When Robert Jackson and his teen-age son George went to Los Angeles in 1956, they were attempting to effect a traditional American escape. At the time, it is doubtful that either knew any more about the place to which he was going than had the 19th Century fugitive slave or frontiersman, but both Jacksons knew well where they had been.

Yet this knowledge that each had of what their lives had been about in Chicago's Near-North Side was unstructured and incomplete. Robert Jackson knew that in Chicago--as earlier in East St. Louis, in rural Louisiana, and in the CCC camps during the Depression--his dreams, despite all his efforts to realize them, had been almost universally deferred. Often in the years before leaving Chicago, he might well have felt like Robert, the character in Jean Toomer's Cane, whose head was sealed inside a diving helmet so monstrous as to plummet him irrespressibly into the crushing depths of an ocean's clammy inferno. Doomed if he were to remove his monstrous mask and doomed if he did not, Robert Jackson could perhaps have done no more than he did: kick and stroke for 16 hours a day and hope. What Robert Jackson did not know or would not allow himself to recognize was the force that was dragging him down, the thing that had changed his natural blackness into the perfect imprisonment of a diving bell, and drowned all his hopes for himself, if not yet those he held for his family.

For 15 years, George Jackson had watched his father swimming on an aquatic treadmill. He observed what the older man got for his efforts to walk humbly, seek mercy, and do justice. At home and at school, he was urged to do likewise. However, by the time he was fifteen, George Jackson was already making it clear that he had no intention of conforming, of diving into his father's wake voluntarily. By then he had already ceased to make any real effort to appease, and had dropped out of school. He had learned the subtle lessons of resistance Papa Davis had offered him far more thoroughly than he had absorbed the passive rituals of St. Malachy's segregated Catholicism. Most important, George Jackson still buoyed the hopes that had been submerged in his father, and had stiffened these hopes into expectations.

"O children, O, don't you want to go to that gospel feast

That promised land, that land, where all is peace?"

Nonetheless, George Jackson at 15 was already well aware that the same forces that had consigned his father to the treadmill had a place on it reserved for him. Although at the time Jackson did not have the highly developed comprehension he would later develop of who and what these forces were or how they enacted their terminal gravity; he did have a presentiment of the closing presence of a diving bell with his number, if not his name, on it. He knew that the life of the diving bell and the treadmill was not what he wanted for himself, but he did not know how best to escape it. He knew that if he were to escape or perhaps merely survive, he would have to react, but he knew neither what tack to take nor what supplies he had to draw upon. So, as much out of a lack of alternatives as anything else, George Jackson went with his father west to America's Promised Land.

II

Until it exploded in 1965, Watts was America's most under-publicized slum. Largely this lack of notice stemmed from the fact that Watts does not strike the eye in the same way that Bedford-Stuyvesant, Columbia Point, or Hough does. Absent is the visual oppressiveness of old six-story run-downs, crumbling brownstone block houses, and the vertical caskets of towering, post-war housing projects. If one is not paying attention, it's possible and perhaps even easy to drive from nearby Inglewood across Watts to South Gate or above on the Harbor Freeway without sensing that the community is one of the most depressed areas in urban America. Absent is even the sense that Watts is an urban community. The broad streets, and ranch-style tract houses lend it an illusion of suburbanity. Yet Watts is no less of a socio-economic urban prison than the older slums of the East Coast. It is merely a prison without walls.

That Watts is little different from the place from which they came was soon recognized by Robert and George Jackson just as it has been by the thousands of other people, mainly black Southerners, who have flocked West in search of a better deal since World War II. Consequently, as has often been the case, Robert Jackson and his son simply picked up where each had left off in Chicago: the father stroking and kicking effort to read water submerged: and the son sinking fast into a life against the law.

III

For a man whose prison career was to provoke so much controversy, George Jackson's criminal record was unremarkable. Between January 5, 1957, when Jackson, then 15, was arrested for "suspicion of joyriding" until February 1, 1961 when he was given an indeterminate sentence which was to prove terminal, Jackson was arrested six times. None of his crimes resulted in bodily unjury to anyone but himself, and in only one instance was he charged with carrying a gun during the commission of a crime. Jackson and others have denied this, claiming he was not carrying a gun then either.

