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Introduction
On 12 July 1969, Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party (BPP), wrote “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?,” a socialist critique of America’s penal system that focused on its inability to rehabilitate prisoners.1 According to Newton, the American prison population consists of two types of prisoners. The vast majority he calls illegitimate capitalist prisoners, who view prison through the lens of the capitalist game.2 As such, incarceration for the illegitimate capitalist prisoner is to be navigated with an eye toward one’s release and return to financial enterprise. Numerically smaller is the group Newton refers to as political prisoners, who consider the entire capitalist system, including its prisons, entirely illegitimate.3 For that reason, these political prisoners condemn their incarceration as oppressive and unjust and refuse to participate in any part of it. In different yet interrelated ways, Newton argues, the illegitimate capitalist prisoner and the political prisoner are unable to be reformed: the one already tacitly accepts American values, while the other categorically rejects them. Throughout his essay, however, Newton subtly aligns his political and economic ideology with that of his “political prisoners,” a rhetorical move that provides a wider critique of American society through an evaluation of its penal system—hence, the gesture to “mass incarceration” in this article’s title.
Beyond his rejection of American capitalism by way of its counterproductive penal system, by entitling his essay “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?” (hereafter “Prison”), Newton subtly invokes two passages from the Bible: Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:55) and the book of the prophet Hosea (Hos 13:14), which Paul is using as a proof text. Admittedly, Newton never elaborates on the allusive force of his title, not in the essay itself nor in any subsequent essay or interview. Considering how critical he was of organized religion more generally, any specific interaction with biblical imagery is striking and warrants some scrutiny. To date, however, the interpretive implications that emerge by reading Newton’s essay against his biblical intertexts remain unexamined. In fact, apart from the occasional comment in historically oriented introductions about the BPP or Huey Newton, “Prison” has not received any serious academic attention whatsoever.
This essay serves as a corrective to both of these academic absences. What...