Finally got around to watching American History X on video last night (It was on telly a couple of weeks back). Thought it was pretty good and compared favourably with other “nazi-skinheads come good” efforts like Romper Stomper, and, uh… Made In Britain.

Good soundtrack by Anne Dudley as well (you’ve got to have a soft spot for Anne Dudley ’round our house because she used to be in the Art of Noise and did a pretty good collaboration with Jaz Coleman from Killing Joke).

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the plot but I thought it was very good at the unfolding of fanatical thought and a realisation that there might be holes in an all-consuming extremist political worldview. (For example the all to common spectre of young dispossessed people being used by older more astute politicos to do their dirty work)

But… it was a bit fuzzy on what the main character replaced this with. So you ended up with a bit of a liberal almost-pacifist vagueness which is almost a complete absence of conviction or thought. Obviously that’s preferable to stiff right arm shouty fascism, but I think it ignores a crucial fact that prison is a site of political awakening and activity.

So whilst the prison scenes in the film are very good at interpersonal relationships, the actual activities of prisoners are shown only as work / recreation / eating, etc. The conflict in the prison is depicted as being purely between prisoners (on a variety of levels) but hardly ever between the prisoners and the prison authorities.

There is no suggestion that prisoners engage in any form of active learning or resistance or that prison is anything other than a neutral site in which people (some good some bad) exist for the duration of their sentences.

And there can be no doubt that the majority of time spent in prison is mind-numbingly tedious and mundane, and not to be romanticised as some sort of “university for revolutionaries”. But I was struck by the lack of coverage of any form of self-education or resistance – something which seems to be very important, crucially important, in writings by (ex) prisoners I have read.

So on that note, I can wholeheartedly recommend BAD – The Autobiography of James Carr (Pelegian Press, 1995). You can read the excellent afterword to the book here.

Other stuff:

Campaign Against Prison Slavery – campaign against forced labour in British prisons (plus lots of related news).

Review of Bending The Bars by John Barker (Christie Books, 2003) by Mark Barnsley and the foreword to the book.