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Part I: Resistance and Culture

The adverse decision of the Board of Pardons terminates all hope of release by legal means.… The authorities are determined that I should remain in the prison, confident that it will prove my tomb. Realizing this fires my defiance, and all the stubborn resistance of my being. There is no hope of surviving my term. At best, even with the full benefit of the commutation time—which will hardly be granted me, in view of the attitude of the prison management—I still have over nine years to serve. But existence is becoming increasingly more unbearable; long confinement and the solitary have drained my vitality. To endure the nine years is almost a physical impossibility. I must therefore concentrate all my energy and efforts upon escape.

—Alexander Berkman, “Chapter XXXIII: The Tunnel,” Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.

What strikes me …. is how after ten years in a maximum-security prison, as soon as there was a tiny possibility of escape, the spirit and prose style of Alexander Berkman sprang alive as if he had not been dehumanized at all.

—Paul Goodman, New Reformation.