S1E105 - Eric King on Surviving Prison

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Eric King talks to Margaret about navigating and surviving prison after spending nine and half years in a federal prison after firebombing a congress person's office during the Ferguson Uprising.

Guest Info

Eric King (he/him) is an anarchist, a father, a poet, a brutal scrabble player, an adoring Swiftie and an undying anti-fascist. You can support Eric on IG @supportericking and @rattlingcagesbook as well as at https://supportericking.org/ Eric also co-edited the book Rattling Cages, which can be found at http://rattlingthecages.com/

Host Info

Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Eric King on Surviving Prison

**Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast where it feels like the end times. And this week—I'm really excited about this week—I get to talk to someone that I wanted to talk to you for a very long time, but I wasn't able to because he was in prison. And that's not a good place to talk to people if you don't know them. But what we're going to talk about this week is how to survive prison with Eric King, the recently released anarchist prisoner who spent way too fucking long in a cage. And so we're gonna talk about how to survive being in a cage because it's a thing that we should all be aware of, even if we try to avoid it. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero etwork of Anarchists Podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Margaret ** 01:41 Okay, we're back. So, Eric, if you could introduce yourself with your name, which I already said, and your pronouns, and then why you know something about surviving prison.

**Eric King ** 01:51 Hello, happy to be here. My name is Eric King. I go by he and him. And I spent just about nine—nine and a half years in federal prison after firebombing a congress person's office in Missouri during the Ferguson uprising.

**Margaret ** 02:10 Okay, so, which is I mean, I don't want to... It is good when people act in solidarity, I will just say that. So I think a lot of people are nervous around—I mean, I'll say I'm nervous around incarceration, right. I've only spent two nights total in lockup, and I've never been in general population. And I think it's a kind of a black box. It's sort of a mystery. And I was wondering if you had any advice for people who, whether they're, like currently facing incarceration, or whether they're making decisions based on their ethics that put them at risk of incarceration. I'm wondering if you have, like, and it was a big topic, but like, how do you get ready to go to jail?

**Margaret ** 03:01 Okay.

**Eric King ** 03:02 So I wasn't ready. I'm going to tell you that right now. Um, I got picked up on the streets, just the cops rolled up on me with their machine guns and everything like that. And so I wasn't ready one bit. I didn't have a support team ready, I didn't have funds ready. And honestly, even though I had read books and I watched documentaries, I didn't know how to behave in prison at all. Um, so when I showed up, I was—I got myself in a lot of trouble with both other prisoners and guards, because I was doing a lot of reckless shit. Um, and so if I were to tell people to get ready, my first advice would be, like, to understand where you're at. Like, you're in a county jail, most likely.

**Eric King ** 03:48 And depending on what state you're in, like, that's gonna depend on like the politics of that jail. And there's ways to survive in county jails and there's ways to survive and low security prison, medium security prison, maximum security. And you can get yourself ready for that stuff. You can be ready.

**Margaret ** 04:06 Yeah. Okay, so what kind of prisons were you in?

**Eric King ** 04:11 So I was at a—I started off in a federal pre trial place. It was a it was one ran by CCA, which was just a nightmare because that's one of the private companies. And then, I'm one of the few people ever in the feds have gone to a low, a medium, a USP, and the supermax—the ADX. So I worked my way up, yeah, I did all four custody levels. And so I've seen like how the survival, like, how you have to move and behave. It's 100% different in each one of those. So it takes time to learn to like it's weird.

**Margaret ** 04:49 So what are some of those ways—like, what are some examples of like how you behaved incorrectly when you first found yourself in lockup.

**Eric King ** 04:58 Sure. So when I first got to CCA, I'm on full insurrectionist anarchist time. And I'm refusing to play by the politics of that jail. And that meant that I sat and ate with the black bros. I let ,the gay and trans people, I always worked out with them, you can come work out with me. I watched the Mexican TV—when the Sureños and the Paisas are watching the Spanish channels, I sat with them. And those are things that I got away with because I can fight. If I wasn't ready to throw hands I got destroyed. And so I had a bunch of fights. I've fought all the time.

**Margaret ** 05:41 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 05:41 And then eventually the other races talk to me. They're like, bro, look, you're causing problems for all of us. Like, your behavior—it's cool, we appreciate the solidarity, we saw you on the news, respect. But you're gonna get us in a race war because we're letting you do things that like other people aren't allowed. So you got to cut that shit out.

**Margaret ** 06:02 Right.

**Eric King ** 06:03 Um, so I was still able to gamble with other races. And I was still able to run my boxing class. And so, like, the LGBT people could always we're still involved in the boxing class, because that's from every race. But like, once that was over, I wasn't—I couldn't sit with the black dudes anymore. I couldn't watch the Spanish channel anymore. Just simple shit like that, that people in prison would say, like, duh, duh you idiot. But like, I didn't get that early on.

**Margaret ** 06:33 That makes sense to me. One of the first friends of mine that I talked to about dealing with jail—a white anarchist who spent a bunch of time in jail, about a year or something, I guess prison more than jail. And one—and yeah, he tells me these stories about how, you know, he did the exact same thing. He went and he sat with—he was like, very consciously, he's like, I'm not hanging out with the white supremacists. You know, right? And he was like, alright, I'm gonna go sit with black folks. And, you know, and he grew up on a primarily black neighborhood, and—

**Margaret ** 07:06 And eventually he—eventually he threw this, like birthday party that had everyone come together. But then immediately afterwards, someone tried to kil