Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Eric King talks to Margaret about navigating and surviving prison after spending nine and half years in a federal prison after firebombing a congress person's office during the Ferguson Uprising.

Guest Info

Eric King (he/him) is an anarchist, a father, a poet, a brutal scrabble player, an adoring Swiftie and an undying anti-fascist.  You can support Eric on IG @supportericking and @rattlingcagesbook as well as at https://supportericking.org/ Eric also co-edited the book Rattling Cages, which can be found at http://rattlingthecages.com/

Host Info

Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Eric King on Surviving Prison

**Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast where it feels like the end times. And this week—I'm really excited about this week—I get to talk to someone that I wanted to talk to you for a very long time, but I wasn't able to because he was in prison. And that's not a good place to talk to people if you don't know them. But what we're going to talk about this week is how to survive prison with Eric King, the recently released anarchist prisoner who spent way too fucking long in a cage. And so we're gonna talk about how to survive being in a cage because it's a thing that we should all be aware of, even if we try to avoid it. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero etwork of Anarchists Podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Margaret ** 01:41 Okay, we're back. So, Eric, if you could introduce yourself with your name, which I already said, and your pronouns, and then why you know something about surviving prison.

**Eric King ** 01:51 Hello, happy to be here. My name is Eric King. I go by he and him. And I spent just about nine—nine and a half years in federal prison after firebombing a congress person's office in Missouri during the Ferguson uprising.

**Margaret ** 02:10 Okay, so, which is I mean, I don't want to... It is good when people act in solidarity, I will just say that. So I think a lot of people are nervous around—I mean, I'll say I'm nervous around incarceration, right. I've only spent two nights total in lockup, and I've never been in general population. And I think it's a kind of a black box. It's sort of a mystery. And I was wondering if you had any advice for people who, whether they're, like currently facing incarceration, or whether they're making decisions based on their ethics that put them at risk of incarceration. I'm wondering if you have, like, and it was a big topic, but like, how do you get ready to go to jail?

**Margaret ** 03:01 Okay.

**Eric King ** 03:02 So I wasn't ready. I'm going to tell you that right now. Um, I got picked up on the streets, just the cops rolled up on me with their machine guns and everything like that. And so I wasn't ready one bit. I didn't have a support team ready, I didn't have funds ready. And honestly, even though I had read books and I watched documentaries, I didn't know how to behave in prison at all. Um, so when I showed up, I was—I got myself in a lot of trouble with both other prisoners and guards, because I was doing a lot of reckless shit. Um, and so if I were to tell people to get ready, my first advice would be, like, to understand where you're at. Like, you're in a county jail, most likely.

**Eric King ** 03:48 And depending on what state you're in, like, that's gonna depend on like the politics of that jail. And there's ways to survive in county jails and there's ways to survive and low security prison, medium security prison, maximum security. And you can get yourself ready for that stuff. You can be ready.

**Margaret ** 04:06 Yeah. Okay, so what kind of prisons were you in?

**Eric King ** 04:11 So I was at a—I started off in a federal pre trial place. It was a it was one ran by CCA, which was just a nightmare because that's one of the private companies. And then, I'm one of the few people ever in the feds have gone to a low, a medium, a USP, and the supermax—the ADX. So I worked my way up, yeah, I did all four custody levels. And so I've seen like how the survival, like, how you have to move and behave. It's 100% different in each one of those. So it takes time to learn to like it's weird.

**Margaret ** 04:49 So what are some of those ways—like, what are some examples of like how you behaved incorrectly when you first found yourself in lockup.

**Eric King ** 04:58 Sure. So when I first got to CCA, I'm on full insurrectionist anarchist time. And I'm refusing to play by the politics of that jail. And that meant that I sat and ate with the black bros. I let ,the gay and trans people, I always worked out with them, you can come work out with me. I watched the Mexican TV—when the Sureños and the Paisas are watching the Spanish channels, I sat with them. And those are things that I got away with because I can fight. If I wasn't ready to throw hands I got destroyed. And so I had a bunch of fights. I've fought all the time.

