"This is the hammer that killed John Henry,

Twon't kill me, baby,

Twon't kill me."

To be sure, George Jackson reentered the prison system of California in 1961 with a chip on his shoulder. In an act which seemed to culminate the 20 year progression of mistreatment he had received, he had been duped into confessing to a crime--of which he may or may not have been legally guilty--in exchange for the promise of a light county jail sentence instead of a term in the penitentiary.

However, the promise never materialized. Instead of going to a country house of detention, Jackson was recomitted to the state's Youth Authority, the agency charged with the disposition of convicted minors. Moreover, Jackson was going back to the joint this time as a long time man.

A long time man is a prison expression conceived on the southern chain gangs and used to describe an inmate who is serving a long sentence. When George Jackson confessed to the $70 gas station stick-up of which Los Angeles Country had accused him, he became a three-time loser. Moreover, he lost forever his legal status as a free man, for California law proscribes that three-time losers receive indeterminate one to life sentences. Under California law, as in most states, though a con may be paroled from prison before the expiration of his maximum sentence, he is not released from the jurisdiction of the parole board until his full time has elapsed. Thus George Jackson, at age 20, faced the inevitability of living the rest of his life without ever again being legally his own man.

Although it can be argued that Jackson brought this fate upon himself by his unlawful actions--or at least by being caught at them; the psychological impact of this prospect must have been awesome. Yet, Jackson had far more immediate problems than those that might have been raised by his speculation upon the dismal future that awaited him on his release. As are all lifers, he was faced with the legal potentiality of never being released from prison alive.

However, Jackson also had a number of reasons to expect that he might be released within a year or at least within a few years. The average time served by a California lifer is less than 15 years. So, at worst, Jackson might have anticipated parole by the time he was 35. Moreover, that average includes the times served by lifers before California established the Youth and Adult Authorities in the 1940's and adopted the indeterminate sentence. Before those two actions, which were both hailed as enlightened reforms, incarcerations of 40 years and more were not unusual, and many more cons would have served sentences of that length if only they had lived that long. Finally, though life was the legal maximum of Jackson's sentence, the prescribed minimum, which determines the date of earliest possible release, was just one year.

Why, then, did George Jackson serve a full life, or more precisely, death term behind bars? Why was he imprisoned for more than ten years, while the man who confessed to the same $70 crime was paroled in seven?

The answer to these questions lies in a complex sequence of action and reaction. Jackson played a major role in this sequence, but the chain began long before he was born and, as is evidenced by Attica and the tide of prison disturbances that have followed, the chain was not broken by Jackson's death on an August afternoon in San Quentin.

II

One of the primary links of the part of the chain that entangled George Jackson was the nature of the terms of his imprisonment. As has already been noted, Jackson was, at the beginning of his term, only a potential lifer, for his sentence was indeterminate.

The indeterminate sentence is an old idea first advocated by British and French penal reformers in the 19th century. The European reformers and their American counterparts argued that the practice of giving a convict a fixed sentence--one in which the time to be served is immutable by any action by the convict--provided to incentive for the inmate to reform. With nothing to gain by reforming, the prisoner usually became bitter and dangerously hostile to prison officials and the society they represented. The con served hard time, and often after his release sought revenge on society for his incarceration. The penal reformers also pointed out that the convict's bitterness was compounded by the corrupt manner in which inmates with pull on the outside could obtain pardons from governors--then the only mechanism of premature release--while poorer cons had to serve their full sentences.

As early as 1787 American prison reformers recommended the indeterminate sentence, in which an inmate's release would be dependent upon evidence of his rehabilitation, as a remedy for the faults of the fixed sentence. In the words of one of the early advocates of the indeterminate sentence:

It seems perfectly reasonable that those whose misconduct compels us to send (them) to a house of correction should not again be let loose on society until they shall have made some indication of amended character. Instead of being sentenced, therefore, to confinement for a certain fixed period, they should be sentenced to earn, at a certain specified employment, such a sum of money as may be judged sufficient to preserve them on their release...and orderly, decent, and submissive behavior should...be enforced, under the penalty of a prolongation of their confinement.