Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jackson

Jackson’s line is built like a jailbreak tool: short, sharpened, and designed to turn a prison “problem” into a political diagnosis. He isn’t asking for pity; he’s naming a consciousness shift. “Have come to understand” matters as much as “abused victims.” The point isn’t that Black convicts are suffering (everyone can see that), but that they’ve learned to read their suffering as structured, not accidental - the product of an “order” that calls itself lawful while functioning like a caste system.

The phrase “unrighteous order” is a deliberate insult to the state’s moral self-image. Jackson’s rhetoric forces a collision between legality and legitimacy: a society can be legal and still be criminal in its effects. “Most” is equally strategic. He’s generalizing on purpose, imagining a collective subject where the system prefers isolated individuals and “bad choices.” It’s an organizing sentence: prison becomes not a dead end but a classroom for political clarity.

The context is crucial. Writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s - a moment of Black Power, urban uprisings, COINTELPRO repression, and exploding prison populations - Jackson is speaking from inside the carceral state as it hardens into a modern apparatus. His own life (and death in custody) adds urgency: this is theory written under surveillance, where language doubles as survival and recruitment. The subtext is stark: if the order is unrighteous, then obedience isn’t virtue, and resistance starts to look like self-defense.