Warfare in the American Homeland

The United States has more than two million people locked in federal, state, and local prisons. Although more than three quarters of the U.S. population is white, non-hispanic, the vast majority of the incarcerated-and policed-are not. In this compelling collection, scholars, activists, and current and former prisoners examine the sensibilities that enable a penal democracy to thrive. Some pieces are new to this volume; others are classic critiques of U.S. state power. Through biography, diary entries, and criticism, these essays collectively assert that the United States wages war against enemies abroad and against its own people at home. Contributors consider the interning or policing of citizens of colour, the activism of radicals, structural racism, destruction and death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the FBI's Counterintelligence Program designed to quash domestic dissent. Among the first-person accounts are an interview with Dhoruba bin Wahad, a Black Panther and former political prisoner; a portrayal of life in prison by a Plowshares nun jailed for her antinuclear/war activism; a discussion of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement by one of its members, now serving a seventy-year prison sentence for sedition; and an excerpt from a 1970 letter by the Black Panther George Jackson chronicling the abuses of inmates in California's Soledad Prison.Warfare in the American Homelandalso includes an excerpt from a pamphlet by Michel Foucault et al.; translated into English for the first time, it argues that the 1971 shooting of Jackson by prison guards was a premeditated murder in response to black and brown prisoners, and their supporters, organizing for human rights and justice.