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inmates in times and places far from Serge’s own context continue to appreciate
Men in Prison.
As an inmate in a Minnesota prison wrote in 1970: “My prison is separated from Victor Serge’s by half a century, half a continent and an ocean and yet we have shared the same experience … Nothing changes. Absolutely nothing changes.” 34 Indeed, if anything, things have gotten worse as the number of human beings in captivity has increased incrementally, resulting in overcrowding, increased brutality, and deteriorating conditions.
    The construction and populating of prisons is apparently dying capitalism’s answer to massive youth unemployment, and Serge would certainly have seen today’s so-called war on drugs as a war against the poor. Nearly half of America’s two million prisoners are ‘guilty’ of non-violent crimes, mostly low-level marijuana and coke dealing—the principal occupations open to Black and immigrant youth, nearly half of whom have ‘done time’ by age thirty-five. The United States, oncea model of liberal democracy, has now surpassed Russia and China in percentage of its population behind bars, with about two million men and women trapped in the criminal justice system. Mandatory long-term sentences, which Serge correctly termed ‘slow death sentences,’ have created a whole population of wheelchair-ridden inmates, while undocumented immigrants and small children are increasingly being confined under unnecessarily brutal prison-like conditions.
    Indeed, privatized prisons have become vastly profitable, and the building of new high-tech maximum-security and ‘supermax’ prisons where inmates are kept in solitary twenty-three hours a day and allowed zero contact with other prisoners, is one of the few remaining growth industries. If history is likely to remember the twentieth century for Hitler’s Auschwitz and Stalin’s Gulag, the young twenty-first is already marked by Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and the U.S. ‘supermax’ penitentiaries on which they were modeled. 35
    As Serge wrote in his
Memoirs:
“The fact that nobody in more than a century has considered the problem of criminality and prisons; the fact that since Victor Hugo, nobody has really raised the issue reveals the power of inertia in our society. This machine whose function is to turn out felons and human refuse is expensive without fulfilling any useful purpose.” Serge said it all eighty years ago: “Modern prisons are imperfectible. Being perfect, there is nothing left to do but destroy them.”
    I ended my original 1968 introduction to this translation of
Men in Prison
with the sentence: “If this book doesn’t make you angry, nothing will.” I was twenty-eight and fresh from the barricades of the Columbia University student strike. A
New York Times
critic archly described my introduction as “somewhat overwrought.” Meanwhile, prisons have grown exponentially, conditions worsened drastically, and I have waxed ever more overwrought. The recent prolonged hunger strikes at Guantá
    Meanwhile, as the saying goes, “If you’re not overwrought, you’re not paying attention.”
    Richard Greeman
November 2013

    1 See Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1905–1941, the first complete English translation of which was published in 2012 by NYRB Classics, with a translator’s introduction by Peter Sedgwick, a foreword by Adam Hochschild, and a glossary by Richard Greeman.
    2 De Boe and Serge were reunited in Brussels in 1936, when Serge was freed by the Russians. De Boe was by then a respected leader in the printers’ union.
    3 Curiously, the only serious, reliable, and politically astute book on the gang was written by an Englishman, Richard Parry. Malcolm Menzies has written an excellent novel about the tragedy, En Exil chez les hommes, which sticks close to the facts and brings to life the characters and atmosphere.
    4 For Serge’s articles as Le Rétif, see Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and