Date: October 17th
Time: 7PM
Location: Duck & Cover (2123 New Street Bellingham 98225)
Eric King comes to Bellingham to present his forthcoming book “A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon” (PM Press).
Eric King is an anarchist who was imprisoned in 2014 for acts of solidarity with the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising. While in federal custody Eric was indicted for a self-defense incident at FCI-Florence. Eric took it to trial and is one of the absolute few people to ever win at Federal Trial. After his victory Eric 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 Eric coedited the political prisoner anthology Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners. Eric survived years of documented physical and psychological torture and made it out of prison with heart and soul intact.
A Clean Hell is a searing firsthand account from inside the most repressive prison in the United States, a place built not for rehabilitation but for disappearance.
The federal supermax ADX Florence is the most secure facility in the United States, a dungeon of isolation, sensory deprivation, and psychological disintegration. Here, cruelty isn’t accidental; it’s the design. Built in 1995, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” was made to cage the so-called worst of the worst: bombers, gang leaders, political enemies, and anyone the government deems too rebellious, too inconvenient, or too visible.
Among them was antifascist prisoner Eric King, targeted for his politics, brutally tortured by the Bureau of Prisons, and ultimately entombed at ADX after beating a politically motivated federal prosecution. A Clean Hell tells the story of Eric’s decade behind bars: the years of surveillance and retaliation, the years locked in solitary confinement, the reality of being known as a “race traitor,” and the daily acts of resistance that kept him—and others—alive.
More than just a firsthand survival story and exposé, this is a blistering indictment of the carceral state and the sanitized violence it tries to hide. A Clean Hell is a crucial document of solidarity and struggle inside the belly of the beast and required reading for anyone concerned with mass incarceration, political repression, or the inhumane architecture of the US prison system.