“Prisons & Fortresses” - Carceral Violence
The next session of the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group, “Prisons & Fortresses”, is on carceral violence. Carceral systems are designed to confine and exclude, imprisoning some rebels while barring others from access. From border regimes to mass incarceration, these structures uphold and enforce the divisions of Global Apartheid.
This dispatch serves as both a reflection on the gathering of this session’s co-facilitators and a primer for our upcoming conversation. At the end of this primer, you will find links to suggested media offerings to explore in preparation for our meeting.
“Inmates at Attica Correctional Facility during the 1971 uprising. The uprising ended when armed state troopers stormed the prison, killing 39 people in one of the deadliest assaults by the U.S. settler state since the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.”
“Over a hundred survivors were left with grievous physical injuries. In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, many were subjected to brutal reprisals—beaten, tortured, and sexually violated by prison guards seeking revenge for the rebellion.”
John Berger, in his essay Fellow Prisoners, argues that to understand our age of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide is to grasp that "across the planet we are living in a prison." This, he insists, is not a metaphorical prison but a literal one. He observes:
"During the Gulag, political prisoners, categorized as criminals, were reduced to slave laborers. Today millions of brutally exploited workers are being reduced to the status of criminals.
The Gulag equation ‘criminal = slave laborer’ has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become ‘worker = hidden criminal.’ The whole drama of global migration is expressed in this new formula; those who work are latent criminals. When accused, they are found guilty of trying at all costs to survive.
Over six million Mexican women and men work in the US without papers and are consequently illegal. A concrete wall of over one thousand kilometers and a “virtual” wall of eighteen hundred watchtowers were planned along the frontier between the US and Mexico, although the projects have recently been scrapped. Ways around them—though all of them dangerous—will of course be found.
Between industrial capitalism, dependent on manufacture and factories, and financial capitalism, dependent on free-market speculation and front office traders, the incarceration area has changed. Speculative financial transactions add up to, each day, $1,300 billion, fifty times more than the sum of the commercial exchanges. The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners."
To take Berger seriously is not to collapse the distinctions between those confined within conventional prisons and those subjected to the carceral logics of border regimes, labor markets, and surveillance infrastructures. On the contrary, to understand the global prison properly is to recognize that those physically imprisoned are, as Orisanmi Burton writes in Tip of the Spear, "doubly so." Their condition reveals the sharpened edge of the state’s carceral apparatus. They are not peripheral to this global prison, but its concentrated expression.
Burton insists that prisons must be understood as sites of war—"state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency." Yet they are also, crucially, "domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation." This echoes Session 1’s emphasis on the surround—not just as a zone of belonging but as a counterpower, a relational force that enables resistance. Incarcerated people, stripped of the surround, face the most totalizing forms of isolation, yet they also cultivate fugitive forms of collective life, revealing the capacity of the surround to be (re-)created even under the most extreme conditions.
To deepen this observation, Burton turns to the words of Jalil Muntaqim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, who spent over forty years behind bars on intensely politicized charges. Muntaqim told him: "We are the tip of the spear." Burton reflects:
"Initially, I interpreted it as a reference to the leading role that politicized prisoners have played in challenging the state. That is, I interpreted the statement as a historical claim. It later occurred to me that in using this martial idiom, Muntaqim could also have been pointing to the location of incarcerated people ‘behind enemy lines,’ such that their effective organization could catalyze movements beyond the walls. In other words, maybe he was deploying this phrase as a tactician, much like Frantz Fanon was when he wrote, ‘It is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead.’
However, there is a more chilling possibility. The war paradigm means that it is also possible to interpret Muntaqim’s statement from the point of view of the state. This would make incarcerated people, and especially incarcerated Black revolutionaries, the tip of a counterinsurgency spear that has pierced through the front line of its opposition on its way toward striking a more essential target, ‘us.’"
Here, Berger’s argument comes into sharper relief. The physical prison is not merely one among many carceral zones—it is the experimental frontier, the site where new weapons of domination are forged and tested. What begins within its walls does not stay there. As Julian Go taught us in Session 1 through the concept of the boomerang effect, tactics tested on the colonized return to haunt the metropolitan core. Likewise, what is piloted in prisons—control technologies, psychological warfare, hyper-surveillance—expands outward to worksites and refugee camps, shopping malls and school districts. We are not merely witnesses to this expansion. We are, as Berger reminds us, fellow prisoners.
He continues:
"Today the purpose of most prison walls (concrete, electronic, patrolled, or interrogatory) is not to keep prisoners in and correct them, but to keep prisoners out and exclude them."
