George Jackson was a revolutionary writer, theorist, and leader of the prison movement whose life exposed the carceral state as a central pillar of racial capitalism and imperial control. Born in Chicago in 1941 and raised in Los Angeles, he was convicted at eighteen of taking part in a seventy-dollar gas station robbery. Under California's indeterminate sentencing he was given one year to life, and he spent the rest of his life behind bars, much of it in solitary confinement. There he transformed prison into a site of political awakening and study, reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Fanon. In 1966, with W.L. Nolen, he co-founded the Black Guerrilla Family, a Marxist-Leninist organization of prisoners that linked the struggles of incarcerated people to the fight against capitalism, white supremacy, and US empire. He later became a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party.

In 1970 Jackson and two other Black prisoners, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, were charged with killing a guard at Soledad prison. The killing came days after another guard shot three Black prisoners dead in a prison yard, Nolen among them. The "Soledad Brothers" became a cause that drew in Angela Davis and a broad movement of supporters. That year Jackson's prison letters were published as Soledad Brother, and the book became an international classic of the Black radical tradition. In it he argued that prisons were not broken institutions but functioning tools of state repression aimed above all at Black radicalism. In August 1970 his seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan was killed during an armed attempt to free political prisoners at the Marin County courthouse.

On August 21, 1971, George Jackson was shot dead by guards at San Quentin, a killing widely regarded as an assassination and one the state's account has never convincingly explained. Weeks later, prisoners at Attica rose up, in part to honor his memory. His second book, Blood in My Eye, was published after his death, and imprisoned comrades founded Black August to commemorate his life. His legacy endures in the movement to abolish prisons and in his conviction that even in the belly of the beast, it is possible to fight and to lead.

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