Eric King and Josh Davidson
This week on the show, you’ll hear part of our conversation with Eric King and Josh Davidson. Josh has been on a few times to talk about collaborative inside-outside projects he works on such as the Certain Days calendar, the greeting cards he helped make of Indigenous political prisoner Oso Blanco’s artwork to benefit Zapatista schools in Chiapas, and the Rattling The Cages book that he co-edited with Eric King.
Eric was just released in December 2023 into a halfway house in Colorado after nearly 10 years in Federal prisons across the country. Eric is an anarchist who was incarcerated for an attempt to molotov the office of a Democratic Party official in Kansas City in solidarity with the then-going Ferguson Uprising following the murder of Michael Brown by police there. An antifascist and antiracist, Eric was moved around a lot during the 10 years he was inside and pitted against nazi prisoners in fight scenarios in a few instances, and near the end of his bid he was accused of assaulting an officer and successfully defending himself from a possible 20 year addition to his time inside but suffered intense isolation, insecurity, mail / phone and visitation blocks, moves across the country and physical restraint, ending up at the federal prison system’s most intense prison, the supermax ADX in Florence, CO.
For the hour, the guests speak about prisoner support, putting the book together, the implications and effects of long term isolation related topics. You can find more of Erics thoughts and updates at SupportEricKing.Org and similarly named social media accounts.
- Our past chats with Josh
- Our past interviews with Eric
Announcement
Hunger Strike at Red Onion State Prison (VA)
Prisoners at the Red Onion State Prison in Virginia have been on hunger strike since December 26th against the illegal and cruel use of solitary confinement at the facility in spite of procedures put into place last summer by the Virginia government. Here’re some words from the support site for Minister of Defense of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson. From rashidmod.com :
“On Tuesday, December 26, 2023, several prisoners confined at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison began a hunger strike to protest the continued use of long-term solitary confinement within the institution.Despite critical concern, outcry from the public and prisoner populations in the state, incarcerated people are still subjected to this brutal practice which has been renamed “restorative housing” since July 1, 2023 when measures were passed to limit its use in the state.
Leading these prisoners in this effort is longtime prison activist, revolutionary writer and artist, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson. Rashid has stated that no one will take any food at all until demands are met. Some of the strike participants have underlying health concerns that make the undertaking of such a demonstration particularly risky. Rashid, himself, is recovering from multiple rounds of radiation to treat prostate cancer as well as suffering from untreated heart disease/congestive heart failure. This is why the public’s support is especially needed. We are asking that calls, emails, and letters be sent to the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) officials as well as Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s office voicing support for the strikers and condemnation for the inhumane use of long-term solitary confinement/restorative housing.”Red Onion Hunger Strike Participants:
- Kevin “Rashid” Johnson – 1007485
- Jason Barrett – 1092874
- Rodney Lester – 1429887
- Charles Cousino – 2213403
- Eric Thompson – 1208012
- Joe Thomas – 1193196
Who To Contact:
VADOC~ Central Administration; USPS—
P.O. Box 26963
Richmond, VA 23261
- David Robinson Phone~ 804-887-8078,
- Email: david.robinson@vadoc.virginia.gov
- Virginia DOC ~ Director, Chadwick S Dotson,
- Phone~ (804) 674-3081
- Email: Chadwick.Dotson@vadoc.virginia.gov
VADOC ~Central Administration
Rose L. Durbin, Phone~804-887-7921
Email: Rose.Durbin@vadoc.virgina.govBeth Cabell, Division of Institutions
beth.cabell@vadoc.virginia.gov
(804)834-9967Gov. Glenn Youngkin
(804)786-2211
glenn.youngkin@governor.virginia.gov
. … . ..
Featured Tracks:
- Army Of Me (ABA All Stars Instrumental) by Bjork
- Bright Star (traditional) from H-Block, The Legacy of 1981 Hunger Strike CD
- Helicopter Song by The Dublin Ramblers from Irish Republican Jail Songs
. … . ..
Transcription:
Eric: Someone explained it to me (I forget who it was. It was one of our elders), but they’re like, “If you do 20 years or more, you come out to a brand new world.” Everything’s new. You don’t recognize anything. Then you have to build from that basis. If you do less than that—let’s say, my moderate amount of time, like 10 years. Sounds like a lot, but it’s moderate compared to other people. But when you come out, you come out to a different world. It’s your world, but it’s like on acid. Everything’s just changed a little. It’s just outrageously confusing. Maybe it shouldn’t be. I don’t know. But I come out, and I’m talking to you on a goddamn tablet. I’ve never had a tablet. I’ve never had a smartphone. You’re telling me, “Talk to your microphone,” and I am like, “What are you talking about?” Everything’s the same—there’s still cars, but now my car has two cameras in it. What? There’s still pants, but they fit very snugly. Yeah, it’s very interesting to me. I know that’s not part of our thing, but I think it’s neat.
Josh: Yeah, for sure.
E: Let’s get down to business.
TFSR: Okay, so we’re joined by Josh, who we’ve spoken to before on the show about his participation in Certain Days calendar collective, his involvement in support for Eric King, as well as other prisoners, as well as the co-editing of the book Rattling the Cages. We’re also joined by Eric King himself, now in a halfway house in Colorado, at the end of his journey through the BOP after nearly 10 years. Eric has been on the show twice before, once during the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners back in 2019, then again in 2022 from the infamous Grady County Detention Center, while being punitively transferred after he won a lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons. Welcome to both of you.
E: Let me correct you. I was being transferred after winning a criminal case against the Bureau of Prisons when I was accused of assaulting a lieutenant. That’s when I was transferred to Grady. Glad to be here.
J: Yeah, thanks for having us, Bursts.
TFSR: Of course. Eric, I wonder if you could catch us up a bit about the end of your bid and about what the halfway house experience is and something about your new job at Bread and Roses Legal.
E: Yeah, I would be happy to do that. Thank you for having us. I finished out the last year and four months at ADX, which is the federal supermax. It’s where they put the “worst of the worst,” the big-name people. It’s really not filled with those people. It’s filled with people who are just suffering in silent misery in a prison that keeps you locked down literally 24 hours a day. I did my last bit of time from there and was released on December 12th. That’s when I got sent to the halfway house.
I’d like to tell you about my job if that’s okay. When I got into ADX, I had a lawyer who had fought on my criminal case, and her name is Sandy, Sandra Freeman. Sandy wanted to keep helping me fight the Bureau from within ADX. She built a team of people that she felt would represent both my values and I complemented their values, and we could work together to fight the Bureau. She introduced me to the folks at Bread and Roses, Erica and Zee. Throughout the weeks and months at ADX, I became very close with Zee and Erica. We share values, we share tactics, and we just get along very great. When it started getting time for me to be released and figure out a plan for my life, those two badasses basically offered me a job at the law firm. They said, “We think you would be an asset as a person. We think this would be a good fit if you feel it’s a good fit.” It was an option, like I would say no. When I got released, they went straight to the halfway house to tell them, “We approve his job. We want him working here. We’ll do whatever it takes to accommodate him.” And they have. And so I have a job at this law firm.
This is Bread and Roses Legal Center. They do both criminal work—helping people in trials, which is something I feel very strongly about—and civil rights stuff, like getting the emergency money for the Club Q families, like supporting those people who’ve been through anti-trans massacres and the mass shooting in Colorado, helping trans folks with name transitions, and a whole plethora of things. The other day they did a toy drive to get toys for migrant children from Venezuela and just impoverished children in Colorado Springs. I got to help with that.
I went from being in the worst, like the worst mental prison you could be in—it’s not the worst physical prison but the worst mental prison you could be in—to now just being surrounded by love and being able to help. I am helping people now, Bursts. That’s not a small thing to me because I was helped so much. I’d have another 20 years to do if people hadn’t stood up for me. I’d have no support if people like Josh didn’t back me and people like you didn’t have me on the radio programs. Now that I have a chance to pay that forward, it just feels like the biggest blessing in the world, if that makes sense. So many people paid it forward to me. Now I get to pay it. I get to help people with whatever I have. Whether it’s a voice, whether it’s researching their case, whether it’s doing whatever I can do to help people, I have that opportunity now. That’s massive for me. It feels like my life’s come full circle.
TFSR: That’s like a double whammy, right? Not only do you get to work in a place that respects you and that you respect mutually, but also one of the prime difficulties that people have when they’re coming out of doing time is finding employment at all, let alone something that pays a decent rate.
Also, it seems like having employment from an organization like this, especially when that can have your legal back, offers you the possibility of a little more freedom in the meantime while you finish out your time at the halfway house, right?
