That’s Not Gangster, That’s Love
Eddie Conway and Jose Saldaña talk about the urgent need for criminal justice reform
BY SUSIE DAY
Why do prison abolitionists
argue that
people who spend
years behind bars
are exactly the ones we need out in
the world to help mend our broken
communities?
The answer starts to emerge
when you listen to Eddie Conway
and Jose Saldaña. Eddie was lieutenant
of security for Baltimore’s
Black Panther Party when he was
sentenced to life plus 30 years. He
spent 44 years in Maryland prisons,
was released in 2014, and
now reports for The Real News
Network.
Jose was in the New York City
Young Lords Party when he was
sentenced to 25 years to life. He was
paroled after 38 years in New York
prisons, and now leads Release Aging
People in Prison/ RAPP, which
works to change state policies that
incarcerate thousands of people
— mostly Black and Brown — for
decades.
Jose and Edie spent most of
their lives locked up, and survived
largely by mentoring men inside,
based on what they’d learned in
the Panthers and Young Lords.
What follows is a virtual haiku of
their 90-minute online conversation
that I moderated. I began by
asking them what it was like to
face a life sentence as a politically
aware person.
JOSE SALDAÑA:I was a streetcorner
drug dealer. That was my
identity and my future. That corner
was the only way out of conditions
I inherited at birth. As a
fi rst-generation Puerto Rican, I’m
in New York, a high school dropout,
experiencing all kinds of discrimination.
When the Young Lords came on
the scene, they changed my life,
totally. They gave me an identity
of who I was that connected to a
history of resistance to colonial
oppression. Before that my heroes
was big-time drug dealers. Now my
heroes became people like Doña
Lolita Lebron who were willing to
Jose Saldaña and Eddie Conway.
sacrifi ce their lives for the Puerto
Rican people. This is what I entered
prison with.
I had a life sentence; I knew I
may never get out, so I continued
to educate myself. Even if I didn’t
get out, I was going to make a contribution
to this movement from
inside prison.
EDDIE CONWAY:My story is
similar. I was in the army. Matter
of fact, I was on my way to Vietnam
when the light came on and
I realized that there was tanks in
Newark, New Jersey, on the street,
pointing 50-caliber machine guns
at Black women. So I came back
to America and it became clear
that the Black Panther Party was
the organization we needed to get
changes.
When I entered prison I was
convinced I would survive and
come back out — and that I would
survive this ordeal out in America,
too. What fortifi ed me was the righteousness
of the struggle to change
things. So from day one, I went in
fi ghting. Forty-three years and 11
months later, when I stepped out, I
was still fi ghting.
SALDAÑA:We all wore green in
New York prison, all subjected to
the same degrading disregard for
our humanity. We were insulted
in just about every way possible,
24-7. Even our families were subjected
to some of this. Everybody
understood that racism dominated
this system but most of us couldn’t
articulate it to the point where we
COURTESY OF RAPP
could have full, head-on discussions.
So dealing with conditions
gave me an in, trying to empower
and help each other. And we had
help — one of the movements that
evolved from New York prisons was
the Resurrection Study Group. It
was founded by incarcerated men,
including former Panther Eddie
Ellis, and was like what the Young
Lords and the Panthers were in the
streets.
SUSIE DAY:What did you
study?
SALDAÑA:The history of resistance,
for one. But resistance didn’t
stop at learning who our enemy is.
It also encouraged a moral commitment
to return to our communities
and repair the harm we’d done
there. This was so important. You
cannot be a leader if you haven’t
acknowledged that you’ve harmed
someone. And people started to realize
that this was a part of their
development.
CONWAY:That’s absolutely true.
We were about changing the harm
that most people had engaged in.
We recognized the history of oppression
and tried to change that.
It’s almost the same experience
you had, Jose. I just came to it in a
different direction.
When I stepped into the prison
system, I was determined notto
work with prisoners — I was gonna
spend my time freeing myself. But
the fi rst day I got there, I realized
everybody was treated like animals.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
I wasn’t going for that. So we
started political education classes
and organizing. We had a group —
about 100 of us in the beginning
— that ended up becoming the
Maryland Penitentiary Intercommunal
Survival Committee. The
Black Panther Party was closed
for memberships at the time, so
we had to name it something else.
And that spread to other prisons in
the state.
DAY: What books did you read?
SALDAÑA:I did so much reading.
“Das Kapital,” Chairman Mao,
“Wretched of the Earth,” Kahlil Gibran,
Kwame Nkrumah. But the
book I used more than anything
was the prison letters of George
Jackson “Soledad Brother”. Because
I understood that the people
I was trying to empower had a
certain way of thinking that the
Young Lords rescued me from: being
a person who will resort to violence
against my own. That’s how
most of my peers survived. So we
addressed that survival mechanism
by redefi ning concepts like
loyalty, courage.
I told them this story. I had a
co-defendant. He was more than a
brother to me; he was my number
onebrother. He was arrested before
I was, when I was in hiding. And
the police, they hung him from a
roof by his ankles. His wife was
there, she told me about it weeks
later. They hung him from the roof,
saying, “Tell us where Jose is!” He
says, “You want to know? Okay, I’ll
tell you.”
They bring him up a little so they
could hear him say where I’m hiding
— because he did know. But he
yelled at the top of his lungs, “F-U,
pigs! Drop me.”
All these guys look around. They
say, “That’s gangster.” I say, “No,
that’s not gangster. That’s love,
man.”
That’s love and loyalty. Not just
to each other, but to a principle
greater than all of us in this room.
This is how I would try to educate
them, bringing them into a move-
➤ NOT GANGSTER, LOVE, continued on p.23
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