By Bill Littlefield

This collection of essays, excerpts, letters, and a few poems is a powerful and necessary tool for educating anyone willing to learn about — and confront — the injustice and hypocrisy of our country’s monstrous system of incarceration.

Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader Edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black. City Lights Books, 471 pages.

Beneath the Mountain certainly IS an “anti-prison reader,” as the subtitle suggests. But this collection of essays, excerpts, letters, and a few poems is much more.

The objection to — and battle against — enslavement and incarceration are as old as the practices that have deprived men, women, and children of their liberty. Beneath the Mountain is concerned almost exclusively with the oppression of people in the United States. The first entry in the anthology references Ona “Oney” Judge Staines, who was enslaved by George and Martha Washington. She fled the Washington household in Philadelphia one night after serving dinner, accomplishing her “self-emancipation” by making her way via the underground railroad to New Hampshire. When she was recognized there, her enslavers tried to convince her to return. She is said to have replied: “I am free now and choose to remain so.”

The editors present longer fragments of writing by or about Nat Turner and John Brown, each of whom worked to free slaves by the only means they felt were available and appropriate, fulfilling, as Turner said in a “confession” transcribed by a white attorney, “the purpose for which I felt sure I was intended.”

These narratives and many others in Beneath the Mountain establish the historical and immoral connections between literal enslavement and incarceration, some of which are obvious. As many critics of the current system of incarceration have pointed out, imprisoned men and women are the only citizens to whom the 13^th amendment prohibiting slavery does not apply.

Many of the most powerful essays in this collection go well beyond the familiar arguments condemning the current system of incarceration: that it doesn’t work; that it dehumanizes rather than rehabilitates men and women; and that it is ruinously expensive and spectacularly racist. For example, in an address delivered in 1899, Eugene Debs, the socialist who was incarcerated first for organizing a strike among railroad workers and later for opposing the role of the U.S. in World War I, argues that “prison perpetuates slavery” and “that capitalism would never release its hold on prison labor.” In an observation that foreshadows the grotesque recidivism rate apparent today, Debs asks rhetorically about the man released from a prison which does nothing but diminish and restrain him: “Where was he to go, and what was he to do? And how long before he would be sentenced to a longer term for a greater crime?”

A number of more contemporary veterans of the system, which is currently incarcerating about two million of our citizens, argue convincingly that the only escape from the trap Debs described is education. In a section from his autobiography, Malcolm X recalls how powerful learning was while he was at the state prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts. He writes: “Ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books.” An excerpt from some of what Malcolm X wrote toward the end of his short life would have been welcome, given that his views evolved toward celebration of a less exclusive solidarity than what’s reflected in his autobiography.

George Jackson, killed by guards for allegedly trying to escape, left ninety-nine books in his cell. Reading deeply in history and political thought, as well as contemplating his own experience and that of other incarcerated men and women, encouraged Jackson to write to his mother as follows: “You must stop giving yourself pain by feeling that you failed somewhere. You have not failed. You have been failed, by history and events, and people over whom you had no control.” In a letter to his father, Jackson contends that “The forms of slavery merely changed at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation from chattel slavery to economic slavery.” It is an irresistible, and  irrefutable, contention echoed in various ways by different voices throughout Beneath the Mountain. Evidence of the truth of the contention: some “prison bureaucrats”  realizing that “the system they operated had too many similarities with the plantation system,” decided that “books on slave rebellions” should be “banned as ‘subversive and/or disruptive to the orderly operation of the institution.’”

Some of the essays toward the end of Beneath the Mountain suggest specific ways in which incarcerated men and women and those on the outside struggling against the current system can support each other. Editor Mumia Abu-Jamal himself writes about the hard work he’s done, in the courtroom and elsewhere, to protect his right to write and publish and broadcast his essays, books, and commentaries. In an essay entitled “Free Alabama Movement,” incarcerated men urge their sympathizers to boycott McDonald’s, Victoria’s Secret, and various other corporate businesses benefitting from the unpaid or poorly paid labor of incarcerated men and women. In a piece called “The Prison Industrial Complex and The Global Economy,” Eva Goldberg and Linda Evans further discuss the economic impact of incarceration, pointing out that “the monumental commitment to lock up a sizable percentage of the population is an integral part of the globalization of capital.” They underline how “the state of California now spends more on prisons than on higher education” and that this trend is not limited to this country. “All over the world,” they report, “more and more people are being forced into illegal activity for their own survival.”

Many of the recent books and articles written by men and women who favor the abolition of prisons discuss various alternatives, such as restorative justice programs as well as redistributing law enforcement funds to responders who’d be trained to handle trauma situations without guns drawn. Beyond calling for solidarity among incarcerated people and those who support their struggle, Beneath the Mountain doesn’t speculate on what might replace militaristic policing and bias on the part of prosecutors and judges. Still, this collection is a powerful and necessary tool for educating anyone willing to learn about — and confront — the injustice and hypocrisy of our country’s monstrous system of incarceration.

Bill Littlefield volunteers with the Emerson Prison Initiative. His most recent novel is Mercy (Black Rose Writing).