**Margaret ** 05:41 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 05:41 And then eventually the other races talk to me. They're like, bro, look, you're causing problems for all of us. Like, your behavior—it's cool, we appreciate the solidarity, we saw you on the news, respect. But you're gonna get us in a race war because we're letting you do things that like other people aren't allowed. So you got to cut that shit out.

**Margaret ** 06:02 Right.

**Eric King ** 06:03 Um, so I was still able to gamble with other races. And I was still able to run my boxing class. And so, like, the LGBT people could always we're still involved in the boxing class, because that's from every race. But like, once that was over, I wasn't—I couldn't sit with the black dudes anymore. I couldn't watch the Spanish channel anymore. Just simple shit like that, that people in prison would say, like, duh, duh you idiot. But like, I didn't get that early on.

**Margaret ** 06:33 That makes sense to me. One of the first friends of mine that I talked to about dealing with jail—a white anarchist who spent a bunch of time in jail, about a year or something, I guess prison more than jail. And one—and yeah, he tells me these stories about how, you know, he did the exact same thing. He went and he sat with—he was like, very consciously, he's like, I'm not hanging out with the white supremacists. You know, right? And he was like, alright, I'm gonna go sit with black folks. And, you know, and he grew up on a primarily black neighborhood, and—

**Margaret ** 07:06 And eventually he—eventually he threw this, like birthday party that had everyone come together. But then immediately afterwards, someone tried to kill him.

**Eric King ** 07:06 Same.

**Eric King ** 07:18 [Laughing]

**Margaret ** 07:21 And it was because—they were like, they were like, well, we think you're trying to unite everyone, like, under you. You know, we think you're trying to, like, form this, like, you know—

**Eric King ** 07:33 What gang are you trying to form?

**Margaret ** 07:35 Yeah, exactly. And he ended up being put in solitary, like, ostensibly for his own protection. And, you know, and I think he's spent the rest of his time in prison in solitary as a result of that. And that was like a—okay, so—but that brings up a question that I think that a lot of listeners would have, especially any white listeners, is then, how do you navigate that while still not joining the Nazi gang? And while indicating solidarity with people of other races without—even if you're, like, not trying to disrupt the structure of what's happening inside the jail?

**Eric King ** 08:18 Sure. So the people listening online can't see me. But I have the word "Antifa" tattooed on my face. I made it clear—I made it clear early on, I'm not fucking with these Nazis. I don't care about you dudes. I'm not going to be your friend, I'm not gonna play like I'm your friend. If you come talking around me with that n-word stuff, that race lover stuff, miss me. You can do whatever you want to do, but like, I'm not doing it. And so, to navigate that, you have to be—you have to be willing to fight. Once again, like, you have to show them—and this is important for people, it's important for anyone coming to prison. If you're willing to stand on your beliefs, you can have those beliefs. What they don't respect in any jail, any prison, any custody level, is talk.

**Margaret ** 09:09 Okay.

**Eric King ** 09:09 So if you if you show up in jail, and you're like, trans people are equal, don't be mean to them. But then you watch them bully a trans person. You're a bitch now, like, your word means nothing.

**Margaret ** 09:23 Oh, interesting.

**Eric King ** 09:24 So you don't get to have an opinion anymore.

**Margaret ** 09:26 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 09:26 But if instead, like a Florence Medium for example, we had a person in their name Crazy Pete. That's what—that was what she chose to go by. And some of the wannabe tough guys tried to bulldog her and saying like, oh, you can't—

**Margaret ** 09:43 What's bulldoging?

**Eric King ** 09:44 Oh, I'm sorry. They tried to—

**Margaret ** 09:47 No it's okay. You can use that slang, but you're gonna have to explain it to me.

**Eric King ** 09:50 Okay. Yeah. So they uh—their agenda was to force her out of the unit or to rob her, one of the two. And I said no. Absolutely not. You're not doing this. Ah, my wife and I had already raised money to essentially buy a gay guy out of debt so they wouldn't be sold by the—by some of the other races. And so people already knew like, this is what EK is standing on.

