Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

If we ecologically-minded antiauthoritarians ever do manage to start putting the brakes on our civilization's death march, then we will see large numbers of us imprisoned. Every revolutionary movement anywhere ever has had to deal with this. It is outside the realm of my experience, but we will have to find ways to continue the struggle from inside the penal system, so that incarceration is not the end of the road politically for an individual, but is simply one undesirable, but acceptable, stage of development. There are all sorts of precedents for this historically and globally from Long Kesh to Kurdistan, Attica, Colombia, and Seatde. Even the gangs are somewhat instructive in this regard, since they have enough power in many prisons to ensure that their members are treated relatively well. This sort of welcoming committee on the inside would take a lot of the terror out of imprisonment, and those of us on the outside would have much less reason to hold back. Do what you can toward this end, but make no mistake, we are a very long way from being there now. Surviving a Felony Trial Someone who has spent more time locked up than I have could write far better than I

538 about the minutiae of surviving it, but suffice it to say that, yes, prison is a terrible place.

especially when nobody knows you and nobody has your back. People do get beaten and stabbed and raped and killed. I know a little bit about that, as well. I dealt with it by convincing myself that if it came down to the comedown a motherfucker was going to have to literally kill me before I was going to get raped. I felt that I could accept death, and because of this I could avert the one thing that I could not accept. I can't really say though, because I never had to prove it to myself.

So it won't hurt you to be as physically imposing as possible, or to know how to fight, but don't get it twisted: what is going to help you survive the most will not be your body but your mouth and your mind. By this I certainly do not mean strutting around talking shit and trying to prove that you are hard. I mean that you will have to earn some respect by carrying yourself honorably, by embodying the struggle for the people and the land like the humble and courageous warrior that you are.

Once you have spent a little bit of time behind bars you will come to a number of pretty visceral realizations. First, that holding a wdld animal in captivity is an abominable violation of the spirit of both the captor and the captive, a deadly sin if the term has any meaning at all. You will have time to reflect on how utterly cynical the system that you are trapped in is, how it nurtures all that is most virulent and violent in a person?^how it creates, destroys, produces, consumes, and unleashes the monsters that give it everlasting life. Prison makes killers, and killers make prisons, and the rich bastards that are making a killing from the whole sick farce are laughing all the way to the bank.

If you are a man, and if you are wise, you wiU think about how it feels to be in imminent danger of sexual violence every minute of every day, and about how it must feel to the women who have to deal with that aU the time. If you are white, you wiH be given a glimpse of what it is to be a member of a disempowered and endangered racial minority, and of what it must be like for the people of color who have to cope with that predica- surviving q Felony Trial ment all the time. 539

You will notice that in some respects the whole situation is a lot more honest with the veneer of consent stripped away. It's all about unadulterated force, and nobody pretends that it is not. You do what you are told, whether you like it or not, or else you get hurt.

It wiU occur to you that there is so much that one can do with a day, an hour, a minute, a week, a month, a year, a life. You will be in awe of how amazingly awesome it would be to walk around your shitty town, hang out with your friends, talk to your mom, play guitar, sleep in someone's arms, masturbate, have sex, cry, pet your cat, cook, hike, drive, sleep in; see the sun, moon, stars, sky, trees, birds, and squirrels; or feel fire, rain, and wind. You will not be able to understand how you could have ever taken any of this for granted. On some level that you will not be very comfortable with or proud of, you will feel like a fool for gambling with your freedom: no matter how urgent, vital, courageous, and noble whatever you did was, it will seem trifling in comparison to all that you have lost. You will swear that if you ever do get out, you will never again let a day pass without squeezing every last drop from it, without being thankful at what a blessing it is to be able to live it?^that you will never again lose sight of this heartbreaking vidsh that you now have to live.