E: I can tell you right now that I am stunned at how poorly people are prepared to leave the halfway house. Let’s say you get four months. They’re not finding jobs for you. They’re not helping you find jobs. If you don’t find a job, they make your ass become a janitor, or you have to pick up trash around the yard. They don’t provide the resources that I thought were going to happen. There’s a kid in my room right now, he got two weeks at a halfway house, and he doesn’t have an ID. The prison didn’t give him an ID. He can’t even get a job cause he doesn’t have the ID. Now he has to rely on the halfway house to help him get to the DMV. But if they don’t give you a pass at the right time, or if the weather’s too bad, you can’t get to the DMV. If you get to the DMV and they’re busy—you only have an hour pass, two hour pass. Let’s say there’s a line, you have to then go back to the halfway house, and put in another request. This kid’s got three days left. He doesn’t even have shoes. They tell you, “If you want clothes, go to the homeless shelter.” You go to the homeless shelter, and they say, “Oh, do you have a job?” “No.” “Well, we’re not gonna give you shoes until you get a job.” I’m watching this circle happen. This is what pushes people back into the criminal justice system. He is almost certainly going to have to commit crimes to survive. I’m watching it happen in real time. Their issue is like, “Well, you got a place to stay, you got food, what else do you want?” People are just woefully unprepared for the world because we’re not given the tools or the accessibility to become prepared.
For me to be offered a job at Bread and Rose, my god, I can’t express in words strong enough how big of an impact that made on my life, bro. I would kill for these people. They didn’t hire me out of some token bullshit. They’re giving me work. I get to work, I get to feel valuable. I get a feel as if I’m creating a career. I’m watching the people I live with have to hold the street signs, the most dangerous job on earth when it’s -5° outside, making $14 an hour. How is that going to help them survive in Denver? It doesn’t. I’m watching this happen over there. But I’m watching my own life happen over here. I’m blessed to the gills. I’m so full of blessings that I could explode right now. Then I have my book. We have our book. It’s so good for me. But I see how it’s not so good for others. That’s where we still have to fight. This is not over, it comes into everything. Does that make sense?
TFSR: Yeah. That’s a really good insight that not only are people not being set up for success, but they’re actively being set up for failure by these institutions. It’s great that organizations like Bread and Roses, as you said, are not doing it as a charity but actually engaging you and your perspectives and your experiences.
E: They put me in a position to succeed. I just need to stress that. They put me in a position where I could be the best me, and then how can you use that to help them? It’s the best position anyone could possibly be in. I love these people with all my heart and what they do to help people. This isn’t a for-profit business. This isn’t a billion dollar legal operation. These are local people helping local people in trouble. It just fills my heart. It makes me feel like a real human. I haven’t felt that way in a long time.
TFSR: That leads me to the next question. That resource, obviously, is based on their experience with you as a person and your skills and your passion and your knowledge, or otherwise they wouldn’t have picked you to work in their small workspace together. That intimacy, you have to—
E: Let’s say, a humble workspace.
TFSR: I mean, that’s a kitchen. Looks like there were a couple of coffeemakers…
E: Yeah, it’s sweet. Drink free coffee all day.
TFSR: As you are leaving the status of the prisoner, do you have any observations you’d like to share about your experience with the prisoner support movement in the USA? What did you find worked well, and where did you find there was room for improvement? I’d love to hear what you have to say.
E: Thank you for asking that, Bursts. I’m gonna start with where it went well, because I’d say I was supported well. I wasn’t one of the Earth Liberation dudes that have 70,000 letters a day and all this weird shit, but I was supported well by people that genuinely cared about me, and I was able to develop real friendships. Where it went well was people like Josh. It was people who came to me as a human, found common interests, and then built on that. Let’s create something from this friendship. Let’s not just make it a “How’s your day?” It was a real bond. There were a few people like that, essentially everyone from my support team went out of their way to treat me like a human and figure out how to bond. When it goes really well, we get things like Rattling the Cages. That came from prisoner support, that came from someone in the free world saying, “You have this idea. Instead of treating you like a character, I’m gonna treat you like a human. We’re going to try to build this idea. We’re going to make it real.” Those things happen sometimes, not usually. But Josh—usually, anyone who talks to Josh has these things happen, but it’s rare for me. I had probably 15 people, and I felt like these are my real friends. I’m still texting every single goddamn one of them right now. I still talk to those people because there was no weird dynamic. It was, “We are two humans, let’s love and help each other.”
Where it goes bad in my perspective, and I’m only speaking for myself, of course. What I see is when that dynamic has changed, and it’s no longer we are two humans. Now it’s either I’m put too high, or I’m put too low. I see that happens sometimes where prisoners can be put on this weird (in my mind) pedestal to where we’re no longer treated like real humans, where you can call us out, where you can’t say, “Hey, man, that was rude” or “Hey, what are you up to? You’re doing things I don’t understand.” Now it becomes, we are the saints, we are beatified. For me, that didn’t feel good. I hated that. Because if we’re friends, you can tell me I’m being a dick, you can tell me I’m doing something gross. But if you’re not able to treat me that way, then that means you don’t see me that way. You see me as an object. It feels almost like I see prisoners being objectified in a way that takes away their humanity. (I guess that’s the definition of goddamn objectification.) I don’t like that. I don’t like that we can’t be honest with prisoners. If we see a prisoner lying or saying gross shit, I think we owe it to them as people to be able to say to them, “Friend, why are you doing this? Why did you say that? That hurt people, friend, you’ve hurt somebody here. Can we talk about it?” But so often it doesn’t happen like that. Its people immediately jumped to the defense to say “No, no, don’t say nothing. They’re a prisoner.” As if we can’t handle critique. We can handle these goddamn Nazi guards kicking our heads in, but I can’t handle Bursts or Josh telling me “Eric, you sound like a dick?” For me having that from my friends allowed me to get out of prison a better person because I came out of prison holding myself accountable.
I came out of prison ready to be heard, but also ready to listen because I wasn’t conditioned to be a saint. I’m not Saint Eric. There are no saints in this movement. We’re all flawed humans. If we can talk to each other and grow, then we can talk to each other and grow. But if not, then we’re just promoting bad behavior. We’re putting people that do prisoner support at harm because they’re coming into these relationships expecting one thing, getting something else, and it’s dangerous. It is dangerous for the prisoner, it is dangerous for the supporters. Those are the things that are really important to me, that people treat prisoners like humans. That includes treating us through building relationships and being friends but also loving us enough to be honest with us. That’s important to me. Love me enough to tell me if I’m out of line or if my braids look bad. Or if I wrote someone and said something really gross. We need to be able to do that. That’s where I stand on that.
TFSR: I understand not putting people on pedestals, but it’s also the communication barrier, the fact that everything going in and coming out is being observed by guards who have their own manipulative systems of control. There’s also the uneven distribution of support based on… I could see somebody deciding to cut off a prisoner because they’ve said something rude, and they’re afraid of addressing it, or they haven’t gotten to addressing it. Or a prisoner saying, “Hey, this person said something to me that’s rude.” Can you talk a little bit about how you navigate the mediating circumstance of communication in and out outside of the dehumanization?
E: It is tricky. I can only use my example. My mail has always been outrageously delayed. I imagine most of us have had something similar. There is this thing where you write something, they get it two months later, they respond, and you’ve already moved on. It takes patience, it takes kindness. It takes cleverness too because you do have to navigate. You don’t want to give the pig something to hurt this person with. You don’t want to say anything that’s going to create a new case, you don’t want to say something that’s going to put them in danger. It does take a level of creativity or a level of honesty in a way that isn’t a sword. Honesty in a way that is an open arm, if that makes sense.
But there is this weird popularity contest in the political prisoner movement. I’ve benefited from this, I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been in the above middle ground my entire bid. Thankfully, people lifted me up. People with big names in the movement lifted me up, and then I benefited from this. That’s real too. I would get more support, and thus I was able to build more relationships. Whereas someone comes in and someone doesn’t pick them up, some ABC doesn’t decide to elevate them, they’re just on their own. Then they might have to do things or say things to try to get attention so they can get support, so they can get love, and thus put themselves at risk. There is a weird dynamic about who gets support, who doesn’t get support, and how it gets distributed. I feel like we have to do better as a movement to understand that people are fighting for a better world. However they’re doing it, they’re doing their best, they’re offering whatever they have. That’s enough for me, that’s enough to get support for me. You don’t have to qualify by being a member of this super fun group or this movement of the month, whatever. You did your best, and we’re going to do what we can to help you. And I think we need to try to find a way to make support bigger so that we have a bigger infrastructure to help more people. But right now, it is what it is. Some people are gonna get this, some people are gonna get this, some people are gonna get treated like a human. Some are going to be “I walked my dog today” type letters, and that’s all they’re ever going to hear. That creates a dynamic that it creates, and I might have rambled my ass off.
