Something I enjoy about working at a school is the chance to check out a variety of books. There are many older books that haven’t been checked out in a while. Many of these books end up being insightful. One I read recently was Who Killed George Jackson? by Jo Durden-Smith. The story is about the death of a prison radical, George Jackson, during a riot and whether or not he had been set up or not. The book is divided into three sections. The first is the official story about the events, the next is Durden-Smith’s investigation into the conspiracy theory, and the third is a psychological look at the left at the time. The first two sections are disjointed and hard to follow. He jumps around too often in the story and refers back to conversations he hasn’t written extensively about. The last section, though, was fascinating.
What really struck me was a comment by a prisoner about how easy it was to kill guards and other prisoners that were not part of your group. The point was the guards and the other groups were just ideas, not people, to the prisoners. It is easy to kill an idea and as long as you did not get to know the guards or people from the opposite group you could kill with no conscience. Durden-Smith makes realized part of the problem was the way the prison was run. For many years the prisoners had direct contact with guards. They got to know them and in some ways become friends. With the advent of new technology that allowed less contact between the two groups, the guards now longer were familiar with prisoners and prisoners were able to separate the guards in their minds from people and made them symbols of the system they saw as unfair. Many of the prisoners were radicals from the civil rights movement who saw the system as corrupt. They saw not only the guards, white or black, but also the white prisoners as part of the problem.
Tomorrow more thoughts.
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