Half of the arrests George Jackson was to have charged against him occurred in the first three months of 1957. The joyriding charge, according to Jackson, stemmed from his purchase of a motorcycle. The bike was hot. When it was discovered by police in his possession, he produced a bill of sale allegedly signed by another person whose whereabouts were never located. Police claim that there was a strong resemblance between the handwriting on the bill of sale and Jackson's. However, either because there was insufficient evidence to merit the charge or because of Jackson's age, he was not prosecuted for forgery or for the theft of the bike. He was later released to his parents.

Later in the same month, Jackson was charged with a burglary. According to police, he broke into a motorcycle shop and stole various items of cycle gear. When brought in for booking, Jackson, who according to the police had already admitted to the crimes, allegedly instigated a fight with the arresting officer who had to be assisted by other policemen in controlling Jackson. Jackson was convicted of the burglary and put on probation.

In March of 1957, Jackson was arrested in the act of robbing a furniture store, and, according to police, was shot attempting to evade capture. Jackson records the story differently in Soledad Brother:

"I was 15, and full grown (I haven't grown an inch since then.) A cop shot me six times point-blank on that job, as I was standing with my hands in the air. After the second shot, when I was certain that he was trying to murder me. I charged him. His gun was empty and he had only hit me twice by the time I had closed with him--Oh, get this wild nigger off me.' ...I had two comrades with me on that job. They both got away because of the exchange between the pigs and me."

Jackson goes on to say that medical treatment for his wounds was made conditional on his cooperation with the police in their prosecution of him.

On the basis of his three arrests in three months and the increasing severity of the crimes. Jackson was turned over to the state's Youth Authority which assigned him to the Paso Robles School for Boys.

IV

The California prison system into which George Jackson entered is a criminologist's dream and a convict's nightmare. In their 1951 book, New Horizons in Criminology, Harry Elmer Barnes and Hegley K. Teeters said: "The state of California stands in the forefront of penal experimentation, with its progressive philosophy epitomized in the Youth and Adult Authorities." At the time, the statement may well have been accurate, for Earl Warren was then governor of the state and had effected a number of changes designed to bring California's prison system into the 20th century. However, the promise seeded by the reforms of the Warren years was to come no closer to realization than was the promise of American life in the lives of Robert Jackson or his sons.

The California Youth Authority, an agency within the state's Department of Correction, was established in 1941 to handle the disposition of offenders under 21. The increasing rate of juvenile crime and recidivism and the exposure of scandalous conditions in the Fred C. Nelles reform school in Whitter by a public committee in 1940 prompted the state to create the Youth Authority. In May of 1940, the American Law Institute had issued a model law for the creation of an independent agency within state government to administer youthful offenders. The most controversial aspect of the Institute's proposal was that the agency would assume jurisdiction as soon as the offender had been convicted, and thus assume the responsibility for his sentencing from the state course system. Dissipate the objections of the "treat 'em rough" school of penology, California became the first state to adopt the Institute's recommendations. with the major exception of retaining the power to grant probation in the courts.

The initial support of the reform-minded for California's action was quickly eclipsed by the almost universal approval of the new Authority's performance and promise. With great fanfare, the Authority initiated a house cleaning of the more vicious reform schools, accumulated data on youthful offenders, created two new penal programs, and opened two correctional facilities--a girls' school at Los Guilucos and one for boys at Paso Robles.

It was the two new penal programs the Authority began that attracted the greatest amount of attention. The first was the establishment of a diagnostic center at which new charges would be evaluated so that each inmate could receive tailor-made correctional treatment based on a scientific analysis of his character and background. The second new program developed by the Youth Authority was the creation of forestry camps to which the more promising charges would be sent for work outdoors. Based upon the philosophy of the CCC, the forestry camps are intended to offer their workers labor that is "both productive and therapeutic" by allowing them to trade the crime-wise environment of the old reform schools for a chance to serve society by fighting fires, clearing brush, and controlling pests in California's great outdoors.

Supporters of the Youth Authority pointed to its programs as the application of scientific methodology to corrections. The diagnostic centers, it was claimed, would take a juvenile's emotional temperature and gear his rehabilitation to him rather than forcing him to adjust to the destructive demands of survival in the tough, old-style reform schools. The addition of the forest camp alternative also received high praise. On the basis of the apparent success of the Youth Authority, California created an Adult Authority in 1944; and other states also established agencies geared to deal with juvenile offenders. Massachusetts became the third state to follow California's lead when it established the Youth Service Board in 1948.

