"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..."

No more auction block for

No more, no more

No more auction block for me,

Many thousand gone.

No more than George Jackson had lived in a vacuum prior to his final return to the California prison system, was he to live in seclusion in the joint--although much of his time was to be spent in solitary confinement.

Simply because Jackson was so often to be placed in isolation and invariably denied parole--both of which are judgment calls--it is impossible to view him apart from the people and procedures of the state's prison system and the forces that affect them.

On the basis of diagnostic tests given during the reception stage of his confinement, Jackson was assigned to the vocational school at Tracy. However, that school, like the one at Lancaster it was built to supplement, already was overcrowded: so the Youth Authority sent prisoner A-63837 to the medium security prison at Soledad.

Soledad is a part of the California that is not California, that is, it is a place not of movie stars or cablecars, but of pears and prunes, pear-pickers and prune-pickers. Walled in by the Diablo and Santa Lucia ranges, it is burned and dusty throughout the summer and rainy in winter. Soledad is not the kind of place to which one would go to leave one's heart.

Yet Soledad, no less than Watts, is physically a part of California, and as such, is a legatee of the state's allure. There is a sign on the side of Highway 101 that runs through the town which reads. "It's All Happening In Soledad." However, just as the black who fled from the East and the South in hopes of finding the good life in Watts have been forced to live in frustration, disappointment and neglect, so have the white dustbowl refugees who have settled in Soledad and the rest of the Salinas Valley.

The luckiest ones have gotten out, but for many physical escape was an impossibility. However, in 1952, the state of California presented the town with a means of internal escape when it built a prison there. A prison provides jobs which in turn distribute money. But more important, a prison provides power--or its illusion--and in Soledad the prison was providing power to people who could get it in no other way.

The fundamental characteristic of people who hold power is that they know how to protect it. If they didn't they wouldn't have it. For a guard or a warden, power means control. It is the ability to stop something from happening. While in other institutions, control is a means, as in the army where it is a means to "combat readiness;" control is an end in itself in the prisons of America.

Regardless of what correctional theories may advocate, a man is sent to prison neither to be reformed nor to be further punished beyond the punishment inherent in his removal from society. A con goes to the joint simply to do his time. This is obviously society's wish, for 95 per cent of the $1.5 billion that is budgeted for all prisons--both state and federal--is spent simply to maintain the prisoner in custody. To do his time as unobtrusively as possible is also the wish of the average inmate. He seeks only to survive his sentence, accumulate clean time and leave. Escape is on his mind, but it is seen more as a moral right than as a viable alternative. A poem by Ethridge Knight, a black writer who did eight of a 20 in the Indiana State joint at Michigan City, describes one of the most powerful deterrents to escape:

"The warden said to me the other day

(innocently, I think), 'Say, etheridge,