Those incarcerated in physical prisons endure the most extreme experiments in exclusion. They are the subjects upon whom power wonders just how far exclusion can go. In Session 3, we explored how policy and procedure function not to protect but to sort, exclude, and assign blame. The most brutal version of this sorting happens within prisons, where even access to sensory experience is subject to governance. A 2022 New York Times video essay titled "Experience the Great Outdoors From Prison" documented a mental health program in which incarcerated people were shown looping nature videos in a concrete room. "Prison administrators hoped that these sessions would offer alternatives for people who were struggling emotionally," the essay notes, "many of whom often ended up in solitary confinement."
In this surreal juxtaposition—images of wild, uninhabited landscapes projected within the concrete confines of captivity—we glimpse both the cruelty and the contradictions of the global prison: a world where the outside is brought inside only as simulation, and where relief arrives as imitation, stripped of substance. The real outside—autonomy, movement, relation—is systematically foreclosed. And what’s more, it is being destroyed, as the planet itself is subjected to ecocide.
Session 2 reminded us that such tools of representation and simulation—smoke and mirrors—are not innocent. The surround is reduced to rubble and replaced with signs: signs of care, signs of justice, signs of nature—while the real, relational forms of each are denied. The prison becomes a theater of simulations, where Empire stages shallow imitations of life, ritual, and repair. The mechanical nature of its spectacle demands not only that we recognize these illusions, but that we refuse to participate in their terms.
To see the prison is to see the system. To name fellow prisoners is to refuse the exceptionalism that isolates the incarcerated from the rest. As we move into this fourth session, Prisons and Fortresses, we return to the question raised in our first gathering: What allows some to resist force with force, while others are frightened into compliance or flight? One answer, then as now, is belonging to the surround.
And yet, the surround is precisely what the prison seeks to sever. Indeed, prisoners often experience their incarceration as moral tests of individual endurance and survival. When put into solitary confinement, some say, "I am being tested. I will become stronger." But is the surround to which we belong becoming stronger—or are we being separated from it further and further by enduring in isolation?
This is true not only for those behind bars, but for all of us. The walls are not only made of concrete—they are cultural, procedural, behavioral. Within them, the performance of compliance becomes a condition of survival, as we saw in Session 3. Hollow simulation replaces the substance of connection, as we explored in Session 2. And the spectacle of violence, restaged endlessly, becomes the path of least resistance for those who can no longer bear captivity—a trap we must learn to evade, as Session 1 warned.
To resist the global prison is not merely to open cell doors—it is to refuse the regime of separation that fragments care, scatters solidarity, and obscures our shared captivity. It is to reject the simulations of freedom, the false signs of belonging, and to remember that the surround is not a metaphor. Like the prison, it is real. And it can be rebuilt.
This session, then, will be about doing just that—if only in a small and fragmentary way. In our next gathering, the AGAPE research group will come together to compose a collective letter to our fellow prisoners—those living life at the Tip of the Spear. What do we, as a collective situated outside the walls of conventional captivity, have to share with those inside? What do we understand as the importance or even substance of connection? Who do we want to connect with? What insights do we have from our various, specific points of contact with the global prison system? What questions, concerns, needs are there?
In Preliminaries to Any Struggle Against Prisons, the authors observe: "The function of prison in the overall economy of servitude is to materialize the false distinction between criminals and non-criminals, between law-abiding citizens and delinquents. This ‘purpose’ is as much social as it is psychic. It is the imprisonment and torture of the prisoner that produces the citizen’s feeling of innocence." As long as the criminal character of all life under Empire remains unacknowledged, they argue, the collective compulsion to punish—and to witness punishment—will persist. Every critique of prisons will continue to miss the mark.
Yet the text also issues a necessary warning: "The distinction between guilty and innocent is false. Reversing it only reinforces its lie. In our struggle against prisons, whenever we cast prisoners as the good guys, as the victims, we reproduce the very logic whose penalty is prison. A single dash of morality is enough to spoil any anti-carceral struggle."
So how do we commune with our fellow prisoners—especially those behind physical walls—without falling back into the very moral architecture that prisons depend on? How do we break the frame without re-inscribing its terms? This is the task before us.
Background Materials:
READ: “April, 1970” prison letter from Soledad Brother by George Jackson
READ: "Riot and Refrain" from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman
READ: Chapters from Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton
"The War on Black Revolutionary Minds: Failed Experiments in Scientific Subjugation"
LISTEN: Orisanmi Burton on Tip of the Spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Rebellion, and the Long Attica Revolt - Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