V

In Soledad Brother George Jackson tells a different view of the Youth Authority's jurisdiction: his life and the experiences of others who have been under the Authority illustrate this difference.

As Jackson relates, the Youth Authority's reforms did nothing to alter the basic emotional shock of entering into a penal institution for the first time:

"The very first time, it was like dying. Just to exist at all in the cage calls for some heavy psychic readjustments. Being captured was the first of my fears. It may have been inborn.

It may have been an acquired characteristic built up over the centuries ob black bondage. It is the thing I've been running from all my life. When it caught up to me in 1957 I was 15 years old and not very well equipped to deal with sudden changes. The Youth Authority joints are places that demand complete capitulation: one must case to resist or else...

There were no beatings (for me at least) in this youth joint and the food wasn't too bad.... When told to do something I simply played the idiot, and spent my time reading. The absent-minded bookworm, I was in full revolt by the time seven months were up."

For George Jackson this first incarceration at the Youth Authority's Paso Robles School was just another holding action. While at Paso Robles, he completed the tenth grade and did a great deal of reading; however, he formulated no sense of purpose, nor was any viable aid given to help him do so. Most important, nothing about the outside world was changing for the better while he was in the reform school. Watts was still going to be Watts when he was released, which would mean that it was going to be worse than when he had left it.

Of course it can be pointed out that the Youth Authority was never intended to be an agency of urban redevelopment in a strictly economic sense. But the fact that no significant action was being taken by the state or federal government. at the basic depressed conditions in Watts and Oakland or the chicano barrios or the white trash towns like Stockton meant that there was a definite limit on the possibilities that the early promise shown by the Youth Authority could ever be realized.

Moreover, flaws that had initially been un- or under-noticed in the Authority's program now were manifesting themselves. Despite the great significance placed by the Authority and its supporters on the diagnostic centers and the forestry camps as effective mechanisms for meaningful programs of rehabilitation, the operation of the system proved otherwise. Boys judged as "promising cases" are sent to the forestry camps where they learn skills that will be of little use when they return to their communities and look for employment instead of being sent to places like the Vocational Institute at Lancaster where they can learn marketable skills. On the other hand, charges deemed "incorrigible" are sent to the vocational schools where instead of learning carpentry or machine mechanics they hold informal seminars in second-story work or in the most effective employment of the blackjack or bike chain. In effect, the "promising cases" for showing their capacity for cooperation with the Authority are being exploited by it. Their work in the forestry camps is productive in terms of the needs of the state to control and harness California's environment, but the work in terms of the boys' own needs is no more therapeutic than that of blacks and Southern chain gangs.

Perhaps the most important failure of the Youth Authority in California is its failure to understand and deal with the motivation of the young people it was established to help. A report on the effectiveness of the Authority's operation by the Community Service Society of New York highlights this inability of the Authority to deal with the real motivation of most juvenile crime and the consequences of this failure:

"Observing the board in action...leaves the observer...with the impression that this is an experience which, by and large, is not constructive for the boy or girl and which seems to emphasize values and a philosophy not consistent with the Authority program. There is, for instance, the constant preaching to the youngster about the necessity for good behavior which carries with it the erroneous assumption that good behavior is simply a matter of choice and the offender who makes up his mind to behave can behave. This sort of preaching from the bench seems to be a disease readily acquired by judges and others who sit in judgment. It has done no good--it probably can do no good...it sets the stage for the same old tread-mill. This impression is bolstered by the use of threats, actual and implied, all relating to the time to be served...There are also promises extracted.'

Despite all of its innovative programs, the California Youth Authority operates on the same core assumptions that are the foundation of the philosophy of the "treat 'em rough" school: that the individual offender exclusively bears the guilt for his crime and that the sole goal of the state's incarceration of him is to force him to recognize this and correct the aberrant part of his psyche that caused him to commit a crime.

Prison would become a personal purgatory for George Jackson, but such was not the case in his first incarceration at Paso Robles. After partially recovering from the initial shock of capture, he learned how to feign the capitulation which the authorities were attempting to elicit and was released shortly before Christmas, 1957.

