“Compelled to update its riot control manual for the first time in more than a decade, the American Correctional Association (ACA) noted new developments in the form as well as the content of these new eruptions. Regarding form, they were increasingly “contagious,” an idea that mirrored the anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plantocrats who feared that if allowed to develop, slave resistance would spread, infecting otherwise orderly geographies. Regarding content, the ACA found that post-1970 prison rebellions were less likely to emerge as spontaneous outbursts of anger and more likely to be “organized, calculated movements of massive resistance supported and assisted by outside groups and led by intelligent inmates using revolutionary tactics.” Moreover, alluding to their maximum demands, the ACA wrote that these new eruptions were increasingly “motivated by a conscious desire to bring about revolutionary improvements in the American social system and to put an end to the devaluation of certain elements of the population by those who are in positions of power.” Thus, we see that it was not only rebels but also the state that understood this era of carceral struggle as being about much more than prison conditions and prison reform. Although they erupted within prisons, these rebellions looked beyond them. As I will show, the fact that this is not widely understood today is an effect of prison pacification.”
“Authored by some of “the best minds in American corrections,” the ACA manual sought to reorient carceral systems toward the administration of political warfare. The organization advised prisoncrats to maintain well-equipped riot squads capable of “splitting up the rioters into manageable groups,” detailed maps of the physical layout to facilitate the tactical reassertion of control, and updated logs of available weapons and supplies. Based on the theory that all rebellions contain elements of leadership, the manual stressed that rebel leaders should be swiftly identified, “eliminated or rendered ineffective.” It also advocated the use of psychological warfare, instructing prisoncrats to be at least as concerned with controlling the public’s perception of riots as they were with controlling the riots themselves. As such, it urged administrators to cultivate “mutual confidence and understanding” with media outlets to achieve sympathetic coverage. It further indicated that public perception, and not a regard for human life, should be the primary determinant in dealing with hostage situations. Although “a reckless disregard for a hostage’s life would not be excused by the public or by his fellow employees,” the ACA stressed that prison guards accepted the same risks associated with being a police officer or a soldier. Therefore, determinations about the fate of captured guards should be based on political rather than moral calculations. Published in 1970, the manual reflects the insinuation of counterinsurgency into the normalized routines of prison management, a process that would only intensify over time.”
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...coercion is not the only weapon in the arsenal of this carceral war machine. Authors of counterinsurgency doctrine stress the imperative of calibrating terror-inducing violence with solicitous reforms. ... Without an understanding of this critical aspect of counterinsurgency theory and practice, weaponized reforms will continue to thwart the development of revolutionary and abolitionist projects as well as their analysis and historicization.
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“In many cases reform, a hallmark of liberalism, involves little more than the use of obfuscating language that aims to reshape the political and epistemological terrain of struggle. Operating in a context of anticommunist counterinsurgency at the height of the Cold War, expert propagandist Paul Linebarger dubbed this “nomenclatural reform.” In 1970, nearly twenty years later, New York’s carceral system underwent what Ricardo DeLeon, an imprisoned Black Panther, called a “euphemistic baptism.” Prisons became “Correctional Institutions,” guards “Correctional Officers,” and Wardens “Superintendents,” with similar rhetorical shifts occurring at the national level. These nomenclatural reforms and euphemistic baptisms were part of a broader strategy of psychological warfare through which counterinsurgency intellectuals aimed to present a benign public image of prisons without in any way altering their repressive and dehumanizing function within the social order."
- Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. p. 14-15, 17-18