TFSR: You should check if your ass is still there. I think it’s there.
E: [laughs] Okay, Bursts. Does that make sense, what I was saying?
J: I have nothing to add. It’s great to hear your voice, Eric. It’s great to get your input directly, instead of just through me or through others. Take up all the airspace you need.
TFSR: Bursts, you might not know this, but Josh literally supports 39 prisoners. I’m not being sarcastic.
J: I don’t know if that number is correct. The whole system changes, the whole the whole idea of support changes when someone crosses into the outside.
E: And crosses that line.
J: Yeah. Then it becomes a whole new world of support.
E: When we’re talking about people that treat supporters like humans, bro literally writes—I bet my hat on it—at least 20 people. If he’s able, while writing to 20 different people, to build real friendships with all of them and maintain a full-time job and maintain a relationship with his partner and have a personal life, if he’s able to do that, we can find the space to do that. The space is there, and the time is there if people want to invest in it and care enough. If we had a thousand Joshes, I swear to God, this movement would be packed. It would be sweet. But there’s probably only a hundred Joshes, a hundred Bursts. The more people that genuinely care and understand that their care is not just words but actions and love, the better off we’re all going to be as a movement.
TFSR: Well, this is the time when I wanted to announce that I’ve taken a sample of Josh’s DNA, and we’re going to be cloning them. You get what you asked for.
E: [laughs]
TFSR: I spoke not too long ago with Thomas Meyer-Falk, who’d spent most of—
E: Oh, did you? I wrote him once to his German prison from ADX.
TFSR: Yeah, he was super stoked to hear that you were getting out.
E: Thomas cared? That makes me feel special. He’s a great guy.
TFSR: But he spent most last three decades in German prisons. He spoke about his experiences and some of the changes and living circumstances and undoing the norms of prison. That gets back to something that you had said a little bit earlier, like the longer that someone’s in, the more the world around them changes, the more different the approach has to be. And then also, more recently, when you mentioned support from folks like Josh or from Bread and Roses, like having people there to be on the outside and to help guide you into the hellscape that is this world right now and deal with the changes. But I wonder how has the transition been for you to having roommates and a much freer schedule and access to the outdoors, more than at the ADX. How has that been, and do you have any clues for folks who are also making that change?
E: One of the things that’s happened to me since I’ve gotten out, I find myself overemotional. Maybe not overemotional, just emotional. Now I apologize to you for a train passing two miles behind me as if I had hurt you. I think it’s like working through trauma. I started crying the other day because my bosses were being so nice to me. Literally crying. I had to walk out of the room. I couldn’t stand it. Because these people were showing me so much love and respect that I had to go. Like I had to get out of the house. Because my whole bid sucked. You know what’s going on. But the last five years, I don’t know how they could have been worse without me dying. To go from a constant literal every day something horrible happening to you, every day you are fight or flight, every day you’re thinking I might get killed today, every day you’re thinking, “I know I’m not going to hear from my family today,” to being given hugs and people buying you food and people texting you. I call Josh every day just to feel human. Because he’s my friend. I feel so safe. I just need people to feel safe around. He was there when I was in prison, and he’s there now.
I get overwhelmed, bro. Doesn’t even answer your question. I just talk about this goddamn train. Because that’s what ends up happening to me is that after prison, I can’t watch certain TV shows without sobbing. My daughter’s talking to me sometimes, and I’m like “God dammit, I can’t handle it.” It’s just too sweet. It’s too nice. That’s a big change that happened in my life where you go from having to be Mr. Hardass to accepting love. I’d like to stress this—you don’t even have to put this in the interview, but I just want to stress it to you. The reason that happened is because I have people around me who treated me like a human. I got out of prison, and my wife is treating me like a human. My bosses are treating me like a human. I’m not getting pampered, but they’re showing me compassion, empathy, and understanding, stuff I have not gotten. If I needed to talk to somebody—”Josh, can I call you please?” “Yes, call me.” If I needed to call Brian, I needed to call Sandy. I have people who prepared me for the world by saying, “Eric, you are a human. You are going to feel things. We are here for you. We don’t expect you to be anything other than what you are. Take your time, and do what you need to do to feel at peace, to feel whole. We are here for you, however you need it.” Then they also let me be there for them. I’m not a sympathy project to the people around me, dude. When I got out, I got probably 100 texts. But about 20 of them were from people who treat me like a real person. “You went through something hard. We love you. Let’s work through this as friends.” Then they let me be there for them. Because that makes you feel like human too. If someone tells you, “Damn, today sucks.” They’re not saying like, “Oh, you got your own stuff going on. Don’t worry about it.” They let me be a part of their lives. That’s something I didn’t have before. You don’t get that in prison very often. But I’m very lucky that my supporters and my friends said, “No, no, no, you’re not a project, bro. You’re our comrade, you’re our friend. We’re with you.” That’s really important.
I guess that’s the advice I would give to supporters: Treat someone like a human. If you want them to be ready to get out, have resources for them, and take the time to help them with resources. Also, take the time to get to know them and be in their heart. Because they’re gonna have shit they need to talk about. They’re gonna have things they need to work through. Sometimes they might just need to hear your voice or just be a friend. That’s what I would recommend. That’s where I’ve been overwhelmingly blessed. I can’t imagine someone having better than me right now. Literally. My wife has done everything. My friends have done everything. How many interviews have you seen Josh do for this goddamn book? It’s our book. I think he was on this show doing it. He understood I can’t do it, but he’s not going to abandon our project. That was an act of love him doing that. It’s an act of love him sitting there quietly right now. Just listening to you ramble. Same for you. These things make people feel human. Also, make you feel like I can do this. I see people that can’t do it. I was prepared because I prepared myself and I had people that prepared me. You’re human, you’re flawed. Do your best, we love you. Would you say Thomas I said “What’s up” and I wish him all the best?
TFSR: Absolutely.
E: That’s a stand-up motherfucker right there.
J: For sure, the same to Kazi.
E: Don’t censor that out.
TFSR: I won’t.
E: I love my brothers inside. My everybody, not just bros, my everybody.
TFSR: Happily, those folks are out.
Since you were working through the bars to do this, how did the oral history project that was Rattling the Cages come about?
E: Rattling the Cages pages is the sweetest project I could ever imagine. It came because Josh treats me like a human. I was spitballing ideas to him about shit that I want to do, because part of my big thing was it’s not enough just to be free or to be supported, we need to also give back. So at one point in time, I spitball to him about creating a museum, a political prisoner museum project, which is outrageous and stupid. But Josh was like, “Well, let’s talk about it. Let’s see what we can do.” Then eventually—we read shit. We read together because he treats me like a human. Just over discussions, reading about prisoners, reading about the trauma that prisoners faced inside Irish prison. (We read about Irish folks, people from The Troubles.) It just developed into, “We could interview or talk to our elders.” For me, it started with only the elders. That’s what I wanted because Tom Manning had just died. I thought there’s so many stories of this guy that we missed. I was living with a different elder, previously, and I got to hear his stories. Then Tom Manning died. I was like “This is real history, and we’re gonna lose it. We’re going to lose it fast.” I brought this idea to Josh, and my wife got involved too. She might have been one to say, “Make it a book.” Then Josh was like, “Look, I know about 700 people, I’m gonna put all of them in it.”
TFSR: And he writes to all of them daily.
E: He does, I swear. But he was like, “Look, here’s all the people I’m gonna put in.” “Are you serious?” Because he took my idea, made it our idea because we talked about it together, and then made it so much better. Mine would have been a pamphlet with just the elders, ten people, and would have been sweet. But Josh was like “How about we do something better? How about we make this a full, encompassing thing of love. That way, we can represent all stories.” Then I’m having to smuggle letters out to him about questions and stuff like that. I’m having to pay people in the SHU to send mail to Josh. Then Josh would respond to them, or to my wife, depending on which. But these dudes had to write out the letter. I’d have to pay them five bucks a letter. (Josh, you still owe me that. I’ll get that later.) But so I would write these letters, give them to them, translate the letters, and then mail them out on their time. From there, just like it took a long time because there was a period where I was getting crushed daily physically, and I couldn’t write to Josh then, I didn’t have the space. But he was patient, man. He was patient. He let the project evolve naturally, and he invested all the time. He put our heart and soul into it and just made it into something really special. It came from support. It came from just normal, loving friendship and support.
