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A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
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A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman

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This is an autobiographical account of the experience of the author and her lifelong friend and lover, Alexander Berkman, of being imprisoned for their views and actions. Goldman was Russian by birth but emigrated to America. She was an anarchist and activist for women's rights among other issues. Berkman was imprisoned for 22 years for the attempted murder in 1892 of the business man Henry Clay Frick, and Goldman, on several occasions, for 'incitement to riot' and distributing information about birth control. The book is a fascinating glimpse into late nineteenth century American politics and social life.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherGood Press
Release dateJan 17, 2022
ISBN4066338111708
A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
Author

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in present-day Lithuania to a Jewish family, Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues. In 1917, Goldman and fellow anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to “induce persons not to register” for the newly-instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with 248 others—in the Palmer Raids during the First Red Scare and deported to Russia. Goldman later left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. She died in Toronto, Canada, in 1940, at the age of seventy.

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    A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman - Emma Goldman

    Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman

    A fragment of the prison experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman

    Published by Good Press, 2022

    goodpress@okpublishing.info

    EAN 4066338111708

    Table of Contents

    A FOREWORD

    THE STATE PRISON AT JEFFERSON CITY, MO. EMMA GOLDMAN

    THE ATLANTA FEDERAL PENITENTIARY Statement by Alexander Berkman

    REPLY OF FRED G. ZERBST Warden of the U. S. Federal Penitentiary, Atlanta, Ga.

    REPLY TO WARDEN FRED G. ZERBST

    PERSECUTION OF POLITICALS

    IN CONCLUSION

    A FOREWORD

    Table of Contents

    There was a time—and that not so very long ago—when popular ignorance and superstition looked upon an insane person as one possessed of the devil or of some other evil spirit. They sought to drive the evil one out by beating and torturing the insane, and often even by drowning, hanging, and burning.

    We have fortunately passed that stage of stupid brutality. Today even the most ignorant man knows that insanity is a disease. But in regard to crime and criminals we are still in the stage of dark-age superstition. We look upon the criminal today as we did upon the insane fifty or seventy-five years ago. Most men still believe that by beating and punishing the criminal, by hanging and electrocution, we can drive the evil spirit out of him. This process is called reforming the criminal.

    Yet common sense and all human experience prove that the criminal is no more responsible for crime than the crazy man for his insanity. The pseudo-scientific theories of the Lombrosos in regard to crime and criminals have been thoroughly exploded and proven utterly fallacious. Even if the Lombroso myth that the criminal is born were true, what good would it do to punish him? There might be some social justification for his isolation, but how could the criminal, if born such, be held accountable for his criminality?

    But as a matter of fact—as modern criminology has proven beyond all dispute—the criminal is made, not born. He is the product of his environment, a child of poverty and desperation, of misery, greed, and ambition. He is at the same time the symbol and the proof of a diseased social condition, the miscarriage of perverted economic arrangements. Fully 97 per cent. of all crime is due directly to our economic institutions. The other 3 per cent. are traceable to the artificiality and neurosis of modern life, to the anti-social tendencies cultivated among the weeds in the neglected and mistreated garden of human life.

    I have been in close contact with so-called criminals for a great many years. Yet nowhere have I found the alleged criminal type, nor have I ever discovered the real criminal. He does not exist. Crime is simply misdirected energy, effort applied wrongly. The average criminal is just the average man, generally speaking. If in any sense he may be considered a variation, it is only because of his frequently superior initiative, daring and intelligence. His often anti-social activity is conditioned by his unconventional vocation, not by any inherent criminal or anti-social tendencies. I am not speaking of congenital criminal degenerates whose number is infinitesimal, and who belong in

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