Iron Gag. A Chronicle of San Quentin Prison, 1950-1980: Book Suppression, Inmate Resistance, and the Rise and Fall of the Prison Movement Left

IRON GAG is a history of San Quentin prison from 1950-1980 drawn from extensive interviews of former inmates and prison staff, the archives of the California Department of Corrections, the University of California's Social Protest Collection, and other sources. It examines the efforts of prison staff to augment other methods of inmate management with attempts to modify convict ideology by means of "bibliotherapy" and linguistic control. Then it follows the trail of an emerging convict resistance movement to this ideological control of reading and writing, resulting in the emergence in the late 1960s of secret prisoner study groups, the creation of an underground newspaper, and growing inmate contacts with student leftists outside the prison. Consequent inmate strike in this period led to riot and the rise and eventual fall of a prisoner unionization movement linked to the post-Vietnam War bay area Prison Movement left. The study culminates with a look at the final, bloody and inevitable confrontation between prisoners and the state, and an intense prison administration crackdown on reading and writing. It concludes, however, that now as in the 1960s the underclass Californian prisoner is attaining literacy skills and ideology from smuggled, non-elite texts in covert study groups, subverting the state's attempts to achieve ideological-moral hegemony through prison education. Since this is so, the tremendous recent expansion of the use of imprisonment in California is likely to bring more, not less, class antagonism into an already deeply fissured Californian social order. Chapters on Caryl Chessman; the Black Muslims; Eldridge Cleaver; George Jackson; the Symbionese Liberation Army.