Sean wrote the following for the recent No More Locked Doors Conference in Oakland. A PDF of a zine of this and other writings by prisoners on solidarity is available here.

Sean Swain’s responses:
–TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR CASE.
I grew up in a lilly-white Detroit suburb, only son of an autoworker and a stay-home mom. After my mind was mismanaged by public schools I enlisted in the Army for more severe mismanagement. After discharge, I shared an apartment with my then-girlfriend and her two children from prior relationships. Her former boyfriend kicked in the apartment door when I was home alone, and in a panic I stabbed and killed him.
He was the nephew of the clerk of courts. I wasn’t.
Police concealed evidence, the prosecutor concealed witnes the court disallowed my experts. When my conviction was reversed, the court refused to follow the mandate of the higher court, and I remain captive for 24 years and counting without a legal conviction or sentence for a non-crime.
I was irregularly targeted and prosecuted not for any criminal conduct, but for the court to uphold the unwritten proposition that the system of injustice is a weapon to maintain the special privileges of the privileged few, while the poor have not even the right to defend our own lives.
As an anarchist writer, I have been subjected to a particular regimen of harassment and retaliation by prison officials. In 2012, I was subjected to torture and state terror, as prison officials alleged that I was Monkey #4, creator of the Army of the 12 Monkeys, a militant rebel group that seriously disrupted Ohio prisons through campaigns of sabota rioting. I was sent to Ohio’s supermax facility because my “ideology” matched the 12 Monkeys.
The FBI generated 1297 pages of investigative files on me, related to my views and activities while in prison. Prison fascists have now contrived justifications to make me die in prison unless I pull the plug on SEANSWAIN.ORG and quit The Final Straw radio show. In this way, the hierarch high command seeks to silence anarchist views and erase them from the public forum.
This only confirms for me that the State must be defeated and destroyed for me to be liberated. I accept those terms.

–HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE PRISONER SUPPORT? WHAT ARE SUPPORT PRACTICES THAT YOU FIND MEANINGFUL? ARE THERE PRACTICES THAT YOU FEEL ARE LACKING?
I think we are working from an outdated model of prisoner support. I find a lot of effort and resources expended first in the area of making prisoners “comfortable” in prison, providing amenities; and also resources toward facilitating prisoners’ writings and consciousness-raising activities. Not to be critical, I think particularly the anarchist community has become really good at this kind of prisoner support, and it is essential, critical, as long as prisons exist.
But I would like to provoke you to consider what prisoner support would look like if you aimed to make prisons not exist. Ultimately, prisoner support is for giving prisoners what they need, and prisoners more than anything need freedom. So, I would like to see prisoner support that provides freedom and I would like to be involved in such prisoner support in the future.
That kind of prisoner support involves great risk and high yield. It also involves some research and planning. But it’s very do-able.

–HOW CAN CURRENT SOCIAL MOVEMENTS SHOW SOLIDARITY WITH PRISONERS FROM PREVIOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS? OUTSIDE OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, WHAT SORTS OF SOLIDARITY ARE MEANINGFUL TO YOU?
I don’t know that I see a distinction between “current” and “previous” social movements. I would suggest that our ongoing struggle today is a continuation, an evolution, an adaptation in a constant flow of struggle. So, by my thinking, we are “we” as a consequence of the successes and failures of the SLA, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and even John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. We are a continuation of struggle going back 6000 years when humans were first subjected to subjugation and domestication.
In my view, the struggle against imprisonment and the environmental movement and immigrant rights and racial justice and the Zapatistas all go together. So, for me, the ultimate expression of solidarity is not to make sure everyone is included on the banners, but is, instead, the most effective acts of resistance that help bring down our common enemy. For me, solidarity is not empathy but common action, inclusive action. Solidarity, in that sense, is an action verb.
I can show oppressed kids everywhere how much I identify with their struggles when I hit the school bully in the face with a brick and end his reign of taking our lunch money.

–IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT “THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES” WHEN REVOLUTIONARIES ARE INCARCERATED. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO YOU.
There is only a distinction between the “free world” and “prison” if you are under the illusion that the “free world” is free. If you recognize that the larger system enslaves us all, then imprisonment is only a more severe state of deprivation in a world defined by deprivations. And the prison complex is just one of the components of that larger system.
On one side of the fence, you are a rebel in resistance against the oppressor. On the other side, you are a hostage in resistance against the oppressor. All that changes is (1) the DEGREE of oppression and (2) geography. Your IDENTITY and your goals, plans, hopes don’t change unless the oppressor tricks you into buying into some alternative narrative, some nonsense where your previous identity is “suspended.”
Prisons only function when prisoners cooperate. WE know that going in. Once inside, we have the opportunity to take away the oppressor’s prison system, the capacity to punish. A State without the capacity to punish is a failed State.

–LIBERATION STRUGGLES ARE TARGETS OF STATE REPRESSION. HOW COULD INDIVIDUALS OR MOVEMENTS PREPARE FOR THIS POSSIBILITY?
A few things come to mind. We know what repression is and what forms it takes. We know what that repression is designed to do to us. So, we can work from the expectation that we WILL experience it and then make advance preparation for when it happens. I won’t go into details on how to prepare for imprisonment, torture, solitary, and all the other abuses because there isn’t space, but I CAN elaborate at some other time to help someone prepare and get through it all as intact as possible.
FACT: I have survived EVERY kind of repression the State has devised except death, and I’m not special or remarkable or any better equipped than you are. If I can do it, you can. What we IMAGINE the State can do is far more terrible than what the State can do. Our IMAGINED repressionparalyzes us.
There are 5 things the State can do to us: (1) take, destroy our property; (2) assault us; (3) confine us in a state of deprivation; (4) transfer us to a more severe state of deprivation; (5) kill us. There are COUNTLESS things WE can do to THE STATE. That means the State is virtually powerless.
I keep in mind the Zapatista approach: “We are already dead.” The day the Zapatistas took up arms against the State, they accepted that they were “already dead.” It was inevitable that the State would exterminate them sooner or later. If you’re doing anything that seriously challenges or threatens the oppressor, death is your reality.
Personally, I’ve been dead a long time.
It’s actually quite liberating.

–ANYTHING ELSE YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE?
I think the organizational forms we take in resisting ought to reflect organizational forms that can sustain us into the future. Those forms that prove most effective, I suspect, are those most “non-system.” The existing system is best equipped to deal with enemies that think and behave in ways similar TO the system. The more “exotic” we are to the system, the less their prior experience prepares them to deal with us. The more diffused and seemingly disorganized and varied our forms, the more overwhelmed the system becomes, the more resistance attracts and inspires a variety of others.
Also, a quick word about “political” prisoners. To use the term is to imply that there are such thing as “nonpolitcal” prisoners; that is, a scenario where the State is exercising legitimate authority and confining a human not for continuance of the State and its nefarious agenda of control, but out of a sincere and valid concern for public safety and well-being. As anarchists we know that has never been the case. Therefore, there ARE no nonpolitical prisoners and the term “political” prisoner really loses all meaning. If the State ever acted in the best interests of public safety and well-being, it would shoot itself in the face, not lock humans in cages.
In 24 years, I’ve never met a nonpolitical prisoner. And I’ve never met a legitimate State.