The carrot-whip option of the site of confinement ranks second only to the leverage provided by the indeterminate sentence as a customarily effective weapon at the disposal of the California penal officials. They can punish the prisoner with whom they are dissatisfied or by whom they are threatened by sending him to San Quentin or Folsom, the maximum security joint. On the other hand, it is also in their power to reward a con by transferring him to Chino or one of the other minimum security prisons-without-walls located in the southern part of the state. Moreover, the authorities have a whole range of institutions in between and joints catering to special interests. A homosexual, for instance, who has played the game right, would be rewarded with a transfer to San Luis Obispo where homosexuals are known not to be hassled. The vocational schools hold three advantages. First, they are not as tight as the penitentiaries. Second, they offer the prisoner training in skills that will be marketable after his release. Third, they put Chino, with its golf course and swimming pool, a mere step away.

However, George Jackson didn't bite the bait. He stayed at Tracy less than nine months before being transferred back to San Quentin in November of 1962 because he was "in need of control."

Not only did Jackson not take the bait, he now seemed to hold the offer of it in contempt. Officials reported that Jackson came back to San Quentin with a "changed attitude." Precisely what this change in attitude entailed is difficult to say. Jackson's prison record shows an escalation in the severity of the violations with which he was now being charged. According to the record, Jackson, who was not a small man, was beginning to throw his weight around.

Violence is the currency of action and reaction in prison. It is also a rite of passage. It is employed by guards and members of the convict establishment as a means of maintaining control. Other inmates find it the only way of preserving their anal virginity. For many--both prisoners and guards--it is as familiar and necessary as breathing. Yet, just as it is on the outside, violence is only a symptom of more fundamental stress or change.

It is difficult to say precisely when or where it began, but in his second term at San Quentin or before, George Jackson did begin to change. At some time in some joint, George Jackson read or heard or did or was done to something that was for him like a slow-fused madeleine. Some part of the puzzle lowered itself into place and initiated a descent into hell so intense as to jimmy the gates of heaven.

Largely, Soledad Brother is the log of that descent. It catches Jacks in mid-flight in June of 1964. He was still in San Quentin then, but the first letter of the book reveals that already he was vastly different from the aimless small-time booster California had flushed into its prisons three years before. He writes to his mother:

...I have made some giant steps toward acquiring the things that I personally will need if I am to be successful in my plans: aside from the factual material acquired from books and observations, there is, as you know, a certain quality of character needed to perform the thing that I have in mind. I have completely repressed all emotion; have learned to see myself in perspective, in true relationship with other men and the world. I have completely arrested the susceptibility to...give credence to...shallow unnecessary things...that lock the mind and hinder thinking.

Although at this point he had not totally succeeded in effecting it. George Jackson had come to the realization that the first thing he had to do to and for himself was to undergo a self-inflicted purgation. In this letter to his mother, he writes as if the process were already a fait accompli: "...neglect and loneliness have no effect on me anymore. I feel no pain of mind or body, and the harder it gets the better I like it." But then he adds in what is probably a more realistic reflection of his state of development. "I must rid myself of all sentiment and remove all possibility of love." He envisions that ultimately. "After I am finished with myself, an observer who could read my thoughts and watch my actions would never believe that I was raised in the United States, and much less would he believe that I came from the lowest class, the black stratum of the slave mentality."

Eventually, Jackson would not pursue some of the goals he was now outlining for himself or assumed that he had already reached. Eventually, he would regret the fact that forces outside of himself caused him to reach--or at least come disastrously close to--the point at which the possibility of love was expunged from his character. Yet in the emotional jungle of a prison, love or perhaps even the potential for it is a prohibitively high state of vulnerability. For the heterosexual man, love can find no physical expression. It becomes only one more item on the list, headed by parole, of things denied from without.

To deny from within urges that would be in any case frustrated from without is not so much repression as it is conditioning for self-determination. In an environment in which the restrictions on one's freedom to fulfill even one's most basic needs and wants are as severe as they are in prison, one can rebel in overt disobedience. However, disobedience has programmed liabilities of its own. Disobedience--defiance without direction--had put George Jackson into the prison system. There, further disobedience could only result in a further escalation in his state of captivity, for the prison system with its rules and punishment options is well-armed to deal with the directionless rebel. By compulsively disobeying, one is playing the system's game. The game the system was designed to win.

However, there is an alternative, and it was this alternative that George Jackson, as Malcom X had before him, was now discovering. He had come to the realization that all his life he had been playing on the assumption that the system's game was as fair as it was advertised, and moreover, was the only game in town. He saw that he had been betting his life on the promises of the pot unaware that the game was winner deals and dealer wins. And each time he had lost he had lashed out, angry and ashamed that he had again been taken. But when the call went out again to "place your bets, please," he had invariably anted up once more.

Since it is not within your power to change the rules of their game, you can not change its results. However, you can change the game that you will play. Jackson saw the truth of this maxim manifested in the liberation struggles of African peoples. In their struggles, he saw men and women who, though they were black and oppressed, had discovered a way to disengage themselves from the cultural and psychological oppression that American blacks still suffered under. Once disengaged, the Africans were able to devise successful ways of terminating colonial tyranny and establishing their own independence.

Jackson attempted to apply this logic to his own life. Rather than trying to win an education in one of the prison vocational schools, he inaugurated a program of intensive self-education. This does not mean that he stopped going to prison classes. To a large degree, he did not have such an alternative. But he purged himself of all vestiges of the feeling that if he did not learn through the system he would not learn at all.

To be sure there were inconsistencies in Jackson's thought at the time. Although he was an advocate of liberation, he was unwilling to see women as full partners in the struggle. "Their job is to train the children in their early life to be men or women...This is a big job, to train and propagate the race!! Is this not enough?"

Yet, unevenness is inherent to growth, particularly to growth in an environment as repressive as is prison. Had George Jackson been on the outside at this point, he might well have had the kind of experiences that later were to allow him to expand his view of a woman's role and potential. Moreover, Jackson's temporary chauvinism was not so much an intellectual conviction as it was an emotional response to his family situation.