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“I seek to collaborate with the brilliant upcoming thinkers and revolutionaries, almost all prisoners. These writers are<br />
beaten and tortured, gassed and shot – and forced into the psychological torture chambers of the control units.<br />
What is going on is a war on the truth and these are the front lines.”<br />
... and the walls<br />
came tumbling<br />
down<br />
Prison Whisperer<br />
Anthony Rayson, former Chicago freeway toll-booth operator, talks<br />
to the people we never even see, those locked away tight in<br />
America’s prisons<br />
Friday<br />
The New American<br />
Dream Interview<br />
[From 2009, The New American<br />
Dream website, before The New<br />
American Dream Radio show]<br />
Anthony Rayson, age 55, lives in<br />
Chicago.<br />
He is a south side anarchist organizer,<br />
writer and editor.<br />
Anthony publishes zines. He runs<br />
the South Chicago ABC Zine Distro.<br />
He recently donated a collection of<br />
zines to DePaul University. He works<br />
closely with prisoners, often publishing<br />
their writing and artwork.<br />
“I seek to collaborate with the<br />
brilliant upcoming thinkers and<br />
revolutionaries, almost all prisoners.<br />
These writers are beaten and tortured,<br />
gassed and shot – and forced into the<br />
psychological torture chambers of<br />
the control units. What is going on is<br />
a war on the truth and these are the<br />
front lines.”<br />
________________________<br />
NAD: Anthony, welcome, thank you<br />
for taking the time for this.<br />
Why are you so interested in prisoners?<br />
26/<strong>Penn</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong>/<strong>November</strong> <strong>2017</strong><br />
Have you even been a prisoner? Any<br />
of your friends, or family members?<br />
Were you born an anarchist, or how<br />
did that all come about?<br />
Anthony Rayson: First of all, greetings<br />
and thank you for thinking of me<br />
for this interview.<br />
I don’t live in Chicago, but rather<br />
about forty miles south, where the<br />
suburbs melt into the cornfields.<br />
I guess I’m one of the rare few, who<br />
actually gives a damn about how<br />
people are treated, am very keen on<br />
discovering the heavy truth, detest<br />
injustice and make it my business to<br />
find the well-written insight from this<br />
country’s most oppressed.<br />
As a writer and serious anarchist,<br />
I look to collaborate with the most<br />
brilliant and explosive revolutionary<br />
thinkers of today and have found this<br />
rare breed almost exclusively penned<br />
up in the Amerikan gulag archipelago.<br />
I feel the prisons are the black hole<br />
of society where all the injustices are<br />
magnified. It’s where the enemies and<br />
victims of the American government<br />
are forced to dwell.<br />
Anarchists don’t believe in authority<br />
or prisons. So to me, this is ground<br />
zero in the struggle here at home.<br />
I have a little saying: “The world gets<br />
bombs, we get bars!”<br />
I’ve been amazingly unscathed as far<br />
as incarceration goes.<br />
Oh sure, when I was a kid, a was<br />
thrown in the drunk tank a few times<br />
and even spent ten days once in the<br />
county jail out in Reno, Nevada in<br />
1973.<br />
I had a trial for a piddling pot rap
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