**Margaret ** 10:17 Right.

**Eric King ** 10:18 Um, and so when it came time for the Crazy Pete shit, like, you just show up, and you show up with your weapons, and you show up with your hands, and you stand on it and you say this is not happening.

**Margaret ** 10:29 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 10:30 We can do whatever you guys want to do. And when you take that stand and they know you're serious, it can defuse the entire situation. Um, but if I just spoke from my little chair, no, don't do it be nice...

**Margaret ** 10:45 Right.

**Eric King ** 10:46 Pete would have got fucked up, and I would have got fucked up.

**Margaret ** 10:49 Right.

**Eric King ** 10:50 So that's, that's the first like, I don't want to make prisons seem like it's only violence, but the first way to get people to understand, like, what you're about is to show them what you're about.

**Margaret ** 11:04 Right.

**Eric King ** 11:04 And sometimes that means, like, just telling like some racist dude next to you, like, man cut that shit out. Cut it out. I'm not trying to hear that shit.

**Margaret ** 11:12 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 11:13 Or like, I would not let people say the f-word around me—like the homosexual slur.

**Margaret ** 11:19 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 11:20 You couldn't say it around. If you said around me, I'm calling you out or we're fighting.

**Margaret ** 11:23 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 11:24 And that was, like, these are stances I took. And sometimes you put me in harm's way and sometimes I had to pay the price for that for real.

**Margaret ** 11:32 Right.

**Eric King ** 11:32 But a lot of times it just let me live as me as, oh that's Eric, he's fucking weird. But, you know, he's not a punk. That sort of stuff. If that makes sense.

**Margaret ** 11:44 No, that—that does make sense. The whole kind of, like, so you need to basically not be weak. You need to be—like you need to like—So. Okay, so—

**Eric King ** 11:59 This isn't about winning the fights either just so you know. It's not about, like, being tough. It's about being brave more than anything.

**Margaret ** 12:06 Okay. Okay.

**Eric King ** 12:07 You have to show up on your—on what you believe in. Not other people's, but what you believe in.

**Margaret ** 12:14 How much does, for example, being antifascist alienate you from the rest of the white population? Like are you, lik,e eating alone as a result? Like or like—

**Eric King ** 12:24 No, you can't eat alone. There is no—so like, in the feds when—if people go to federal prison, like, people very likely to catch RICO charges in the next couple of years. Like it happens.

**Margaret ** 12:33 Right.

**Eric King ** 12:34 Um, like that dude whoe just bomdb the abortion clinic in Wisconsin. He's going to the feds.

**Margaret ** 12:38 Okay..

**Eric King ** 12:39 Or not the abortion clinic, the anti-abortion clinic.

**Margaret ** 12:42 Oh, yeah, that makes okay. Yeah, uh huh.

**Eric King ** 12:44 I was like, oh my god.

**Margaret ** 12:45 Yeah, all right. Yeah,

**Eric King ** 12:49 But that dude stood on pro-women's rights stuff.

**Margaret ** 12:53 Right.

**Eric King ** 12:54 Um, and so, I'm going to pretend like he's white. So he's gonna go to the feds and he has to eat with the white guys. You either sitting with white guys, or you're gonna get fucked off the yard.

**Margaret ** 13:05 Right.

**Eric King ** 13:06 And that means—that means beat up, put in PC, and shipped to somewhere else.

**Margaret ** 13:09 Okay, what's PC?

**Eric King ** 13:10 Oh, PC means protective custody. And you can go in there if you're—if you ask to, or they understand that you're going to get hurt.

