of the Brigade that summer after the Olympia Division of Corrections bombing. The couple had read the accompanying communiqué in The Sunfighter indicting capitalism as the culprit in creating crime. Yet Brown and Coupez, like everyone else in the Seattle's Left activist community, were distressed by the carelessness of the Safeway Store bombing, feeling that it made radicals look like callous crazies. Nevertheless, Brown accepted Seidel's invitation. The meeting took place at the new safehouse Seidel and Edward Allen Mead had established on Beacon Hill. Mead's old friend John Sherman also signed on.

In his second month in jail, Edward Allen Mead publicly acknowledged his membership in the George Jackson Brigade. His jailhouse interview with two contributors to the countercultural biweekly Northwest Passage was the first opportunity for Seattle's aboveground Left to present their questions and concerns to a member of the Brigade. Mead's dissatisfaction with the city's aboveground Left was immediately apparent. He also said that the Communists should strengthen their weakest point: the armed front. Roxanne Park, one of Mead's interviewers, criticized the Brigade. Her criticisms were tactical, not political: both she and the Brigade wanted to see Communists and socialists in power. The Left Bank Collective, whose members were anarchists, came to the Brigade's defense. It was easy for Park's opponents to cast her in the camp of over-privileged whites who identified as socialist revolutionaries but delayed the actual revolution indefinitely because it would not only inconvenience them personally, but would, in its combustive violence, also prompt troubling ethical questions.

In returning to Seattle, the George Jackson Brigade chose a residence in South Seattle, near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. The perennial issue of prison struggle cropped up again in the late spring. As with the Brigade's first bombing—that in support of prisoners on June 1, 1975—the long-term isolation unit at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla was the flash point. A triumvirate of interests was in conflict: prisoners, caged for indefinite periods in dismal circumstances; prison guards, who despised and feared their charges and complained of a lack of support from their superiors; and policy makers in Olympia, whose dreams of reform became nightmarish realities when implemented. After the Brigade discovered an interlocking directorate joining the Seattle Times to Rainier National Bank, it decided to use actions against the bank's branches as a launching pad for its objections to the circumscribed public debate over prisoners' rights. This chapter discusses the Brigade's return to Seattle with a high-profile string of bombings.

Bruce Seidel's death came as a shock. Members of the George Jackson Brigade had made a personal commitment to die for their cause, but they had not foreseen one of their own being killed so quickly. In the wake of Seidel's death, the popular singer-songwriter Holly Near came to Seattle. Despite feeling guilty about enjoying themselves so soon after the death of a close friend, Rita Brown and Therese Coupez attended the concert, where they recognized many others in the audience who were also in mourning. Mead and Sherman, captured at the bank robbery where Seidel was killed, were initially charged with his death, but the charge was soon dropped. Dual counts of “assault with intent to kill” against two police officers remained. An inquest into the legality of Seidel's death found that police officer Robert W. Abbott had reasonable grounds to fire when he shot and killed Seidel. This chapter recounts how the remaining Brigade members staged a jailbreak to free Sherman, shooting a police officer, Virgil Johnson, in the process.

In December 1974, Seattle Police Chief Robert Hanson decided to arm his force with hollow-point bullets, highly lethal projectiles designed to explode inside their target. Local organizers immediately called a demonstration to decry the policy. Edward Allen Mead walked with the crowd, which was supervised by officers on horseback, but declined to participate in the chants. It was one of the last rallies he attended before his next incarceration. The most militant protests in Seattle occurred in the primarily black Central District. Tyree Scott, the charismatic leader of the United Construction Workers Association, denounced local contractors who received federal money to hire blacks but persistently refused to do so. This chapter recounts the tensions between inmates and the administration at the Washington State Penitentiary that led to hostage taking by inmates, including Danny Atteberry. It also looks at Mead's construction of a pipe bomb in collaboration with a friend, Bruce Seidel, with the headquarters of the Division of Corrections in Olympia as their first target. Finally, the chapter examines how the George Jackson Brigade came into existence.

Janine Bertram was devastated by the capture of Rita Brown. Compounding the pain of the abrupt loss of her partner was her isolation from her friends and loved ones in the community in Seattle. Further, she was alienated from John Sherman and Therese Coupez both conjugally and politically. During the period directly following Brown's capture, Bertram kept a diary. The document offers an invaluable look at the George Jackson Brigade's most dismal period until its disintegration. As a continuing member of the perpetually broke Brigade, Bertram was compelled once again to participate in bank robberies. Janine did not mention it in her diary, but the collective had decided to bomb the Puget Sound Power … Light substation at the intersection of One Hundred Eighty-fifth Street and the West Valley Highway, in Tukwila close to the Renton border. This chapter how the Brigade ceased to exist by looking at the diary entries of a heartbroken Bertram.

This chapter sets out the emergence of convict criminology in the USA through a discussion of the life and work of John Irwin. It traces Irwin’s progression from prisoner to professor via Soledad Prison and the University of California, Los Angeles. His subsequent academic work on prisons, with prisoners and contributions to prison reform provide the archetype for convict criminology. Irwin’s trajectory after completing his five-year sentence for robbing a petrol station as a teenager is compared to that of black power activist George Jackson’s for a similar youthful offence. Jackson was controversially killed in prison in 1971. The central position of race in the USA’s penal politics is emphasised through this and the ensuing discussion of the US convict criminology group. The published work of members of this group are critically discussed, as are their wider contributions to criminology in the USA.

The collective decided that it was time to get out of the city. John Sherman and Therese Coupez drove south until they arrived in Coos Bay, Oregon. Rita Brown stayed on a little longer in Seattle to clean up the George Jackson Brigade's tracks. She spent a few days at the 10th Street Collective burning papers from Women Out Now and other potentially incriminating documents in the house's massive fireplace. Brown stayed in phone contact with Coupez and Sherman via a prearranged series of dates in public phone booths. Chronically short of cash, the three decided to rob a bank in Coos Bay and use the proceeds to relocate. Brown volunteered to be the trigger person, and John taught her how to do it. On June 8, 1976, Brown entered the Empire branch of the Western Bank with Sherman as her backup. Impersonating a man and sporting a false mustache, she was able to get $2,095 from the teller. Brown used the drag ruse to stage other bank robberies.

After the New Year celebration, cash became a pressing issue for the George Jackson Brigade. With each of the three bombings costing approximately $250 in preparatory materials, the New Year's Eve attacks had drained the collective's limited resources. Neither Edward Allen Mead nor John Sherman had held on to their jobs at Boeing Field, and Bruce Seidel was similarly unemployed. Mark Cook, the donor of the funds used to buy the guns in Denver, had a day job as supervisor of Pivot, but his contributions were not enough to support the organization's full-time members. Another consideration was that Seidel, Mead, and Sherman, three white men, were too proud to rely on Cook, an African American, for donations. They decided to stage a bank robbery and chose the Pacific National Bank of Washington on January 23, 1976. The results were disastrous: Seidel died from gunshot wounds after getting hit by responding policemen, while Mead and Sherman were arrested.