Prisoners Of Conscience

An Amnesty International report.

What’s a congressman from Virginia doing in places where bullets fly and babies starve? Thirty years ago, Frank Wolf was elected to the U.S. Congress to address local transportation issues. Fueled by a faith that made him believe he could do something about it, the congressman grew to champion human and religious rights around the world—from cracking down on gang-related crimes in the U.S. to relieving suffering from war, AIDS, and famine in places like Darfur, China, and Bosnia. Eventually, he became a key proponent of opposing radical Jihadists and creating a National Committee on Terrorism. As Wolf visited some of the most dangerous places in the world, he saw firsthand the need for members of Congress to speak out for persecuted people around the globe. In Prisoner of Conscience, he shares intimate stories of his adventures from the halls of political power to other dangerous places around the world, what he has learned along the way, and what you can do about it now.

This remarkable collection of prison literature inspires with the eloquent idealism of prisoners of conscience through the ages. The contributors include many of the world's finest writers: Wole Soyinka, Primo Levi, Irina Ratushinskaya, Fydor Dostoyevsky, Henry Thoreau. There are moving accounts from victims of the Holocaust, Soviet labour camps and psychiatric prisons, nuclear protestors, civil rights and anti-apartheid activists, anti-colonial nationalists and targets of religious persecution throughout history.

This memoir relates one Americans compelling journey of conscience that culminated in a federal prison sentence for a peaceful act of resistance. Kennon was one of twenty-five Americans in a single federal trial to receive the maximum sentence for a petty offense. Six months for a Class B misdemeanor and a $3,000 fine. The introduction, a fast-forward through this offenders life story, clearly reveals the motivations and consequences of this clergymans purposeful act of resistance, in the spirit of Gandhi and King and in the face of a governmental threat of prison time. Chapters 1 through 7 are taken from his contemporaneous prison journal and letters to family members. They tell how he was dealing with what happened each month during the time he was incarcerated. Over the years I have studied corrections as a sociologist and visited inmates as a clergyman. It is a very different experience being a prisoner, writes Kennon. He paints prison life with a mixture of pain and humor that captures the ironic picture of a correctional institution bent on retribution without rehabilitation. Mingled among these pages are his prison poems, reflections, and articles, as well as selected excerpts from wise writings he encountered during his time there. An epilogue gives a glimpse into what has happened since his release and a brief update on the struggle for peace that caused him, and scores of other Americans, to become prisoners of conscience.

From childhood, Ma Thida dreamed of helping others--caring for the sick, sharing information despite censorship, and standing up for people's rights. To stand against the oppression that had been stifling Myanmar's progress for decades, she joined Aung San Suu Kyi and the many other activists in the National League for Democracy, campaigning steadfastly despite intimidation, harassment, and worse. Because of her efforts, the regime sent her to Insein Prison, where she faced serious illness and bleak conditions. However, it was in fighting the obstacles of her imprisonment and following the Buddha's teachings that Ma Thida found what it means to be truly free. In this memoir, readers join Ma Thida on her path through captivity and witness one remarkable woman's courageous quest for truth and dignity.

Prisoners of Conscience continues the work begun by Gerard A. Hauser in Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, winner of the National Communication Association’s Hochmuth Nichols Award. In his new book, Hauser examines the discourse of political prisoners, specifically the discourse of prisoners of conscience, as a form of rhetoric in which the vernacular is the main source of available appeals and the foundation for political agency. Hauser explores how modes of resistance employed by these prisoners constitute what he deems a “thick moral vernacular” rhetoric of human rights. Hauser’s work considers in part how these prisoners convert universal commitments to human dignity, agency, and voice into the moral vernacular of the society and culture to which their rhetoric is addressed. Hauser grounds his study through a series of case studies, each centered on a different rhetorical mechanism brought to bear in the act of resistance. Through a transnational rhetorical analysis of resistance within political prisons, Hauser brings to bear his skills as a rhetorical theorist and critic to illuminate the rhetorical power of resistance as tied to core questions in contemporary humanistic scholarship and public concern.