His next contact with the law enforcement system of California was in August of 1958 when he was arrested in Bakersfield for allegedly threatening his employer's life and damaging some of his property. A month later, he was picked up in Bakersfield for a service station robbery that had netted $105. There is a disparity between the superficials of this case and what Jackson claimed was the complete situation. In Soledad Brother, he said that he and two black friends found themselves locked up in Kern County Jail on suspicion of a number of thefts. "Since the opposition cleans up the books when they find the right type of victim, they accused us of a number of robberies we knew nothing about. Since they had already identified me for one, I copped out on another and cleared Mat and Obe on that count. They 'allowed' Obe to plead guilty to one robbery instead of the three others they threatened him with."

Although forced into what he felt was a frame-up, Jackson had no intention of being sent down river without showing some resistance. Employing what he later came to view as a "Very significant thing for our struggle here in the U.S: (that) all blacks do look alike to certain types of white people" to its best advantage, Jackson tied up a black who was scheduled to be released from the jail the next day, and left the following morning in his place. Jackson remained free for less than a month before being recaptured in Harrisburg, Ill. Upon being returned to Bakersfield, Jackson escaped a second time, but was quickly recaptured.

Jackson was recommitted to the Youth Authority, and served in its institutions until he was granted parole in June, 1960. Three months later, he was arrested again in Los Angeles and charged with a $70 service station stick-up. Although at no time denying having been involved to some degree in the caper, Jackson's reported versions of the story maintain his legal innocence. However, this was never tested in court because Jackson and the other black accused of the crime pleaded guilty. In Soledad Brother, Jackson explains why; "I accepted a deal--I agreed to confess and spare country court costs in return for a light county jail sentence. I confessed but when time came for sentencing, they tossed me into the penitentiary with one to life."

Whether George Jackson's confession to a $70 stick-up was elicited this way or not is perhaps an open question. All that is certain is that he did confess. Perhaps he did so because he knew that he was guilty or knew that the state had enough evidence to convince a jury that he was, and, as many men faced with conviction have, hoped to barter a confession for some personal gain. Such is often the case when someone under suspicion or indictment turns state's evidence and trades his fingering of others for a grant of immunity from prosecution. However, such a hope would have been improbably in Jackson's case. A small-time booster, Jackson had no information of interest to offer the state However, he did have his body to offer, or more precisely, his rights to his body. Court costs in the state of California average over $1,000 a week. By abdicating his rights to a trial by jury, Jackson would be saving Los Angeles County $2,000 - $3,000.

Such a deal between a defendent and the prosecuting county or state occurs regularly in America. In recent years, confessions, traditionally induced through the third degree treatment, have been obtained by less physical means. Men like Jackson, Danny Escobedo, and Ernest Miranda have been deceived into trading their rights of constitutional and legal protection for the promise of a deal that rarely materializes, or have had their ignorance of those rights, their poverty, race, and-or previous records used against them.

Jackson could hold little hope that by confessing he might deter the county from prosecuting him. Moreover, he belonged to a subculture and subscribed to its code that deems fingering for the cops only slightly less offensive than being a cop. In his autobiography in Soledad Brother, Jackson explains proudly how his charging of the policeman he claims fired at him and his confessing to crimes he had not committed took the heat off his partners and friends. Thus, it would seem highly improbable that Jackson confessed in hopes of receiving a state's evidence immunity.

His own explanation of the motivation of his confession seems more plausible. Either on his own initiative or, more probably, in response to an offer by the county, Jackson confessed hoping or with the understanding that he would be sent to the county house of correction. In effect, Jackson was selling his body, or more precisely, the $3,000 the county would save by his absence from the courtroom. What Jackson was not aware of was that the county had nothing to give to him in return. California law stipulates that three-time losers automatically receive indeterminate one to life sentences.

A two-time loser at the time, Jackson had nothing to gain by his guilty plea. Allowing for inflation, Jackson's $3,000 price tag was less than he--19 years old, 6 feet, and a solid two hundred pounds--would have been worth on the slave blocks of Charleston, Savannah, or Richmond.

VI

And so George Jackson entered the barred world. His life and crimes up until this point were representative of those of most of the men serving time in California and throughout the country. Lower caste criminals as they had been lower caste citizens, Jackson and the majority of inmates in American institutions never gain a great amount of financial success as a result of their criminal involvement. But for George Jackson economics was never the prime motivation. Crime was a preliminary exercise in self-determination. It was the only medium through which he could broadcast the message: so long as the only alternatives offered are for me to be poor on my own terms or to be poor on your terms, "I won't be a good boy ever.