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“You are not provided any joy, any stimulation—you got to find that yourself… I didn’t understand what weeks and months of silence can do to someone’s psyche. That can tear people apart if you’re not conscious of what’s happening to you.”
by Mansa Musa
The Real News
October 6, 2025
Eric King is a father, poet, activist, and anarchist who was imprisoned in 2014 for acts of solidarity with the Ferguson, MO, uprising in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown. While locked up, King endured years of documented physical and psychological torture, spending the last 18 months of his sentence in the ADX supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with King about how he survived his incarceration “with heart and soul intact,” and about King’s new book, A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious
Dungeon, in which he “opens the doors of America’s most secretive prison and lets the reader step into the cell to experience all the horrors the Federal Bureau of Prisons tries to keep hidden underground.”
Guest:
- Eric King is an anarchist who was imprisoned in 2014 for acts of solidarity with the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising. While in federal custody King was indicted for a self-defense incident at FCI-Florence. King took it to trial and is one of the few people to ever win such a case at a federal trial. After his legal victory, King was sent to the federal supermax ADX, where he spent most of his final two years of his prison bid. During his time in prison King coedited the political prisoner anthology Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners. King survived years of documented physical and psychological torture and made it out of prison with heart and soul intact. He is an activist, antifascist, and loving father and husband who lives in Denver, CO.
Additional links/info:
- Eric King, PM Press, A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon
- Mansa Musa, The Real News Network, “30 political prisoners’ oral histories collected in an unprecedented new book”
- Mansa Musa, The Real News Network, “Imprisoned Ferguson activist ‘assaulted by guards, assaulted by Nazis’”
The post ‘A soul-sucking, desolate hell’: How I survived America’s most secretive supermax prison appeared first on PM Press.
Source: Blog.pmpress.org
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