**Margaret ** 13:19 Okay, so this is what my friend was put in.

**Eric King ** 13:22 Yeah, like your friend. Like they most likely understood this dude's about to get hurt.

**Margaret ** 13:25 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 13:26 Let's get him out of there.

**Margaret ** 13:27 Okay.

**Eric King ** 13:28 And so, you're gonna sit with the white guys. And most likely, like the gang dudes will have like their own little—because whites will have their own separate tables, they'll have like five or six tables.

**Margaret ** 13:38 Okay.

**Eric King ** 13:39 And that's where you eat. And in the federal system, you eat and sit with your state. Like where—what you represent. So I'm from Kansas City, Missouri. I sat at the Missouri table. It was us, Kansas, Oklahoma, and sometimes Chicago—it's like a Midwest table, basically.

**Margaret ** 13:55 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 13:56 And the gang guys—[laughing] might as well. So the gang bros, they would say,, like they have they're like, that's the SAC section, or that's the ABT section. SAC is Soldiers of Aryan Culture. ABT is Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.

**Margaret ** 14:13 Okay.

**Eric King ** 14:13 Um, and so I don't have to fuck with those guys at all. I don't have to associate with you. But like, if they see me doing something they don't like, like for—I taught the yoga class that Florence and I allowed all racists and sexualities, you're coming to this yoga class.

**Margaret ** 14:31 Right.

**Eric King ** 14:31 So sometimes some of the—some of the dudes would come to me and be like, hey, man why do you got this n-word in your class? Or why do you got this gay dude in your class? And then you just have to tell them, like, you're not my fucking boss. Get out my face.

**Margaret ** 14:45 Right.

**Eric King ** 14:45 I don't answer to you. I'm not in your gang.

**Margaret ** 14:47 Right.

**Eric King ** 14:48 Um, and so sometimes they go to your rep. Each car has a rep.

**Margaret ** 14:55 What's a car?

**Eric King ** 14:56 Okay, yeah, my bad.

**Margaret ** 14:58 No, it's okay. Yeah, I'm just gonna say it for the audience.

**Eric King ** 15:02 I'm from Missouri, so that's called the Missouri car. It's like our group.

**Margaret ** 15:06 Okay

**Eric King ** 15:06 You're in that car.

**Margaret ** 15:07 Okay, which is separate from a gang.

**Eric King ** 15:10 Yeah. Because we're not trying to make money.

**Margaret ** 15:14 Ah, okay.

**Eric King ** 15:15 Like, if someone attacked a member of my car unprovoked, like, without us knowing about it, I could then be called to have to go and retaliate against that person.

**Margaret ** 15:25 Right.

**Eric King ** 15:25 Even though it's not a gang.

**Margaret ** 15:27 Right.

**Eric King ** 15:27 You still assaulted our group, and so—it's a group with our money making scheme.

**Margaret ** 15:33 Right, okay.

**Eric King ** 15:34 And so, I—if that gang had a problem with me, they would then have to go to the head of my car, someone who had a lot of respect, been down for a minute, and tell them like, we want EK, to shape up or we want EK off the yard. My car would then decide to either talk to me, fuck me up, or tell the gang did kick rocks. Like leave us alone.

**Margaret ** 15:56 Right.

**Eric King ** 15:57 And so, depending on how that went, depends on how far it goes. But I never got fucked off yard, so.

**Margaret ** 16:06 So it worked, but it was a it was a tricky situation to do.

**Eric King ** 16:09 It's so tricky, because  one wrong move—and this is what I hope anyone going to prison in the future always understands—you have to always be respectful, even if you hate someone.

**Margaret ** 16:19 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 16:20 So if somebody with a swastika on his face comes up and tells me to do something, I can't say like, fuck you Nazi bitch—Nazi jerk.

