Rattling the Cages

“Reading these oral histories from these folks, it's really powerful stuff...this is a really important book. If we don't have a strong political prisoner support movement, our movements are not gonna succeed and they're not gonna persist ... [a] helpful tool for organizers whether they're on the outside [or] on the inside."  —Jared Ware, Millennials are Killing Capitalism

“Rattling the Cages brings the term 'political prisoner' into sharper focus by providing outstanding oral accounts from a wide range of North American political prisoners. In the finest tradition of oral history—'the poetry of the everyday,' the literature of the streets—this book takes us to the source, and shines a bright, illuminating light into the shadowy world of our peculiarly American gulag. Rattling the Cages dives head-first into the wide world of direct personal experiences and human meaning-making, offering an important antidote to propaganda, dogma, and stereotype.” —Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days and Public Enemy

“Rattling the Cages has more wisdom, harder-earned, per page than any other book I've ever read. It is the kind of wisdom most people hope to never know, the kind of wisdom that comes from facing the true nature of our state and what it does to those who resist its power. The lessons of this book force those of us on the outside to ask whether we are walking the way we believe. Rattling the Cages will be essential reading for years to come.” —Baynard Woods, author of Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“Prison can't win, Huey Newton famously said, because walls and bars cannot hold back ideas. And this book is brimming with ideas from survivors of political repression. Rattling the Cages is an intimate intergenerational dialog with movement activists representing sixty years of struggle and too many years of incarceration. In conversations both hopeful and heartfelt, intense and inspiring, they share how they live to fight another day.” —Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family's Journey  

“As a collection of oral histories, Davidson’s Rattling the Cages provides an essential archive on both the breathtaking cruelty of American prisons and on the courage and humanity of those locked away. To heed the critiques of its contributors is to accept that all imprisonment is political. But something in these pages throbs even louder than critique. Here, too, one finds love and the joy born from struggle. Those serve as the foundation of this book’s brilliant contributions, of the world they—and we—hope to build.”  —N. D. B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University

"Rattling the Cages pulls off a virtual prison break. It brings so many of my favorite people together, all in one place, to share their incredibly powerful perspectives on life, politics, and dynamics as political prisoners, and to talk about what the future holds.” —Leslie James Pickering, author of Mad Bomber Melville, former Earth Liberation Front spokesman, and co-founder of Burning Books bookstore