The coming revolt of the guards. Coming Revolt of the Guards 2022-10-28
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The coming revolt of the guards refers to the idea that prison guards, also known as corrections officers, will soon engage in a rebellion or uprising against the prison system or their employers. This concept has gained attention in recent years due to high levels of corruption, abuse, and mistreatment within the prison system, as well as the increasing demands and challenges faced by prison guards.
One of the main reasons for the potential revolt of the guards is the working conditions they face on a daily basis. Prisons are often overcrowded, underfunded, and understaffed, leading to a high level of stress and danger for the guards who work there. In addition, the guards are often confronted with violent and volatile situations, as well as exposure to trauma and physical harm. These conditions can lead to high rates of burnout, mental health issues, and physical injuries among the guards.
Another factor contributing to the potential revolt of the guards is the lack of support and resources provided to them by the prison system and their employers. Many guards report feeling undervalued and unsupported, with limited opportunities for advancement or professional development. They may also face discrimination and mistreatment from their superiors or colleagues.
In addition, the guards are often caught in the middle of conflicts between prisoners, prison staff, and outside organizations such as advocacy groups or government agencies. These conflicting interests can create a tense and hostile work environment, further adding to the stress and dissatisfaction of the guards.
Given these challenges, it is not surprising that the guards may consider a revolt as a way to bring attention to their concerns and demands. However, it is important to recognize that a revolt is not a solution to the problems faced by the prison system. Instead, addressing the root causes of these issues, such as overcrowding, underfunding, and lack of support, is necessary to create a safer and more just prison system for all involved.
In conclusion, the coming revolt of the guards highlights the pressing need for reform within the prison system. It is important to address the challenges faced by the guards and other prison staff, as well as the prisoners, in order to create a more humane and effective system of justice.
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All this takes us far from American history, into the realm of imagination. Blacks, cajoled by Supreme Court decisions and congressional statutes, rebelled. We would need-by a coordinated effort of local groups all over the country-to reconstruct the economy for both efficiency and justice, producing in a cooperative way what people need most. To emphasize the commonality of the 99 percent, to declare deep enmity of interest with the 1 percent, is to do exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them-from the Founding Fathers to now-have tried their best to prevent. The election of Clinton in 1992, carrying with it a vague promise of change, did not fulfill the expectations of the hopeful. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. Most crimes by far involved theft.
At the turn of the century, the violent pacification of blacks and Indians and the use of elections and war to absorb and divert white rebels were not enough, in the conditions of modern industry, to prevent the great upsurge of socialism, the massive labor struggles, before the First World War. They might then conclude that physical security for a working person in the city can come only when everyone in the city is working. And that between occasional crises everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. It began to be evident that more and more of these deaths were coming from an environment poisoned by military experimentation and industrial greed. Men and women, black and white, old and young, could then cherish their differences as positive attributes, not as reasons for domination.
Accelerating “The Coming Revolt of the Guards” —and Increasing the Thousands on the Streets to Millions
Everyone could share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. The Revolution and the Constitution, trying to bring stability by containing the class angers of the colonial period—while enslaving blacks, annihilating or displacing Indians—did not quite succeed, judging by the tenant uprisings, the slave revolts, the abolitionist agitation, the feminist upsurge, the Indian guerrilla warfare of the pre—Civil War years. I do have people I admire for aspects of their lives, but not heroes. There was a flood of cultural changes such as the country had never seen-in sex, family, personal relations-exactly those situations most difficult to control from the ordinary centers of power. The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also inspiration. But with all the controls of power and punishment, enticements and concessions, diversions and decoys, operating throughout the history of the country, the Establishment has been unable to keep itself secure from revolt. The water people drank, the air they breathed, the particles of dust from the buildings in which they worked, had been quietly contaminated over the years by a system so frantic for growth and profit that the safety and health of human beings had been ignored.
New values of cooperation and freedom might then show up in the relations of people, the upbringing of children. Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge so clearly as to lead to general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. Crime was out of control, cancer and AIDS were out of control. The society's levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state-the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. Young people, despite lures of career and comfort, defected.
A People’s History of the United States Chapter 23: The Coming Revolt of the Guards Summary & Analysis
True, to overestimate class consciousness, to exaggerate rebellion and its successes, would be misleading. The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. . Every time it looked as if it had succeeded, the very people it thought seduced or subdued, stirred and rose. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. But when such a movement took hold in hundreds of thousands of places all over the country it would be impossible to suppress, because the very guards the system depends on to crush such a movement would be among the rebels. The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history.
The Guards give just enough to keep believing in their own generosity, but not enough to lift the Prisoners up to where the Guards are. They might then conclude that physical security for a working person in the city can come only when everyone in the city is working. Cameras and other surveillance technology are becoming increasingly inexpensive, and law enforcement labor costs will increasingly be replaced by inexpensive Orwellian surveillance. Women, wooed and ignored, romanticized and mistreated, rebelled. Zinn was known to be supportive of some Anarchist ideas, and here, his vision of an ideal society seems heavily Anarchist: people would opt in to society voluntarily, rather than being compelled to join it.
A society so stratified by wealth and education lends itself naturally to envy and class anger. It would be a new kind of revolution, the only kind that could happen, I believe, in a country like the United States. The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also inspiration. It is as if a whole nation were going through a critical point in its middle age, a life crisis of self-doubt, self-examination. The great lesson of the 1960s is that a determined population is much stronger than the American Establishment.
That future is here in the U. But because it would be a process over time, starting without delay, there would be the immediate satisfactions that people have always found in the affectionate ties of groups striving together for a common goal. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media- none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty. As for the subtitle of this book, it is not quite accurate; a "people's history" promises more than any one person can fulfill, and it is the most difficult kind of history to recapture. In a system of intimidation and control, people do not show how much they know, how deeply they feel, until their practical sense informs them they can do so without being destroyed. To uncover such history is to find a powerful human impulse to assert one's humanity.