J: I’ll just add that the reason it grew initially was because most of the people that Eric wanted to interview ended up dying after years and years of medical neglect. No, I mean, it’s serious.
E: Jesus! It’s true. We missed Maroon.
J: Maroon, Bo Brown, Chip Fitzgerald, Blood McCreary… Kathy Boudin died, so many people died.
E: Missing Kathy really hurt.
J: Yeah. Mutulu Shakur, Eddie Conway, Albert Woodfox. So many people died in the four years that it took us to make this book.
E: Four years of patient back-and-forth conversations only through letters. This dude is amazing.
J: Well, only through letters with you, but it was with emails through others.
TFSR: Also, for all the people that did pass in that period, it’s a thick book. You got a lot of people’s experiences from all over, like Anglophone Turtle Island, at least, from so-called Canada and the USA.
E: Oh, it’s Turtle Island, okay?
TFSR: Yeah, that rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
E: Golly!
TFSR: So that’s pretty incredible. And folks not only those who are still inside but folks talking about their former experience inside.
E: That’s where Josh nailed it. That’s where my project would have failed. It wouldn’t have been as comprehensive. It wouldn’t have been as interesting. It wouldn’t have taught as much if we had just done it the way I wanted before Rachelle got involved, before Josh mixed it up into something really special. That’s what made it something really powerful in my mind.
J: I think the project was such a good idea that people wanted to get involved. I didn’t reach out necessarily to all the people involved, but they heard through word of mouth about it, and they wanted to share their stories. They wanted to be a part of raising political prisoner voices. Right back at you with the idea for that.
E: For me, it started as a love letter to the elders. I thank you for what you did because I couldn’t have survived my prison experience without your wisdom. Josh turned into not just a love letter, but a comprehensive love letter, a full dictionary love letter of let’s learn every lesson. Let’s not leave any lesson unlearned cause I focused on the 30 years or more people. It’s important to have someone in there that only did 12 months. It’s important to have someone in there that are trans. Definitely, it’s important to have elder Black people. It’s important to have women, men, and gays. It adds so many more lessons for us all to learn about what oppression looks like and what resistance looks like. Because my perspective isn’t the only perspective. It’s dangerous and stupid if I only want to give the story from my lens, and Josh opened it up to 1000 lenses. That’s what adds the beauty to the book, I feel. Every lesson is taught. RIP, Kathy.
TFSR: Are you collaborating on other projects at the moment? Or are there any other projects that y’all have worked on together that you want to talk about?
E: I have three projects I have going on right now with Josh exclusively. In my mind, Rattling the Cages isn’t a one-and-done thing. There’s more prisoners out there: There are social prisoners, there are prisoners that have security threat groups, there are prisoners have been held in dungeons for decades, and there’s international prisoners. That’s important. From my perspective, I want to talk to people that do prison support. I want to know their history, Bursts, because we can learn from that also. People who have been tangibly involved in the movement have so much to teach us if we open our ears and listen to people who have done this. We can learn so much about what worked, what didn’t work, what helped, what didn’t help. Then also, I believe we’ve got a cartoon project going on, a child version of Rattling the Cages.
J: It’s an idea that’s percolating right now. I’ve done a few events for the book, one in San Francisco and another in New York.
E: He is a very big celebrity.
J: No, not really. But some people came, which is really encouraging to see. Yeah. A friend’s child came to the event in Baltimore, and she asked afterward if there were books to help her understand political prisoners and why people were in prison. And there’s one or two that touch on the subject, but there isn’t much. I think it would be helpful if there were. There’s a lot of great organizations doing work out there that could potentially use it as a fundraiser. That’s something we’re looking into.
TFSR: Could you name a few of those organizations?
J: Yeah, the first that initially came to mind was the Rosenberg Fund for Children—
E: Which I would like to dig into.
J: Yeah, as a recipient of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, Eric, you should go ahead and talk about them.
E: Yeah. Bursts, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Rosenberg Foundation for Children. They help not just political prisoners’ kids, but activist kids, activists who are facing repression. They came to us about six or seven years ago, and I didn’t know anything about them. But they immediately started helping my children. They got to go to these cool camps. They get to learn skills like guitar and horse riding. They gave us gas money occasionally for Rachelle and the girls to come visit me. They do shit like this all the time. When I was getting out of prison, the Rosenberg Foundation paid for the hotel and the car rental. That’s not a small thing. When I talk to you about me being just blessed through the moon, that’s the shit I’m talking about because people—they’re normal people—but they got together and said, “How can we help?” And they do this for lots of us. It is the biggest blessing because I can’t help my kids. I can’t when I’m in ADX, or whatever, I can’t take them on a horse riding thing. I can’t get them to have neat stuff for the backyard so they can have a fun little winter or summer. But the Rosenberg Foundation can, and they do. It’s not just that they can do it, they do it. That’s just so beautiful to me. Me and Josh had talked about when we do the kids’ book, if we can, we use it to help them. Let’s give that back to those groups that are helping people. Let’s help people help people, basically. Let’s show that love and solidarity and mutual aid together, that we’re all in this together. We can do things to help each other and help the broader community. Josh, go ahead. Sorry.
J: I’ll just clarify that the RFC are the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were put to death by the state during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. And it just goes to show the validity of people who need support being involved in the organizations that are giving support.
E: They helped me, I want to help them. Let’s keep this ball rolling, man.
TFSR: It’s why it’s mutual aid, right?
E: Isn’t it?
J: Yeah, very definition, for sure.
E: I really love the Rosenberg Foundation.
TFSR: Eric, had Rattling the Cages been available back in 2014, when you went to prison, do you think that lessons from the book would have changed your trajectory while imprisoned?
E: Yes! Oh my God, what a what a good question.
TFSR: Josh did it.
E: I came in blind. I came in really stupid. I didn’t know not only what to expect but what was expected of me. There were things I wanted to do in prison, but at the same time, I don’t know if I am making things harder for myself. Am I being stupid? Am I making the movement look bad? All these things. I almost had an insecurity or a doubt about how to do my time. What came out was I ended up being stupid early on—I caught multiple staff assaults early on because I thought I was fighting for the people. None of our elders in that book talked about, “my first year in, I smashed some cops for the movement.” They didn’t do that because it was a no-win situation. It was stupid. But in my mind, I didn’t know how else to resist. I didn’t know how else to help people. When I started communicating with elders and getting their books, getting books that came out where they had written things, it started teaching me that I can treat this like the world. I can organize in here, I can resist on a smart level. Even though I failed a lot of times, and I went back to just like “I’m gonna fuck these dudes up,” if I would have had these books going in… You read about how David Gilbert does his time, you read about Lauren and Susan, Linda—you read about people that are like “How can I help the people I’m inside with? How can we resist to help each other?” It wasn’t about how can I resist to hurt somebody, like when you read about the people that did the HIV training—they put themselves at risk, especially social risk, but they did it out of love to help the people they were with because they understood this is a struggle together. If I learned that, I could have fought so much more cleverly. I could have been just more clever and not have to have been through so much reckless resistance. Resistance that doesn’t have an end game, doesn’t have a win. It’s just self-congratulatory, basically, “You hurt me, so I’m gonna hurt you.” We don’t move forward that way. Even though it feels good. It feels damn good. I can’t stress enough how good it feels. I could write a whole book on how good it feels. But you don’t get anywhere. Even I think Michael Kimble, his whole thing was, “It feels good to resist, bro. It feels good. It’s all I got.” But you learn so much.
If I had had that book, not only would have I just loved and honored our elders more, which I always did to begin with, but it would have already been there to start with. But I would have been smarter, and I could have used my resources better. I could have learned how can I actually hurt the prison system while helping the people inside of it, instead of just how can I hurt them while hurting myself. Does that make sense? “You didn’t give me a grape packet, so I’m gonna throw a cup of shit in your face.” That’s not clever. I did that. That’s stupid. If you’re going to oppress me, you’re going to eat shit. It’s dumb.
TFSR: Take a situation where you were systematically having power removed from you and then reacting in the way that you see. That makes sense to me.
E: I saw this Assata quote, where she was like, “A revolutionary woman doesn’t need reactionary men.” That just pops in my head sometimes, like “I’m being reactionary as shit.” Assata wouldn’t want to be my friend right now. But towards the end of my bid, that changed, and I was able to reflect, and a lot of that came from conversations with people like Josh, or reading your transcripts with people. Just learning more about what resistance looks like inside and how I can apply it to my own life. That’s where the book is a tool, especially with Cop City going on and the repression going on.