**Margaret ** 16:28 That's fine. Yeah.

**Eric King ** 16:29 Okay, but I can't say that to them. I will get stabbed.

**Margaret ** 16:32 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 16:33 And not hypothetically, like literally.

**Margaret ** 16:35 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 16:36 So I have to say to them, like, hey, man, I understand, you have your beliefs. I get that. But I'm doing me right now, and I'd appreciate you just let me do my time. Stuff like that. That's how you have to talk, until it's done talking.

**Margaret ** 16:49 Okay, and is that kind of how you would like—okay, another anecdote that's not mine. Another one of my friends who spent about half a year in prison for a while and is—he told me that his cellmate was the tattooist for the Nazi gang in the jail.

**Eric King ** 17:06 That sucks.

**Margaret ** 17:07 Yeah. And so the Nazi kept being like, hey, you got to join us. And my friend kept being like—the way that my friend handled this, and I'm curious, your take on this. Basically, he was like, he was like, no, I can't. I'm already in a gang. I'm an anarchist.

**Eric King ** 17:23 Oh!

**Margaret ** 17:24 And it—and then the the cellmate didn't really buy it until there was a noise demo outside for my friend. And so then there's all these people with circle A's and fireworks outside. And it was just like—yeah, so now th cellmate's like, oh, I get it. You're already in a gang. They just, it's fine. And then they like stop trying to recruit him at that point and they were able to live in peace, which is an awkward—it seems like the things that we assume about how to interact with people and how to carry ourselves on the outside don't relate to how we have to do it on the inside. Is that kind of—

**Eric King ** 18:00 Hell no they don't.

**Margaret ** 18:02 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 18:03 But so your friends situation worked because it was a jail.

**Margaret ** 18:07 Yeah, uh huh.

**Eric King ** 18:09 Like in a jail—jails are so different than prison.

**Margaret ** 18:12 Okay.

**Eric King ** 18:13 Because it's short term. All custody levels are mixed in there.

**Margaret ** 18:18 Right.

**Eric King ** 18:18 There's not going to be as much racial like—the dynamics aren't as aggressive because you're all from the same place. You're all from Kansas City or New York or whatever.

**Margaret ** 18:29 Uh huh.

**Eric King ** 18:30 Um, so the—it's not split up like that. So if I was in a jail and some dude told me to join his gang, I'd probably laugh in his face.

**Margaret ** 18:38 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 18:39 Like unless he was seriously dangerous, like your friend did the right thing. Just got the attention to, look how I had this over here.

**Margaret ** 18:46 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 18:47 Because apparently that dude, that gang dude thought like, that's what you respected. He respected someone that was—that stood on something. Basically, you already stand for something.

**Margaret ** 18:55 Right.

**Eric King ** 18:56 Um, but also if you—if you go to a lower custody federal prison, like let's say you go to a low—I started out low.

**Margaret ** 19:03 Okay.

**Eric King ** 19:03 There's no gang members there. No gang is going to recruit you there.

**Margaret ** 19:07 Right.

**Eric King ** 19:07 Those dudes, they can't do anything there. So like, that—you don't have to worry about that in a lower custody level. Some dude tried to press you at a federal low, you could laugh right in their face.

**Margaret ** 19:22 Right.

**Eric King ** 19:23 You soft mother fucker. Get away from me.

**Margaret ** 19:25 Because it's not—the lows are not run by gangs as much. Is that the—or at all?

**Eric King ** 19:31 No. Yeah, they're run by sex offenders.

**Margaret ** 19:34 Oh, interesting.

**Eric King ** 19:35 Those security federal prisons, that's where they put the vast—the nonviolent sex offenders, the first time—first time nonviolent offenders, like I started low. I'm a first time offender with a college education. I'm not a threat to them. So even though I have this charge, they don't care. I go to low. Um, and so that's where, like, white collar people, they go to lows.

