Modern Era
Alexander Berkman
1870–1936 · Anarchist communism
The prison is the state written small.
In their words
“Anarchism means liberty: the liberty of the individual to live his own life in his own way.”
Berkman spent fourteen years in Pennsylvania's Western Penitentiary after an attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead strike, and wrote the best account we have of what a prison does to a person. With Emma Goldman he published Mother Earth, was deported to Russia in 1919, and then wrote the first plain-language introduction to anarchism for workers who had never read a theory book.
Why it matters for freedom
He showed that the state's kindness and the state's cruelty come from the same machinery.
Who they stood against
the prison system, the industrialists who used the state's police, and later the Bolshevik state he had first welcomed