"A Clean Hell" by Eric King arrived today
Looking forward to reading @/SupportEricKing’s book after listening to him talk at Seattle Anarchist Book Fair and be interviewed for the press tour.
PM Press sends a whole bunch of little treats to go along with their orders! Which was a nice surprise.
Eric King A Clean Hell opens the doors of America’s most secretive prison and lets the reader step into the cell to experience all the horro
The @/FreedomForFelons_ podcast interview released Dec. 19 is a standout for being about to talk about aspects of prison life with a level of immediate mutual intelligibility that is impossible without lived experience.
The reminder of the Rattling the Cages oral histories that King edited with Josh Davidson was good to have, and would make a good next read, but like King and the hosts were saying, people who haven’t lived it find it hard to believe that prisoners talking about personal and systemic abuse by guards is real. Rikers: An Oral History by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau was comprehensive and beyond persuasive, but a huge part of that was guards also admitting it.
With @/Anark (Daniel Baryon), King also spoke to the realities of how you hold onto your principles amid systems that don’t give you agency for ideological purity (e.g. being forced at higher security prisons to only associate within-race, therefore with white supremacists) or what battles you fight for your principles (e.g. veganism).
The conversation on what prisoner support really looks like and how letter writing should not be viewed as charity but mutual exchange between people was also really insightful, esp. “send me the books I like to read, not the ones you think I should read”. That wasn’t primarily a lesson on anarchism but worth remembering: even people who are in the most vulnerable circumstances deserve better than you thinking you know what’s best for them rather than themselves. And the @/SeekingWitchcraft podcast was a really good conversation on many of those same things but with the added focus on what following a personal, non-Christian and specifically pagan practice looks like inside a culturally Christian institution meant to dominate and destroy your body and spirit.
Ashley sits down with Eric King, author of A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon. Eric is an anarchist who
RSS: https://audioboom.com/channels/5082003.rss
Again, have not yet read the book itself, but really excited to, based on all these things so far.
