3
" Tried together, they were dubbed the Ohio 7, although legal battles took some of them from Ohio to New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. These legal battles weren’t the only troubles greeting these revolutionaries: except for Williams, whose wife and children did not accompany him underground, the other six were couples who lived and raised their families underground. After the arrest, the government attempted to use the nine children, most of them under ten and all of them minors, as bargaining chips against their parents. The state offered the Levasseurs’ eight-year-old daughter $20 and some pizza to cooperate with the government against her family. The Mannings’ children were held incommunicado for two months after the parents were first arrested; they had to go on hunger strike to force the government to disclose the whereabouts of their children. "
― , The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States
5
" The issue of incarceration itself—including not just political prisoners but the prison as a system—needs to be framed as a fundamental question of building and defending our movements. This is a movement rooted in care: It means supporting prisoners as part of a movement culture where people care for one another, create new bonds of solidarity, and celebrate people’s history. This is a movement focused on shrinking the state’s capacity to repress: It means working to close prisons, end solitary confinement, free prisoners, eliminate borders. It means embedding direct challenges to the carceral state within social struggles while working to popularize a wider set of radical politics. While no one organization can do everything, a successful anti-prison movement will need to synthesize direct action, popular relevancy, and radical critique. To separate these approaches is to grant victory to the prison state. "
― , The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States
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" The liberal international human rights community often defines political internees as those incarcerated for their beliefs, not necessarily their actions. While such instances abound, they are not the only or even the best examples of politically motivated incarceration. Whether someone “did it” ought not to determine fully who receives our support. Instead, political prisoners are best conceived as active participants in resistance movements.
Thus the central issue for thinking about political prisoners is not whether they “did it” but what movements did they come from and what are the broader circumstances surrounding their arrest. Most of those incarcerated participated in radical movements seeking fundamental overhauls of structures of power. (...) Political prisoners emerged from movements seeking to stop, to overturn, to develop alternatives to state and extralegal violence of the system. All of America’s political internees did something; some resisted with force, some put their bodies on the line, and others used words and propagated ideas the state deemed too powerful to let slide as just so much free speech. The issue of political prisoners is less one of “innocence” than of defending people’s ability and capacity to resist. "
― , The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States
9
" Although armed actions have been the most dramatic, revolutionary militancy has never been limited to guns and bombs. Hundreds of political prisoners have come from pacifist circles, both secular and religious. While these activists are generally imprisoned on shorter sentences than those described above, their political actions are no less vital, their commitments no less revolutionary. Just as those who engaged in armed struggle never comprised the majority of the movements from which they came, most nonviolent activists who serve prison time for acts of civil disobedience are not revolutionaries. Yet many of them are, and their work provides a vital point through which to build strategic unity among those who differ on questions of tactics. It was, in fact, revolutionary nonviolent activists who maintained dialogue and critical support for armed revolutionaries in the 1970s when other sectors of the Left, who were often theoretically supportive of armed struggle in Third World countries, were decidedly hostile to its domestic iterations. "
― , The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States
10
" Perhaps the most famous nonviolent militants of the time were Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Jesuit priests and tested pacifist warriors. The Berrigan brothers and seven other Catholic leftists burned almost four hundred draft files in Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17, 1968, using homemade napalm to protest its widespread use in Vietnam. Regarding the attack, Daniel Berrigan said, “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. "
― , The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States
11
" Unlike others who carried out high-risk actions, Plowshares activists did not adopt a hit-and-run strategy. Their project was one of moral and spiritual witness. As such, they awaited their capture at the scene of an action, using the trial and surrounding publicity, even jail time, as further opportunity to spread their political message. During these trials, Plowshares activists and other pacifists (including, for instance, those who engaged in antiwar civil disobedience during Gulf Wars I and II) have cited international law and the necessity defense as justification for their actions—sometimes resulting in lower sentences or even acquittals. While most Plowshares activists came from a religious background, the antinuclear and antiauthoritarian politics were also salient; for instance, Jewish secular anarchofeminist Katya Komisaruk dismantled a military computer designed to guide nuclear missiles as part of her involvement in Plowshares. She served five years in prison. "
― , The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States