Captive Nation

Simultaneously a detailed history of George & Jonathan Jackson and Angela Davis, a wide-ranging overview of prison's central role in black national identity and resistance organizing of the 60s and 70s, and a strong case for the revolutionary marxist view of black power / black nationalist movements. Left in my head a lot of the powerful analogies these groups used to connect prison to the general black experience; between colonization and incarceration (in migration, resistance, nations-within-nations); with prison and judicial changes/legitimacy as Jim Crow laws receded and black-as-criminal took their place, both in black expressions of self-determination and white expressions of law-and-order. Berger ends on a strong discussion of state violence under neoliberalism and the state-empowering militarizing effects of attempting to achieve freedom through violence.