TFSR: Yeah, it seems like some of the reflections from prisoners in that book, or in other things that I’ve read or folks that I’ve talked to, some of the strongest wisdom that people have gotten is from elders. That’s the role that elders in prison have, to say, “Hey, you’re literally like banging your head against the wall. That’s not going to move.” When you come in, you can’t be expected to know how things operate. Also, people have been doing the thinking and the working and the collaborating on the inside to try to figure out—not that they have all the answers—but try to figure out what actually moves things, what changes things, and where can we get from here if we collaborate together. That’s one thing that I got a lot out of that book that I think is super helpful.
E: Eric from eight years ago would have written a book like this and would have been like, “Stab, hurt, fight.” Eric today would write this book and say, “Let’s go into this with empathy. Let’s see how we can work together. Let’s go into this with love for each other for what we’re going through. Let’s see how we can resist to actually make a difference.” That came from the elders. But also, I gotta be honest, Bursts, not every political prisoner gives a shit about our elders. Let’s be real, not everyone is dying to read a quote from Kuwasi. Josh used to send me packets of Sundiata writings just so I could feel alive. We as prisoners need that humility to understand that we don’t have all the answers. But there’s people who have been through what we’ve been through, and we can learn from them if we choose to. Those lessons are priceless.
TFSR: Obviously, those bars and walls are real, and the wardens are real. The guards and everything are real. But sometimes the delineation between the free world versus the inside world can obscure the fact that a lot of those lessons from that book are the things that we need on the outside too. A lot of those situations have analogues to what we experience in our day-to-day lives when resisting or experiencing or witnessing a series of systems of oppression.
E: One of the things I learned from the book the most that really affected me is I felt really vulnerable in prison. There was times I wanted to cry, and there’s times I was scared to death, dude. I’m not a big dude. I don’t want to stab somebody. I don’t want to die. I watched these things happen, this brutality happens, and I felt so afraid. I didn’t know who to talk to about that because we are revolutionaries, we can’t be vulnerable. We can’t be sad. We can’t want to just curl up and be like “God dammit, why is this happening?” We can’t do that. That’s what I thought. No disrespect to anyone, but when you read some of these older writings, that’s what they are. They’re talking about how strong we are and how we resist. We can take on anything and don’t let these bastards break you. But sometimes you do get broken, and sometimes you’re hurt. I can’t talk to my wife on the phone for five years, that hurts. One of the things the book really helped me with was seeing other people feel similar ways, knowing that other people, that people I have looked up to, the people that in my mind were steel, iron men, iron women, iron people, they were fragile too. They hurt. It’s okay to acknowledge that the prison system hurts us. Because if we don’t acknowledge the hurt, you’re basically saying that prisons are nothing. It’s nothing, it doesn’t do anything. But if we’re able to say this place hurts us, and there are times when it just feels like my soul is getting ripped in pieces, and I don’t know what to do. That was one of the things in the book that I was hoping to get, I wanted to know that other people cared and that other people actually felt. That was really rewarding for me when I started reading the responses back when Josh was able to share those with me. When I finally got my copy was like, “I’m not some soft-ass dude. This is normal. We get hurt, right?” Not all of us can Oso and be a brick wall of badassery. Some of us have to be badass by hurting and knowing how to heal and get through it. For me, that part alone in the book was priceless, just knowing that it’s okay to be human in prison. You don’t have to be the revolutionary 24/7. Sometimes you can just be a sad dude who wants to run laps and read a book.
J: Well, I’ll just add that one of the best parts for me so far is getting the responses from contributors and hearing what they think of the book and then even what they’ve learned. These are people who have been involved in struggle for 40-50 years. Hearing that they’ve learned from this is really encouraging. I look forward to hearing what other contributors did too.
E: These monsters of our movement, we’re learning from each other by getting to hear each other’s words. It’s so empowering. I got empowered by reading about those nuns and the priests—not the nuns but the Catholic folk. Cause their personalities were so vibrant in the book. “I didn’t like the cursing. I didn’t like all the poor language,” because that’s their reality. That’s something that they felt, and even if it’s so, whatever. Or I cared about Rebecca, Rebecca Rubin. She would not give up on these animals for nothing. She’s like, “This prison wall is not going to take away my personality. I love these goddamn animals.” And I love that. It’s not my experience, but hearing just her personality in it. It’s not a manufactured ALF response. It’s her being a human and saying, “This is what mattered to me.” I just thought it was so vulnerable and so sweet. Big-up Rebecca.
TFSR: Also the range of experiences too. I come back to not only Ann Hansen’s reflections from in there, hearing about an assigned-women’s prison across the northern border from here, but James Kilgore’s experience, too, of being an elder coming in already and having a decade’s long experience sharpened with struggle and resistance and whatever. Sharp stuff. It is really good.
E: Did you ever read Ann’s book where she talks about all of them smoking PCP in prison?
TFSR: Direct Action or the other one after that?
E: I think it was Direct Action. It was so funny. For real, that would be so terrifying to sit in a prison smoking PCP, but they are doing it, just getting wedded up, just living life. Sweet! Because once again, we picture how we’re supposed to be, and then here’s how your real life is. And Ann Hanson said, “This is who I am. What do you want to do?” It was awesome. I love her.
TFSR: Well, is there anyone else that you wanted to say thank you to? Obviously, you’ve mentioned your wife and your family. You’ve mentioned Josh a few times. Anyone else you want to give a shout-out?
E: I always want to shout out Sandra, Sandra Freeman. Sandy. She was Rattler’s lawyer back then. She did my criminal case, her and the other legal team. But she came and visited me every week. When I was in USP Lee getting tortured, she came and visited me. When I’m in ADX, she’s on the phone every goddamn week. Always love to Sandy. Of course the Bread and Roses for the million things we talked about. There’s a big divide in the ABC world about who supports who and who supports when and all this stuff. But I can say wholeheartedly the more time we invest in helping people, the better our movement is going to be. The more we take people seriously, the more we understand them, the more we get to know them. We cannot fail if we’re together. If we’re unified, we’ve got real solidarity, we can do this. Can I take a second to talk about supermaxes, too, by the way?
TFSR: Yeah. You and I were talking before the interview, and you were talking about wanting to do more work about making the experiences of people who are in supermaxes or who are in long-term isolation from other folks more visible. Tell us about the experience and the work that you’re hoping to do around that.
E: It seems like in the 80s—maybe late 70s-80s—people got really invested in fighting against USP Marion. Marion took over from Alcatraz, and Marion was filled with political prisoners. Oscar was there, Leonard was there, Sundaiata was there. One of my favorite people on Earth, Bill Dunn, was there. The Puerto Rican fighters were there. It was just packed with revolutionary people. Because it had more of us in it, and had more eyes on it, and the more eyes that they had on it, the more they were able to ease up on the bullshit, and the repression cannot survive when we were literally tangibly protesting against it. People would do that, shutting down Marion Control Unit was a big deal. But for whatever reason, ADX comes around, and it just feels like people stopped caring. It seems like the liberal media will still pick up stories of “the most dangerous but the most secure.” But that talks about the prison, it doesn’t talk about the people and what they’re going through.
When I got to ADX, I was having people writing me asking if they could send me clothes, trying to send me food. I was like “I can’t get mail without the FBI approving it, and you want to send me pants? God bless you, thank you so much for caring!” but there was just such a disconnect between what’s happening and what people know. That alarmed me because I was meeting folks that have been there for 15-20 years. A lot of them, not just a handful, a lot of them. If they’ve been going through this whole time, that means that people on the outside are either choosing not to listen, not finding a way to listen, or there’s not enough stuff to listen to. That scares me. Because this prison is a monster. You have no power there. When I tell you 23 hours a day locked in a concrete box, I’m not joking. It is a concrete box. You cannot hear the person next to you. You could literally go 20 years and not talk to another human cause you have to go out of your way to go to rec. When the cops bring your food tray, there are two doors, they open the outside door, stick the food tray on the inside bean slot, and then walk out. There’s no communication. You don’t wanna communicate with these motherfuckers anyway.
