"Very few men imprisoned for economic crimes or even crimes of passion against the oppressor feel that they are really guilty"
About this Quote
Guilt, in George Jackson's framing, isn't a private moral reckoning; it's a political technology. When he says "very few men imprisoned for economic crimes or even crimes of passion against the oppressor" feel truly guilty, he's severing the state's legal language from its ethical claim. The line refuses the courtroom premise that the prisoner is the primary wrongdoer. Instead, Jackson suggests many "crimes" are better understood as distorted responses to a rigged economy and an enforced social order.
The phrasing is doing quiet work. "Economic crimes" compresses everything from theft to fraud into a single category of survival and scarcity, implying that the real crime is deprivation itself. "Crimes of passion" typically conjures domestic melodrama, but Jackson repurposes it: passion becomes insurgent feeling directed upward, "against the oppressor". That twist turns the prisoner from deviant to antagonist in an unequal contest, someone who sees the system's violence and answers back, however messily.
The subtext is a challenge to the legitimacy of prisons as neutral institutions. If guilt doesn't attach, punishment reads less like justice and more like management: controlling surplus bodies, disciplining the poor, protecting property, defending hierarchy. Jackson is also signaling the emergence of prison political consciousness: the incarcerated person not as a failed citizen seeking redemption, but as a subject who names structures and refuses shame.
Context matters: Jackson wrote as a Black radical formed inside California's carceral state, amid the late-1960s/early-1970s explosion of prison organizing and repression. His point isn't that harm never happens; it's that the state wants guilt because guilt makes obedience feel like choice.
The phrasing is doing quiet work. "Economic crimes" compresses everything from theft to fraud into a single category of survival and scarcity, implying that the real crime is deprivation itself. "Crimes of passion" typically conjures domestic melodrama, but Jackson repurposes it: passion becomes insurgent feeling directed upward, "against the oppressor". That twist turns the prisoner from deviant to antagonist in an unequal contest, someone who sees the system's violence and answers back, however messily.
The subtext is a challenge to the legitimacy of prisons as neutral institutions. If guilt doesn't attach, punishment reads less like justice and more like management: controlling surplus bodies, disciplining the poor, protecting property, defending hierarchy. Jackson is also signaling the emergence of prison political consciousness: the incarcerated person not as a failed citizen seeking redemption, but as a subject who names structures and refuses shame.
Context matters: Jackson wrote as a Black radical formed inside California's carceral state, amid the late-1960s/early-1970s explosion of prison organizing and repression. His point isn't that harm never happens; it's that the state wants guilt because guilt makes obedience feel like choice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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