Appearing in English for the first time, this fascinating little book tells the story of Nikolai Trofimovich Iziumchenko (1867-1927), a peasant conscript to the Imperial Russian Army whose Tolstoyan beliefs led to his two-year imprisonment in a penal battalion.
Following a short, and informative, introduction from the book's editors, Iziumchenko's story is reproduced in translation with minimal annotation, making the account both accessible and readable for those with no prior…
Dear Allies and Friends
Fourteen weeks “down”. There is a golden bronze glow to everything now. The leaves are piling up in crunchy heaps on the hillsides and lawns keeping the women on “landscape crew” busy all day.
The Geese honk as they pass in wave after determined wave, disappearing through the valley beyond the river. Only a few leaves cling to the elder trees whose branches are dramatic against the pink- and grey-streaked sunset. Darkness falls earlier and by 7pm I'm…
Why is punishment inflicted? Most people don't even ask themselves that question. For them it is evident that prisons exist, cells in which those who have transgressed the penal laws of this society are locked-up, for weeks or months or even for years. They walk past these prisons, and are not disturbed by their existence.
Others, who have examined this question, find it easy to answer: a sense of justice, they say, demands repayment for injustice committed. Or they put forward the…
Timed to coincide with the annual Prisoners for Peace list and associated articles, Peace News takes a look at prison and nonviolent struggle.
Not only because nonviolent activists and war resisters frequently end up in prison—and have to continue their struggle while inside - but also because the core issues of prison poses many conceptual challenges to nonviolence, challenges which we also feel we have failed to address adequately in this issue.
What is in there…As a nonviolent activist who has been to prison for short periods on a number of occasions over anumber of years, the issue of how much we, as prisoners and as activists, participate in our own incarceration is something I have found quite perplexing.
Take - for example - the issue of work in prison as a simple starting point. The vast majority of prisons worldwide depend very heavily - if not entirely - on the goodwill and complicity of their captives, backed up by a range of…
A scholar of Gandhi and Tolstoy from the US asked the founder of the Vedchhi Ashram “How do you decide when to offer Satyagraha and when to continue with constructive (village development) work?”
"I never went to prison, the prison came to me!", he answered, and added “we do not seek issues nor do we seek confrontations. Ours is a way to life. So live; So live! that the perpetrator of injustice, be it the state or the landlord, may understand how to correct…
At 8.30am on the morning of Tuesday 11 September, as my subway train took me just under the World Trade Center (WTC) from my home in Brooklyn to my job in upper Manhattan, I am struck by a headline from The Daily News, New York's “hometown” newspaper. Alongside of a photo of mild- mannered African American educator Patrick Critton screams the news: “Cops Bag Panther - Nabbed 30 Years After Deadly Bank Heist.”
The story told of a hijacking to Cuba, following a 1971 bank…
I can't offer a historical analysis of the situation for the gai or lesbian community in prison. I do not have any statistical information regarding the total number of lesbians and gais in prison, neither information about their sentences, nor information about their crimes, and even less information about the law. The only resources I have to draw on are from Amnesty International and other human rights groups.
Editors note: before reading this article you might find it helpful to…
I have been invited to write about torture for this issue on prisons and really, much or nothing could be said, the topic simply does not allow for neutrality or impartiality.
It has not been easy to find a way of approaching the subject in such a way that allows us to enter - even superficially - into the paradoxes, the emotions, dilemmas and the rationality provoked by this human manifestation: something which is painful, hard, and even tortuous to communicate. So why examine this…
On 23 August a Finnish antimilitarist civil disobedience group - The Wall Breakers - symbolically attempted to rescue a total objector from prison.
As part of a small support demonstration at the Katajanokka prison, one of the group threw a rope over the prison wall while two others started digging a tunnel under it. The digging went on for half an hour until the police ended the performance. No arrests were made, though it is possible that indictments might follow.
The man on…
Internationally, the role of the private sector in the criminal justice system is now substantial and set to expand. On top of contracted services such as food, cleaning, laundry and medical care, the last 20 years have seen private companies take charge of designing and building prisons as well as managing them, particularly in the US, Australia and Britain; with Puerto Rico, Canada and South Africa following closely.
A cheap deal?
In the US, the prison-industrial complex…
According to the Washington Post "FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the 11 September attacks and terrorist plans".
So far more than 150 people have been detained in the US in connection with the World…
Gandhi practised two types of Satyagraha in his mass campaigns. The first was civil disobedience, which entailed breaking a law and courting arrest. When we today hear this term, our minds tend to stress the “disobedience” part of it. But for Gandhi, “civil” was just as important. He used “civil” here not just in its meaning of “relating to citizenship and government” but also in its meaning of “civilised” or “polite”. And that's exactly what Gandhi strove for.
We also tend to lay…
This is a kind of concept album about pirate-radio and death-row. The premise being that it’s the night before a revolutionary, activist nun (yes, nun), who advocates the medical use of marijuana, is about to be executed.
Hmmm... Michael Franti is a lovely, great guy, and this album has a lot to recommend it (it's on in the office a lot). Issues are sensitively covered, the songs are fantastic, beautifully arranged, hitting the political-soulful-funk spot perfectly. But the snippets…
Last June two nuclear weapons abolitionists sawed down three of the 4,000 poles that hold antenna lines for the US Navy's Project ELF (extremely low frequency) submarine transmitter (PN 2440).
Bonnie Urfer and Michael Sprong are not alone in believing that their action was lawful, which is why the two so boldly accepted responsibility for the damage – unlike vandals or thieves. Convicted in February 2001, they were sentenced in Madison in May.
The…
