Not all prison guards are like John Mills.

After doing nearly ten years of time in the joints of California, George Jackson had established a balance to his life. Four months before John Mills became the first guard to die in Soledad since it was built in 1952, George Jackson wrote to his brother Jonathon:

I add five words to my vocabulary each day...right after breakfast each morning when I have forty-five minutes to kill, It's not enough time for anything else and since I don't want to waste any time. I work on words. It is by words that we convey our thoughts, and bend people to our will.

Would a man with such control over his inner life, a long time man's feel for time, and a committed man's disdain for waste have killed John Mills? Would he have killed Mills when the real focus of vengence, O.G. Miller, was still alive in Soledad? Moreover, would the death of three more inmates have driven Jackson out of the firm balance of his reason to the irrationality of revenge?

Certainly there is at least a reasonable doubt. If George Jackson did kill Mills, he applied ultimate means to achieve a far less satisfying end. However, in charging Jackson with the murder of Mills, the California prison system was placing itself in the position to reap an ultimate solution to one of its problems.

California statute 4500 dictates the death sentence for any lifer convicted of assault on a correctional official. If Jackson was convicted he would have paid with his life for the death of John Mills. An eye for an eye, a life for a life, the vengeful justice of the Old Testament, yet more than justice would have been served if George Jackson had gone to the gas chamber--if, in fact, justice would have been served by his execution. His death at the hands of due process would have resolved the dilemma with which his life confronted the prison system.

IV

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

We had been talking generally about prisons when the news of Jackson's death got to us. After not saying anything for awhile, Fred said "George Jackson was the most rational man I ever knew."

So begins a sonnet by the black poet Claude McKay. Although the poem was first published in 1922, it embodies much of George Jackson's attitude towards his imminent death during the last 18 months of his life. During that period, Jackson was confined first in the maximum security block of Soledad and then, after obtaining a change of venue that transferred his trial from Monterey to Marin County, in the Adjustment Center at San Quentin. Held in close confinement in prison, chained when he was taken out to appear in court. Jackson became less of a prisoner during this time than he had ever been before.

His letters are a measure of his release. They reveal a sense of increasing strength drawn both from the support that the outside community was giving him and from his own reaffirmation of his usefulness as a member of the prison vanguard. Thus, rather than losing his sense of purpose and direction under the strain of his escalated confinement, Jackson came to see and express himself with an inspired power:

I don't want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth, and licentious usurious economics.