This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

I enrolled in Anger Management to get the second of two programs I need to complete in order to get out of solitary. I had already taken the Money Smart program, which indoctrinates convicted felons in the benefits and virtues of using the U.S. banking system. I got my certificate even though I included a critique of the banking system on the back of my homework, along with cartoons of masked characters with cans of gasoline around burning banks.

So, Anger Management would give me my second certificate and qualify me to get out of solitary. How it works, OSP offers a million programs you can watch on TV and mail in your answers. Thing is, none of these programs count as the two to get you out of solitary. It looks good that they offer these programs, but to get to lower security you need one of select few programs that staff teach in the unit. And thats not easy to get because there are few staff and there are only six phone booth sized cages for six prisoners to take each cycle of programs. Hundreds are waiting. Six get selected.

Back in January, I was continued at solitary because staff are overwhelmed and can’t get necessary programs to prisoners in solitary. You must stay in solitary until you get the programs virtually unavailable in solitary. Right. More of the problem is the solution to the problem.

It took nine months to get into Anger Management. It’s taught by one of a half a dozen well-intending mental health folks who genuinely seem like they want to make a difference. They don’t know that the point of their existence here is to create a veneer of “rehabilitating”and “correcting” in case anyone looks, without actually creating the circumstances for real change or empowerment. Sometimes these well intended shrinks actually seem befuddled about how they’re undermined.

I had to fill out a survey to rate how angry I am and how often, and at the end, a key told me how bad my anger problem is. The implication is, if your really angry or angry frequently, there’s something wrong with you. It’s not that the economy is trashed and your boss is a jerk and the environment is toxic and the cops are brutal. No. The problem is not the world. It’s you.

What if your in a situation where anger is a healthy response? Well, apparently there isn’t such a situation. Anger is always bad, wrong, evil. And the problem is always you.

See, the programming presents the common theme of self blame to poor and largely minority convicted felons, convincing them that they are to blame for becoming crack dealers and crackheads, rather than brain surgeons and rocket scientists. It has nothing to do with the powerful and wealthy elite foreclosing upon rewarding options and mangling our world.

What could an impoverished Black, functionally illiterate surviver of child abuse locked in a steel phone booth at the supermax possibly have to be angry about? He didn’t chose a life of crime; a life of crime chose him. And the same State that shaped those desperate circumstances now offers a program to explain to him why he has an “anger problem,” he needs to address.

What do I know, but it seems to me that the problem is not enough people are sufficiently angry. We’re too effectively conditioned and socialized to ignore the concrete causes of intolerable situations and to analyze ourselves to discover our “issues” that underlie our “feelings.” Perhaps we’re angry because we should be.

To quote Rage Against the Machine, “anger is a gift.” An interesting statistic I learned in Anger Management that I think supports my position: every year, the suicide rate approximately doubles the murder rate. That means twice as many people kill themselves as kill someone else. Twice as many people direct their hostility and blame at themselves when they feel they are driven to kill in order to stop suffering.

So imagine if we could undo the indoctrination that gets us to see ourselves as the source of our problems and we could direct the blame that those thousands of suicides internalize toward the real source of our collective troubles. Imagine the drastic revolutionary change in conditions. By focusing our rightness and legitimate anger, we could change the world.

If all of those self-hating, self-blaming suicides directed their self-destructive anger outward at the bosses and politicians, bankers and industrialists – the powerful who warped our world in the first place – we could create a future where we have no reason to be angry. Unsurprisingly, the fascists don’t have a program for that.

But we do.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Ohio’s supermax.

If you’re angry, you are the resistance