Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Submission 2026

Being targeted in prison is just part of the revolutionary life. As George Jackson said, "The revolutionary is an outlaw, a doomed man." In prison specifically, this means you're often kidnapped and taken to the hole, not for something you did, but for what the administration thinks you might do.

In my case, I've spent the last three years in the same pattern of being re-kidnapped, re-violated, re-dehumanized, and further isolated. Because that's what going to the hole is — re-incarceration. A form of recidivism I dub "segstitutionalization." You don't need to be a revolutionary or activist to find that the prison within prison is a revolving door. You all know that people who go to prison once are likely to return, with more than a fifty percent recidivism rate nationwide. So it's no surprise that the traumas and stigmas of re-incarceration play out in prison as well, which is, at the end of the day, a microcosm of society. It has the same pigs (correctional officers), same laws (rules), same president (warden/superintendent). And just like the outside, where any citizen can be held without charge for up to seventy two hours, you can be kidnapped to the hole and held for up to thirty days while the prison "gathers evidence." But no charge doesn't stop the sexual assault that is strip searches, the stealing of all your property, and the orange clothes you're forced to wear inside your cage.

People who get out of the hole — like those getting out of prison — find getting a job next to impossible. Thanks to your recent sting in there, you are now identified as unmanageable and therefore unemployable. "Have you been to the hole?" "When was your last hole shot?" are common questions. You get out of the hole, and you're branded with a red or green tag you must wear everywhere. So every cop you pass can freely stop and frisk you — and will — just based on the tag, as well as the fact that you're likely Black.

Should you be a green tag — like myself — you're labeled as affiliated, an organizer. Ungovernable! We get a probation officer, or Security Threat Manager (STM), who are all white men given the freedom to act with impunity because they are the prison's supposed experts on gangs and other "trouble." One of the STMs at Oregon State Penitentiary, among the several prisons I've been in, is a white christian rapper in his spare time. In his full time, he puts large groups of Muslims in the hole under investigation. These are our experts on everything minority.

So, just like those on the outside who always prepare to go back to prison for a variety of reasons — maybe they got more comfortable or even prefer it, or they're aware they're profiled — we who have been segstitutionalized do the same. We targeted carry our address books and envelopes on us because it's the only property they'll let you have. We stay prepared ourselves and prepare our loved ones for our eventual return to the hole.

This is the third year in a row in which I'm taken, under investigation, in February or March while the prison constructs their narrative of an "unauthorized organization," "disturbance," and this year, "disrespect." Every year, I remain in my cement tomb until the following one, when I'm shipped to a different prison, often having to undertake hunger strikes to get basics and accountability from the administration. Then I'm out of the hole for a month, only for the pattern to repeat — and repeat.

This year, I was shipped to Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution (EOCI), and I made it to March third before being brought to the hole under investigation and then administrative segregation, a prison's catch-all status for when they want you in the hole but can't even concoct a halfway conceivable story for it. It's an indefinite placement to disappear people, to retaliate, to destroy one's ties with their community and the outside world.

Why? Now, first understand, the state is not a rational entity — no, far from it, so the why's and how's will always confuse those who seek a rationale for the state's abhorrent actions. That being said, the reason EOCI gave is a doozy. They pulled a conversation my partner and I had on the phone in which we joked about "white genocide." I also remarked on the prison state being run by "fascists" and "nazis" — which they are. Some fascists here were hurt by those words. The white male ego is a sensitive thing.

My real (alleged) "crime," the thing I was doing that they wanted desperately to stop but couldn't, was educating prisoners. I was bringing together people normally separated by race and affiliation, buying them books and studying the history of movement struggles, dissecting the greater systems of oppression which created one's material conditions. What I was doing was waking people up. Assata once said that to break free, one must be acutely aware of being a slave. That's why I prioritize education, to give oppressed people the tools with which to liberate themselves because you cannot fool a mind that knows itself.

However, our studies expose the truth that our modern overseers don't want us to know — that prisons are plantations, and they are the overseers, and yes, there is a racial component. No crime happens in a vacuum, and poverty breeds criminality, and systems work as intended to incarcerate, repress, oppress, and execute a slow genocide while extracting labor. This, they don't want people to see.

They'd rather we discuss drugs or debts, not systems of oppression, or that we discuss racial politics, as opposed to global politics and the intersectionality of oppression and movements. They'd prefer us stuck on TVs and talking about movies over us establishing long term relationships with people, relationships that will traverse these walls and include us in a movement that cares about prisoners.

No, they don't want that. Drugs and gang beefs, they expect and can handle. Educating the people, the cornerstone of waking up to the pure fact that resistance is essence — that, the state cannot abide. So, here I reside in this dungeon for the third year in a row.

But I will never be counted among the broken. I will resist because resistance is essence, and I will leave prison with the same morals I came with. No matter the hole I am put in, I will not bow because there was a world before prisons, and there will be an after. No one is free until we all are free. Until every cage is empty and prisons are liberated, until kkkops, ice, the whole fascist police state and its systems of coercion, including the legal apparatus, are abolished. Until freedom, I struggle on.

Love, Rage, and Solidarity,
Malik