Dan Berger's The Struggle Within on Truthout
"In order to build a liberated future, we've got to remember what people have been incarcerated for historically - and why...
Through recounting the incarceration of activists fighting for black liberation, Native American sovereignty, Puerto Rican independence, economic justice, the abolition of nuclear weapons and more, author Dan Berger illustrates how imprisonment serves as a political tool deployed by the state to maintain the status quo.
Defining "political prisoner" is a risky endeavor, historian Dan Berger notes in the introduction to his recently released book on the topic, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States. Too often, it's assumed that political prisoners are people who "haven't done anything" - who are imprisoned simply because of their beliefs. However, as Berger articulates throughout this engrossing, fact-packed primer, most political prisoners did do something: They participated actively in movements to resist state power, often acting outside the bounds of the law. And so, rather than limiting conversations about political prisoners to determinations of "innocence" and "guilt," it's much more useful to discuss how and why the state attempted to suppress those movements."—Maya Schenwar, Truthout
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