Word: soledad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Soledad, no less than Watts, is physically a part of California, and as such, is a legatee of the state's allure. There is a sign on the side of Highway 101 that runs through the town which reads. "It's All Happening In Soledad." However, just as the black who fled from the East and the South in hopes of finding the good life in Watts have been forced to live in frustration, disappointment and neglect, so have the white dustbowl refugees who have settled in Soledad and the rest of the Salinas Valley...
...many physical escape was an impossibility. However, in 1952, the state of California presented the town with a means of internal escape when it built a prison there. A prison provides jobs which in turn distribute money. But more important, a prison provides power--or its illusion--and in Soledad the prison was providing power to people who could get it in no other...
George Jackson spent a year in Soledad. In his first four months, he was accused of seven violations of prison rules. When he came up for parole after the expiration of his minimum sentence, his prison record classified him as "surly and intractable." A bad nigger who "flatly refused to obey orders." Parole was denied and con A-63837 was transferred to San Quentin...
...denying Jackson parole and transferring him to San Quentin, the state officials essentially were trying to impress upon him the power that was at their disposal. Soledad, a medium security prison, is by no means a pleasant environment in which to spend your twenty-first year on earth, but Q has long been notorious as the roughest joint in the state. By exhibiting their ability not only to deny him release but also to worsen the conditions of his confinement, the authorities hoped to drive defiance from Jackson by intimately acquainting him with the cost of such resistance...
...Largely, Soledad Brother is the log of that descent. It catches Jacks in mid-flight in June of 1964. He was still in San Quentin then, but the first letter of the book reveals that already he was vastly different from the aimless small-time booster California had flushed into its prisons three years before. He writes to his mother...