So I noticed an extreme disconnect between what people know about ADX and how much they even care, as if supermaxes have been so normalized that we no longer need to worry about. They’re just inevitable. We have to deal with them. They’ll phase themselves out. Things are getting worse there every year. The food is the worst I’ve ever had. The beds are the worst I’ve ever had. The cops—some of them are chill, but they have more power than any other cops, so they can beat the hell out of you. You’re not gonna do anything about it because you’re handcuffed, and they have batons. You only get to talk to unit staff and your teams when they come around. You have no power. Everything is controlled by them. It’s not like that in other prisons, I’m telling you. In other prisons, you can get mail, you can go to the library, you can go to rec when you want, you can talk to staff when you need to talk to staff, you can fill out your own visiting, you can do things. I’m not saying other prisons are okay. But in ADX, you literally have no power, no control of anything. When you can’t control anything, that means they control everything. That leads to abuses. Abuses happen every single day. Even when my wife finally got approved for a visit, she’d come and visit me, and the cop wouldn’t have a chair in our area. Small things. That’s a small thing. But it’s a big thing. Because I’m in a concrete booth, I can’t do anything about it. I can do nothing. When they come and take away all of our books because they just decide we don’t get books anymore, we can’t stop them. If they decide we’re not going to rec, we’re not going to rec. You have four phone calls a month, you’ve been there for 20 years, you have four phone calls a month, and no amount of bucking will get you that fifth call. You can’t throw food, you can’t attack staff. You’re not getting that call. If you miss, if the phone disconnects, you’re dead. That’s it. You are the phone call dead. 20 years, you’re not touching your family. 20 years, 10 years, five years, one year.
I want to find a way where I can engage people in what these prisons are like. These prisons are not a game. They’re not inevitable. They’re allowed to exist because we’ve allowed them to exist. They’ve gotten this bad because we’ve allowed them to get this bad. They shut down Thompson in two years. Why? Because it was so bad and people spoke up. A lot of people spoke up, liberals spoke up, our people spoke up. If we can get Thompson shut down in two years, if we get the Lexington Control Unit shut down in one year, if we can get Marion shut down, could we not get ADX better? I hate using this term, can we not reform it? Can we not get these dudes a way out of there? Can we not make it so that everyone gets four hours out a day instead of one to start? Imagine me down 20 years. You get one hour out a day, man. I can start crying about it right now for real because you meet these people—Jeff Ford is there. Jeff Ford did security for Martin Luther King in the 60s in Chicago. He’s been in ADX for 20 goddamn years. One hour out a day.
Larry Hoover, no one cares about Larry Hoover. He’s a gangster. He’s a gang member. But he’s been in prison for 50 years. He’s at ADX. He’s 80, and he can barely walk. They keep him in ADX for what? He is 90 min out of the cell a day. These things mean something to me. When you meet an 80-year-old man who’s been in a box for 20 goddamn years and he can’t get out. You don’t get out. You don’t get to decide if you get out. That hurts me as a human. I want other people to feel that hurt, that it doesn’t matter that these aren’t Bill Dunne and David Gilbert and Susan. It doesn’t matter that they’re not the best of us. They’re humans that are being brutalized internally. They’re not getting killed. They’re not getting raped every day. They’re getting raped and killed here, in their hearts and their brains. Because when you live in a box for that long, as I did for five years, your vision of the world does start becoming that box. Take away all the tough guy bullshit, “I can do that standing on my head. Oh, they can’t break me.” They don’t need to break you. They need to just chip away at you. And they will. There’s a reason why I cry every day when someone’s nice to me. I didn’t used to do that. That comes from extreme isolation, that comes from being vulnerable 24/7, having no control of your life.
And I’m just imploring people to please take supermaxes seriously. Don’t treat ADX like it’s filled with the villains that you hear about in the world so they don’t deserve nothing. It’s filled with pieces of shit. I’m not gonna lie about that. There are dirtbags there, but if we allow that to happen to them, we’re allowing it to happen to us. We say it’s okay for it to happen to these scumbags, then we they say that we’re the scumbags, it’s okay for it to happen to us. I can’t tolerate that. I can’t get along with that. I hope that other people hear this and hit me up, hit my support team. Let me know if you care about supermaxes and you want to get in, you want to start talking about it. Because it only takes a couple of discussions, we can get the ball rolling at least. That’s all. Take it seriously, please.
TFSR: I think there’s an interesting trajectory with the supermaxes. The state keeps slightly modifying the ingredient list, but the recipe comes out the same, whether they call it Ad Seg or SHU or communication management unit or supermax or whatever. It’s just a bunch of rebranding for the same dehumanizing pattern of circumstances that doesn’t allow, as you said, these ways of interaction with the world. It breaks the person. But that’s a fucked up spectrum, right? Definitely, it could be a lot worse. Here are some examples of how it’s worse. You’re not getting put in… In some places, I’ve talked to people where they’re in a state system, and they’re old-law prisoners from before the changes in parole systems, and they have to deal with young prisoners who know that they have a set period for doing before they get out. But these people are still relying on the parole system. If they defend themselves in a fight, the younger person who came in with a 10-year sentence for the same crime that they got that they’re serving 25 far, can’t defend themselves. But if they don’t defend themselves, they might still get the charge, or they might get stabbed or whatever, but the other person is going to get out after 10 years, probably. The whole thing is such a magnificent case of fuckery. The idea of isolating out a certain part of the political body that is considered to be infectious. They don’t want political prisoners. They don’t want the jihadi prisoners. They don’t want whatever else to spread their ideology throughout the rest of society and create an ungovernable mass. They break us into little boxes. They fortify the racial divides among prisoners so that we go into cliques or gangs or whatever. They allow certain groups to control parts of the drug trade or part of the other illicit trades.
E: When Daniel McGowan was at the CMU he was there with my friend Tarek, who just got out of ADX, jihadi dude, some of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were there, some of the embassy bombers were there, but also so was the American jihadi, the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. So he was there with him, and so it was filled with an interesting cadre of people back then. Even if you don’t get along, you all know why you’re there. You’re all in prison for standing on your shit. Whereas in a normal prison, you’re there with—I don’t want to diminish prisoners, but you’re there with dirtbags. You’re there with people that will stab you for 25 cents. You’re there with people who will rob their grandma. I don’t want them in prison, but there’s pieces of shit in prison too. They still deserve to get out, but they are pieces of shit. Instead of being with all those dudes you are with like-minded people, and I got told by the jihadis that it started creating like a… “This isn’t that bad of an idea.” Almost like how ISIS got started in an Iraqi prison. It started making then think like, “We can organize here. We can do this.” So they took advantage of it to the point where the Bureau’s started to try and kick them out, to fill it with rats and sovereign citizen people, but the jihadis were like, “We don’t want to leave, we have a good thing going on here.”
TFSR: It obviously puts proof to lie that the purpose of prison is rehabilitation.
E: No, no. If anyone still believes that, they’re a child. If anyone in the world ever hears that prison is about rehabilitating, and you believe it, you’ll believe anything. There’s nothing you won’t believe. If you think this place isn’t built to tear you down and make you feel like the worst person on earth, it is there a fix you… I don’t want to say I want to hit that person, but I want to talk to them. Josh, I feel like I’ve really bulldogged you on this.
J: No, absolutely. Keep talking. You’re doing well. I haven’t done time. All I’ve done is support you while you’ve done it. So it’s your experiences to share.
E: Okay, fair enough. There’s fear about saying certain things because I’m still being helped by people. And I don’t want to hurt anyone in prison. But I also wish that we would give eyes to people who are in worse situations. I don’t want to diminish someone. I started at a low. I started in the softest prison on Earth, where Jared Fogle was. I understand. But I look at someone like Oso Blanco. He has been in nothing but the worst prisons. The worst as far as steel. He had to do to SMU. They just shut down Thompson. He did the SMU three times before it was being watched by the government, before it had eyes on it. Imagine the horrors that someone like Oso Blanco has seen. It’s hard for me to even put in words. For anything you say, it could be the last word you ever say. He’s lived that life for I think 20 years. Josh, you can help me with that. I want people to support all prisoners, yada, yada, yada… But there are people have been in for a long time. They had to have the hardest time you can imagine.
Someone like Joe-Joe, in the state. He is in his 70s, and he’s still having to protect himself, he still lives in that environment. That’s real. He might not ever get out. Also, if Biden doesn’t pardon him, when’s Oso going to get out? I do think that when we talk about supporting our elders, we might not like them. We might not have fun writing them, we might find that some part of their personality is this or that. What they’re going through is so brutal that if we don’t support them, to me, it almost feels like I’m condoning what’s happening to them. I’ve given up on them. There’s nothing I can do. You’ve been in for 30 years. You know what you’re doing. As if the pain stops. I guarantee you Oso is hurting inside. I guarantee it. He’s had to hurt people to survive. Joe-Joe, shit. Shit. In the Pennsylvania state prison system? Come on, man. Even someone like Bill Dunne. He’s been in for 40 years. He’s at a medium, but that medium sucks. Victorville sucks. That’s where bro was at. Jake Conroy. That medium sucks. Bill’s is a 70 or 80-year-old man.
