Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Hidden Article

This posting has been hidden because it breaches the Indymedia UK (IMC UK) Editorial Guidelines.

IMC UK is an interactive site offering inclusive participation. All postings to the open publishing newswire are the responsibility of the individual authors and not of IMC UK. Although IMC UK volunteers attempt to ensure accuracy of the newswire, they take no responsibility legal or otherwise for the contents of the open publishing site. Mention of external web sites or services is for information purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.

John Bowden - a unique hero

leedsabc | 20.11.2012 00:12

John Bowden is innocent. Wrongly fitted up for a crime that never happened, John has been persecuted by the system as a violent offender. The real Truth is very different. John has help his fellow captives, hostages of the state and become a shining light in the inhuman conditions that is known as prison. Heres to John's innocence, his integrity, his continued non-selfish devotion to his fellow captives, John - a true working class philanthropist will be released and will have his innocence confirmed from this wrongly sentence to hold him hostage.

An old interview with John Bowden from Schnews

John Bowden was arrested in 1980 for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992, after years of brutality and repression, he managed to escape and was on the run from the police for a year and a half. He was recaptured in March 1994 and has since been in Perth Prison in Scotland. Here he talks about various aspects of being inside, including the reasons as to why he committed murder and his subsequent politicisation.

How do you justify asking for our support, having taken a life?

The murder itself cannot be looked upon as an isolated incident, it has to be tied in with my history. Being identified as Irish I experienced racism as well as extreme poverty very early on in life. Unfortunately my instinctive rebellion against both sets of disadvantages was always blind and misdirected. I rebelled early by committing serious anti-social acts (I burnt a factory to the ground when I was nine!) and so was criminalised and incarcerated quite early on in life. I was fed into the ‘criminal justice system’ as a mere child and systematically brutalised and de-socialised to the extent where I became a complete outsider, made hard and violent by institutionalisation and predatory in my relationship to ‘straight’ society.

The writer Norman Mailer has drawn some interesting and profoundly accurate parallels between the condition of ‘state raised convicts’ (people who had literally grown up in penal institutions) and that of the rebellious slaves sold into the gladiator schools of ancient Rome. Both groups suffered extreme dehumanisation and were turned into killers - the gladiators so that they would kill each other for the entertainment of the rich; the state raised convicts so that they would represent the ultimate social folk devil from which ‘normal’ society must be protected and carefully policed against.

By the time I had reached my early twenties I had already spent the bulk of my time locked away in various prison-type institutions and had accumulated a long criminal record, composed mostly of violent offences, which were becoming increasingly more violent. There was therefore a certain inevitability about my arrest for murder in 1980 and subsequent imprisonment for life. Within a year of being sentenced I was involved in a highly publicised hostage taking incident at Parkhurst Prison when an assistant governor was seized in protest over the murder of a prisoner in the hospital wing. I was sentenced to an additional ten years imprisonment, on top of life, and buried in solitary confinement for over four years. At that point my life was effectively over, and yet in a very real sense it was only just beginning. Somehow in the midst of all that hopelessness, pain and repression I actually began to discover my true humanity and experienced a process of deep politicisation which drew me closer to my fellow prisoners and oppressed people everywhere. From a brutalised and anti social criminal I metamorphasised into a totally committed revolutionary.

My politicisation happened while I was being held in solitary confinement and I suppose it had the intensity of a religious conversion almost. I was held in solitary for over four consecutive years at one point and so read and thought a great deal, and began to make connections between the struggle that I’d been fighting all of my life, albeit in an individualistic and self-destructive way, and the far wider struggles of oppressed people everywhere. I was also radicalised by my direct experience of struggle in prison essentially because in its treatment of rebellious prisoners, the state always reveals its true nature which of course is pure fascism. Revolutionary politics helped me to properly contextualise my struggle in prison and also to sustain and inspire me when I experienced repression of the most brutal and soul-destroying sort.

...Malcolm X once described prisons as universities of revolution. I discovered myself in prison and also a sort of freedom that I had never before known - my body might have been imprisoned but my mind and spirit became completely liberated...

What’s it like being in prison?

The pain of my recapture and the soul-destroying reality of being back in prison wounded me terribly and at one point caused me to contemplate offering up my life in one final struggle against the system - but then you made contact and I felt as if I still had some link with the outside.

Life here is much the same; I eat, I exercise, I sleep. Someone once described prisons as huge human battery farms, designed simply to warehouse people and maintain their biological existence. We’re fed (badly), clothed and housed in tiny boxes devoid of even the most basic human comforts. Though physically sustained men are spiritually crushed and driven insane almost routinely.

One day there will be a ‘carnival of the oppressed’ (my favourite description of revolution) and these bastards will be held accountable for their actions.

During summer prison becomes even harder to endure and accept and right now my longing for freedom is so painfully overwhelming and desperate. I want to be away from this awful place and free to wander with the sun on my face and the sounds and colours of summer all around me.

There are moments here, especially in the early mornings when I first awake and struggle to make the psychological adjustment from dreams of freedom to the hard edged reality of captivity, when I feel totally overwhelmed by depression and deep deep sadness. It sometimes requires a real Herculean effort of will power just to climb upright each morning and endure yet another soul-destroying day in this place, another day filled with dead time and frustrated desires, with such a desperate craving for freedom. Prison is a veritable evil exactly because it is so deliberately designed and structured to destroy the human spirit. I feel that psychological and emotional violence very keenly.

The experience of such extreme oppression, however, will never break or diminish me because in a sense I’ve been held captive all my life and so have grown hardened to their efforts of breaking me. Being imprisoned wounds and injures me but never will it touch my essential core, that vital source of strength and resistance. Despite all the pain and hardship of prison, I do somehow manage to survive with dignity and integrity and even humour.

...no matter how overwhelmingly bad the odds, retain a powerful hope and belief in the possibility of struggle and a far better world as a result of it...

I’m fortunate that I have apolitical perspective on prisons and so can universalise my struggle and relate it to the struggle of oppressed people everywhere. That awareness does provide a real source of strength and hope in this situation. In prison, especially you learn to understand the importance of collective struggle and mutual support and there really is no way that I could endure and survive this experience merely as an individual prisoner, depending on my own individual dreams and hopes.

How important is it to write to prisoners?

Prison, more than anything, is designed to isolate and alienate people from any source of support on the outside, and it is exactly that sensation of isolation that often destroys prisoner activists and political prisoners especially. There is no greater feeling of demoralisation than that created by the feeling that one is completely alone and isolated here, because no matter how strong or committed one is we all still need to feel that we are part of a much wider struggle with comrades supporting and assisting us even if they are not physically present. If I know that people on the outside recognise and support my struggle here in prison then I can endure and continue to resist infinitely even if buried in the deepest solitary confinement unit. Your own expressions of solidarity are a constant inspiration and source of so much that makes life bearable at the moment. A single letter is always sufficient to restore my belief in struggling on and reaching beyond all that presently exists to oppress and crush me.
Support John Bowden

leedsabc

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech