As a part of his purgation, Jackson was giving a lot of thought to the condition of his family and the black family in America. He saw the slave mentality as a disease passed from black generation to black generation by the roles which the economic system of America forced black men and women to play. The black man was submitted to a dual castration: the economic one which he had to endure on the job or in unemployment, and the emotional one, endured at home, largely a by-product of his financial impotence. Emasculation was bequeathed to his sons because, like their father, they were dominated by their mother and were without a suitable model of masculinity they could emulate.

Without this model, the black sons "resist and rebel but do not know what, who, why, or how exactly they should go about this. They are aware but confused...they end where I have ended. By using half measures and failing dismally to effect any real improvement in their condition, they fall victim to the full fury of the system's repressive agencies."

Jackson was not merely analyzing this process as a means of purging himself of its effects. He hoped that by indicating to his parents the mistakes they had made in rearing him he would convince them not to repeat those mistakes on his younger brother Jonathon.

According to popular conception, the prisoner is always a man in segregation. Forced aloneness is seen as the punishment he pays for his crimes. A soul on ice, he goes to the penitentiary to seek a personal absolution. In the spare quiet of his cell, isolated from his fellow men, he contemplates his crime and punishment. However, the process of purgation and change which Jackson was undergoing was not occurring in a human vacuum, nor even in an atmosphere of rational calm. He was still in the joint, and in the joint there are always forces that try to make sure you don't escape an awareness of where you are.

In April of 1965, George Jackson was charged with knifing another inmate. Jackson, who claims never to have employed violence except in self-defense, wirtes in Soledad Brother that the charge was just one in a number of attempts to undermine his growing influence with other cons. "This is all a well-thought out effort to frighten me...I guess they want to show me and those around me here how powerless I am in their hands." However, the ploy, Jackson asserts, is not going to work:

"Fear, the emotion that stiffens and inhibits the minds of most men, causing them to be totally incapable of acting in their defense at the moment of trial, is totally lacking in me. I could look upon my total ruin with as detached an unconcern as I look upon theirs. The payment for life is death."

Yet though Jackson was confident "I'll come out of this as I have everything else. I'll see Ghana yet;" he was also aware of the cumulative attrition resulting from his indefinite confinement:

"But how much longer will this last for me in and out of prison, for you in and out of debt, for the others of our kind who suffer jail, mental institutions and the like. How long will we be forced to live this life, where every meal is an accomplishment, where every movie or pair of shoes is a fulfillment, where circumstance never allows our children to develop past a mental age of 16. I've been patient, but where I'm concerned patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice."

Perhaps the most difficult thing with which Jackson was trying to deal was this uncertainty. Under the indeterminate sentence law, he had no way of knowing when or if he would ever be released. Charged with assault on a fellow inmate, he faced the added possibility of serving the next few years in isolation. Each day that he spent in prison was a protraction of his state of terminal vulnerability. "I go to bed each night, hoping, trying to avert the storm that is now coming on. I find each morning as I found this one, freighted with the possibilities of my own disaster." Chained to the flaps of an institutional Icarus, "I begin to weary of the sun."

Yet just as this experience had "engendered in me a flame that will live, live to grow, until it either destroys my tormentor or myself," it also nurtured compassion and empathy:

"The early hours of morning are the only time of day that one can find respite from the pandemonium caused by these the most uncultured San Quentin inmates. I don't let the noise bother me...because I try to understand my surroundings. I've asked myself, as I do about