When we think about support, I hope people think about the fact that yes, everyone has it bad. Yes, everyone is removed from their families. Yes, everyone has to deal with state repression and doesn’t get to go home. But someone at that low or camp, they’ve never had to watch someone get murdered. They’ve never had to carry a knife up their ass out to read, they’ve never had to watch cops shoot somebody. There are different levels to prison. I’ve been to all of them, so I feel comfortable saying that. I’ve been to a low, medium, high, and supermax. So I can tell you, the support you need at a high is just different than the support you need at a low. It’s different. I think we need to treat people like when we’re supporting people, support them at their level, support them as what they actually need, as opposed to what we feel might make us feel good. Oso, I might not want to hear about the fact that you took your dog on a walk. Take the time to get to know someone like that and figure out how can I literally help them. Josh created a book with him. This dude won’t stop making books or art projects.
J: Those are greeting cards.
E: Greeting cards? So Oso from the inside, in the midst of this—I can’t describe to you how bad the USP system is in America. I literally can’t, I can’t put it into words. Oso has been there for almost my entire life. He’s still trying to help people. That’s how he expresses his love of life, by helping people. And someone like Josh or Bursts or whoever can tangibly put him into the world. I hope that people will support our… Oso’s an elder. All these people are elders. Bill Dunne’s an elder, Joe-Joe’s an elder, Kojo at Coleman is an elder. Let’s figure out what they actually want. Let’s take the time to get to know them. What do they actually want or need? How can I literally help you? As opposed to here’s a picture of a tree. Maybe they want the picture of the tree. But maybe they’re not Rebecca Rubin. Maybe they don’t care about those birds. Maybe they care about something else.
TFSR: I was gonna say that at least when we do our letter writing, if someone hasn’t written to a prisoner, but their birthday’s coming up, oftentimes we’ll suggest, “If you don’t know what to talk about, just start a conversation.” If you don’t know how to start a conversation with a stranger, maybe don’t go 0 to 60 because you don’t know what this person wants to talk about, but just give them some information to let them know you, and meet them at the human place and not at the political superhero place or whatever. I mean, is it annoying to get a letter out of the blue from someone?
E: I will be real here. I hate letter-writing letters. I’ve talked to Josh about this before. Because I always felt an obligation to respond. If I get 15 letters in a pack, and every one of them is “Hi, my name is so and so I’ve never written you before. Do you like bugs? Do you like turtles? I like this.” It feels good, but now I feel like I have an obligation. Now I have to spend $20 to write each of you back. I’m not going to hear back from you. Because usually a letter-writing night, Bursts—I don’t know if this is your experience. You can tell me—oftentimes, I’ve never met a long-lasting friend that wrote me from a letter-writing night. Not one. Someone will write back two or three times. Jay wrote me from some letter-writing night, and that built our relationship. That was amazing. But usually, those are people with big hearts who care. That’s sweet, but I did end up sending back just one letter to the entire group, like “Thank you, if you want us to still be friends, please, write back on your own.” Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But it’s never bad to write a letter. It’s never not appreciated, I guarantee that. What I meant was if we’re trying to build relationships, we then have to get beyond that. Because we cannot become friends if the basis of our relationship is that it’s cold outside. That’s a good starting point. But if I write you back about my life, it has to start from something tangible and real for me.
When people did that—the first time Josh wrote me he was talking about political prisoners. He was talking about the IRA. And he’s talked about Daniel and Certain Days. It gave me something to talk about. Now we can connect on this level. Let me clarify, every time you’ve ever sent a letter to a prisoner, it’s been appreciated. I’ve never gotten a letter where I was like, “Fuck you, who cares?” Never happened. But I also know that I can tell by almost the first letter, whether or not this person actually wants to write. I can tell whether you’re writing me, or whether you’re writing to political prisoner Eric King. There’s a very big difference. Sometimes you have to work to get from one to the other. But if you’re writing me as an object, I already know you’re not gonna write me back. I already know that we’re not going to be talking for 5-6-7 years. The day I got out of prison, I was still writing people who started writing me at CCA nine years ago, because they took the time to say, “What are you about? Who are you? What are you passionate about? What do you care about?” Or “I saw this interesting story. What’s your opinion? Do you want to write something? Do you want to make a zine? Do you want to do this?” There’s a big difference. Every letter is appreciated. Every letter feels good, especially when a mail call comes around, and you’re the one that gets a stack—that ego’s real. It’s real, bro. But also, sometimes, if you want to do something, if you want to really connect with a human, connect with them. Don’t connect with them as this object of defiance and rebellion. Connect with them as a person. That all went full circle.
TFSR: That makes sense. That’s a good clarification. It’s good to hear your perspectives on it for sure.
E: Bursts, when you sent me the zine packets at ADX, people loved those. You never sent me mine, you jerk. I was next to some dudes that have been in there for 15 years. They just love hearing what they consider real news or real history. They hated censored history or bullshit history. I would shoot them your packets.
TFSR: That’s awesome.
E: And they loved it. That gave me the ability to connect with those people on a deeper level. Other people, when writing prisoners, could print out things, and send them to them and say, “What do you feel about this? Have you ever done something like this? Do you want to do something like this?” Connect with them as a person and really try to build that bond.
TFSR: I know the Books to Prisoners project around here has done a few reading groups where they go ahead and reach out to the people on their mailing list, say who wants to be a part of this, we’ll send you a book, fundraise for the book, send it out to everyone and then do an outside discussion group, have people write down the notes, solicit responses from people on the inside, put that into a zine, and then send that back to each of the people who participated. It’s a weird long dialectical back-and-forth. But at the end of it, you’ve got this conversation that maybe the bars and the comms wouldn’t let you actually participate in.
E: People in prison are willing to put in that long dialectical time. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a group called Free Minds out of DC. I recommend looking them up. They run a zine, but it’s a little magazine, and it’s entirely by prisoners. It is the best I’ve ever seen. There’s a disproportionate amount of DC dudes at ADX. Every one of them had a subscription to Free Minds, and every one of them participated because they felt like they were being heard. They weren’t censored. They weren’t cut off. It’s very similar to what you just described, where it’s like a magazine but it’s a magazine with our thoughts. Very similar to Fire Ant—shoutout to Fire Ant—that tries to do that as well. People don’t take advantage of Fire Ant like they should. Robin, Nadja, and everyone involved in Fire Ant, they do what you just described, but for anarchist prisoners, and I love it. I think Fire Ant is just like what you described, that epitome of let’s connect together, let us connect together as people. I’m not going to censor you. I’m not going to be your parent. I just want to know what your thoughts are and what you feel about this or that. Shout out to Fire Ant and Big Rob out of Maine. Rob’s a great guy.
TFSR: Absolutely. And the Bayview is another example of a project.
E: I don’t know about Bayview. I remember they sent me one article once. Is that a very similar project?
TFSR: It’s a longer-standing, the project is probably got to be 40 or 50 years old at this point. Its focus is being the biggest national Black newspaper, and they feature articles and editorials by incarcerated activists all the time. It’s super worth checking out.
J: Yeah, check it out, Eric. It’s a good one.
E: That would be the exact example of what I’m talking about. Connecting with people, man. If you’re gonna do a letter-writing night, cool, but connect. You do a lot of that, Bursts. I don’t know everything you do. But I know you do your best to bring voices out.
TFSR: Nobody knows what I do.
E: I call that inside-out. Inside-out support is the best. When someone on the outside and you work on a project together on the outside or inside. That is the best feeling on Earth. That’s what our book was. That’s what his project with Oso is. That’s what basically a lot of your radio show is. That makes us feel so alive. When Bill Dunne was putting out the Marionette from Marion, and his supporters made copies and sent that out, he got to be free. That’s a freedom. It just takes effort. It just takes real-world effort. Because we can’t do it. We can do some, but we just need people who care enough to do it. Thankfully, I’ve been surrounded by those people. Not everyone is, so when all these people from Atlanta start coming in—and they will—I hope people don’t just treat them as forest fighters. I hope they treat them as individual people. If there’s 50 of them, 50 individual people who all cared, who all sacrificed their lives, who all put their futures on hold, not one selective group of the Cop City protesters. No, they are people, they’re individual people who care. Let’s find a way to galvanize support and support every single one of them.
