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This is a history of the California prison movement from 1950 to
1980, focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area's San Quentin State
Prison and highlighting the role that prison reading and writing
played in the creation of radical inmate ideology in those years.
The book begins with the Caryl Chessman years (1948-60) and closes
with the trial of the San Quentin Six (1975-76) and the passage of
California's Determinate Sentencing Law (1977). This was an
extraordinary era in the California prisons, one that saw the
emergence of a highly developed radical convict resistance movement
inside prison walls. This inmate groundswell was fueled at times by
remarkable individual prisoners, at other times by groups like the
Black Muslims or the San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther
Party. But most often resistance grew from much wider sources and
in quiet corners: from dozens of political study groups throughout
the prison; from an underground San Quentin newspaper; and from
covert attempts to organize a prisoners' union. The book traces the
rise and fall of the prisoners' movement, ending with the
inevitably bloody confrontation between prisoners and the state and
the subsequent prison administration crackdown. The author examines
the efforts of prison staff to augment other methods of inmate
management by attempting to modify convict ideology by means of
"bibliotherapy" and communication control, and describes convict
resistance to these attempts as control. He also discusses how Bay
Area political activists became intensely involved in San Quentin
and how such writings as Chessman's Cell 2455, Cleaver's Soul on
Ice, and Jackson's Soledad Brother reached far beyond prison walls
to influence opinion, events, and policy.
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