TFSR: I guess maybe closing up the conversation now. Going back to your connection with Josh and those initial communications that got y’all going and the inspiration for the book in part was about the prisoners in Ireland from the Republican movement resisting colonization, resisting the RUC, resisting the British Army, all that crap, the loyalists. One of the inspirations that I’ve taken out of that struggle is in my approach towards prisoner support is that prisons are there to break down the connection between our communities of people who are inside and the people who are on the outside. This is not new info, but I wonder if both of you could talk a little bit about the importance of prisoner support as it lies within the movements that were involved in and continue that movement. It’s not just about the prisoners as prisoners, but it’s about them as comrades and collaborators with us to change the world.
E: Josh, do you want to start or do you want me to rant for 30 goddamn minutes?
J: I’ll just say that not only does the Irish, the struggle for freedom there, but also in Palestine, they serve as shining examples of what we could have here in the US and in North America if more people were involved and if more people were aware of political prisoners. And as you said, these are systems that are meant to destroy people and to basically commit legal genocide whenever possible, whether it’s Black people in the US or Palestinians in the Middle East or the Catholics and the Irish in Northern Ireland.
E: Well said, it really seems like in America, the government has done a really great job of making sure that the general public views prisoners as scumbags, as people not deserving love. We’ve had this beaten into us that if you’re in prison, you’re bad. You’re out of prison, you’re good. If you don’t want to go to prison, be good. People have really internalized that. Even other prisoners feel that way about themselves sometimes, like “I deserve to be here I’m trash. I did bad.” I’ve been to Ireland eight times, and I’ve been really blessed that I’ve been able to do that. But what you see in places like Ireland or Palestine my bro mentioned, is that the public doesn’t always view it that way. They definitely don’t view it that way when it comes to resistors. They do have a separate thing between social criminals and political prisoners, but they take their political prisoners god damn seriously. There’s no like “Oh, you did this but what you did was lame or stupid or wrong.” They don’t do that. When it comes down to we’re being oppressed, we’re going to resist this, and we’re going to support these people who do that.
Let’s take it back to the hunger strike, they weren’t marching down the streets always saying, “Free the hunger strikers.” It was “Save Bobby, save Kevin, save Brian.” They were people. When we see the Irish struggle, they’re respected as people. They were respected as fighters. They are supported as much as they can. That support is on the outside often. You see the rallies, you see marches, you see taggings, you see the banner drops, you see resistance, you see people shutting down the prison, you see people boycotting the industries that support the prison, which is something that in America we need. We will never break down the prison system in America without hitting the money. But the Irish were all that, and I imagine the Palestinians were too. But because they view resistance differently. They view support for resistance differently.
In America, I sometimes feel like the general public thinks like, “We have it good. We’re a free country. So if you’re in prison, you weren’t a freedom fighter. You were a bomber. You were a shooter, a robber.” That just diminishes the underlying reason and causes of why all this happens. It doesn’t open for discussion. It doesn’t teach anything. I don’t know how to change the American public’s view of prisoners. Honestly, it seems like the January 6th people got more support than anyone. It seems like the public really turned on them because the politicians told them to. I’m not expecting Cory Bush to come out and say “Free Kojo.” But there’s a complete discord between the people fighting, why they’re fighting, and the general public. My mom does not know a single political prisoner. She knows me. But I don’t know if we’re doing enough to educate the public. I don’t know if we’re doing enough to rally support outside of our bubble. I feel as though sometimes we isolate ourselves. I know for a fact the Irish do not do that. We cannot make our message broader if we don’t make our arms wider. If we don’t welcome more people in, we cannot expect more support. It reminds me of that quote, “When you have more people, you don’t build a wall, you build a bigger table.” Soon we’re gonna have a lot of people in prison. If the Cop City shit goes poorly, if these other movements go poorly, if the Palestinian protests go poorly, if fascists get into the White House and start making different laws, and so we have women and more trans people in prison, more activists in prison. If we want to be ready for that, we have to have broader arms and a broader voice to reach out to people and say, “This is what we’re about. This is why we’re about. We’re human. Please come in here. Please see what we’re doing and help us, join us.” It almost sounds like evangelizing. But the Irish are able to do it. They can galvanize support because people understand why it’s happening. That’s what we need to do. We need to let people know why this is happening. If we don’t, then it’s just gonna be us trying to pat ourselves on the back and trying to help each other, and we only have so many resources. As we said, there’s only so many Bursts and so many Joshes. We need 1000 Joshes and 1000 Bursts. And they’re out there somewhere if we’re able to get to them. I feel like that’s important. I feel like that’s what the Irish have succeeded in, the Palestinians have succeeded, by saying “Our struggle is your struggle. What I’m doing is because I am under the same circumstances that you are under. Help me.” And they do.
Pedantic? Annoying?
TFSR: Josh?
J: No, well said.
E: Josh. I’m flattered, but this what I just talked about. We need to be honest with prisoners.
J: No, I agree with you. [laughs]
E: Okay. Did I ever show you guys my tattoo? Do you remember when that sniper was killing the cops in Dallas? Well, I remember it was July 7, 2016. That is tattooed on my hand with a little heart. So stupid. [laughs]
J: Nice. I do you remember that. I’ve heard stories about your Ted tattoo.
E: Oh yeah. Do you wanna see it, Bursts? It’s on my thigh.
TFSR: If you are gonna strip for me, then yes!
E: I didn’t get that tattoo of mass love and support for Ted. It’s not like I think about him like, “Oh, man, I hope Ted’s in heaven doing great.” It’s because what Ted represents to me is that even if someone is gross, or even if someone’s problematic, they don’t deserve to have this suffering. That’s importance to me. Ted had a lot of gross theories, and even though some of the stuff I do agree with—he wasn’t wrong about technology. But even if I hate what Ted felt about people or society, he doesn’t deserve to be in ADX for 20 years. He doesn’t deserve to have the state destroy him. That’s what’s important to me. So I when I got this tattoo it’s to remember that, one, action is important. Even if you have to do it yourself. Put in the work. Ted did it all by himself from a goddamn cabin in Montana. So put in the work. But also don’t abandon people because the state deserves to oppress them. Don’t give the state a free pass to crush people. That’s how I feel about the jihadis. That’s how I feel about the scumbag gang leaders. These dudes might be pieces of shit. But that doesn’t give the government free rein to just crush them. That’s what’s important to me. It doesn’t matter if we like each other. It matters if we hate them.
TFSR: Like you said, if they have the ability to do that to them, they’re gonna do it to us.
E: We’re the next step. People need to understand that. I threw a goddamn bottle at a wall in Kansas City, Bursts. It didn’t even burn that goddamn building down. And I just got to ADX. Imagine what can happen to these Cop City people if we’re not on our toes. Imagine what can happen to someone if we take our eyes off of them and give the state free rein. They will crush us, literally.
TFSR: It’s been a pleasure talking to both of you. Where can people can people still find your writing, on your support blog and your social media? Do you want to name those?
E: I’m not on social media myself, but I’ve been really enjoying posting little video clips and little pictures. That’s on supportericking.org. But also @supportericking I guess is the Instagram. The more eyes, the better. If I’m being annoying, tell me. If you see my shirt sucks, let me know. That’s how I grow. People really called me out for wearing the Kansas City Chiefs hat. So I don’t have it on today. This is how we grow. But also please support people fighting for trans people. Please support people fighting for the Palestinian people. Please support people fighting for prisoners. Support Bread and Roses, support the Rosenberg Fund, support your local ABC, do your goddamn Running Down the Walls, and raise money because war chest is not a game. That war chest helps people. That is inside-outside activism. Please buy Rattling the Cages, I want to make this sequel, and we need to make sure we have good sales. We need to push this. [laughs] If you are from Northwestern University Publishing, let me know, call me.
J: Buy the 2024 Certain Days Calendar, which has an article about the book. And also just the fact that the book has a fundraiser. Half the proceeds go to the ABC war chest which provides monthly stipends to people in prison, and the other half goes to Eric, and I’m sure he will do amazing things with it.
E: Yeah, I’m not just keeping the fund. It’s put back in the community. It’s not for me to buy a new shirt. This one’s 20-years-old.
TFSR: I saw the video of you driving down the road with a Benz. So that wasn’t your bend from benefit money from the Rattling the Cages?
E: [laughs] That was siphoned off pre-release money. I am manipulating guilted people.
TFSR: All that big AK Press money. Yeah. [all laugh] It was good enough to actually meet you.
E: Yeah, for real, you are great. Very nice.
TFSR: I like the tats.
J: It’s good.