**Margaret ** 19:59 Right.

**Eric King ** 19:59 Um, big time rats in informants go to lows.

**Margaret ** 20:04 Okay.

**Eric King ** 20:05 So if you see a gang member there trying to push that line, or some racial dude trying to push that line with you—and push that line means trying to force his agenda on you—you can basically tell him, like, if you want to do that shit, go pop yourself up to a higher custody level.

**Margaret ** 20:19 Right.

**Eric King ** 20:20 If that's where you want to be, go be there, but I like walking outside and playing tennis. So leave me alone.

**Margaret ** 20:26 Right. Okay but then—

**Eric King ** 20:27 Lower custody levels are sweet.

**Margaret ** 20:29 Okay, so then this brings up the question, because it seems like one of the other things that one would hope to not do is have what happened to you happen, where you got escalated up.

**Eric King ** 20:38 Oh shit. It was crazy! I've never seen nothing like it since I've been in.

**Margaret ** 20:41 Was it your behavior? Or was it some decisions that they made around your politics or like what—what caused you to end up escalated?

**Eric King ** 20:47 So, and this is something that all activists and radicals, especially white ones, need to worry about. Because like, honestly, like the white guards don't really bother the other races about their politics. They just assume you have bad politics in their eyes.

**Margaret ** 21:00 Right.

**Eric King ** 21:00 But so for white guys, they see you as a race traitor.

**Eric King ** 21:04 So when I got to Englewoo I was doing fine, but the cops there would harass me relentlessly. So I'd get called to SIS almost on a daily basis. SIS is like the FBI inside the prison system. Special Investigative Services.

**Margaret ** 21:04 Okay.

**Margaret ** 21:21 Okay.

**Eric King ** 21:22 And so they had—if you're an activist, or you have one of our charges, they have to read it approve your mail, they have to live listen to your phone calls, like, they make it a burden.

**Margaret ** 21:31 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 21:31 And so these pigs would call me to their office every other day, like, what do you mean in this email, what do you mean in this email? And then I would have my books confiscated on a seemingly weekly basis, they would just coming to my cell, take all my literature, all my writing materials, keep them for a week until—until I filed to region, and then they'd give them back. Um, and so I got bumped up in custody level because one day I was in the—I had a beef with these guards at visiting because they kept harassing my kids. They kept trying to get my kids by the sex offenders.

**Margaret ** 22:06 Oh, god.

**Eric King ** 22:06 I was like, just stop it. Like, leave us alone. I don't bother you.

**Margaret ** 22:10 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 22:12 And so, well I got an argument was one of them in the bathroom, and you're not gonna believe me when I tell you this, but this officer had the gall to tell me he was gonna have his little boys beat up my daughter's in their school.

**Margaret ** 22:23 Damn.

**Eric King ** 22:24 I reported it right then. I had one of the other guards go call the lieutenant. The lieutenant remove that guard from visiting. Well, the next day, I had gone to psych because I was so angry with being in prison and they told me, like, write down your anger in a poem. Write it down in writing form.

**Margaret ** 22:26 Right.

**Eric King ** 22:26 So I did. And I mailed to my wife. Well, SIS takes that letter and accuses me of threatening staff.

**Margaret ** 22:50 All right. Yep.

**Eric King ** 22:52 So they chained me up and that day drive me to Florence medium and put me right in the SHU. That day.

**Margaret ** 22:57 Yeah. And SHU is solitary. That's one I do know.

**Eric King ** 23:00 Yeah. Yeah. Special Housing Unit is what they try to—try to call it in Orwellian speak.

**Margaret ** 23:06 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 23:06 Nothing special about it.

**Margaret ** 23:08 Yeah, well, it's—it's certainly not normal to spend all your time alone.

**Eric King ** 23:12 [Laughing] Fair enough.

**Margaret ** 23:13 And not like in a fun hermit way where, like, you're Thoreau and your mom brings you your lunch.

**Eric King ** 23:22 [Laughing] Then then I just kept progressively, like—I don't know if you know what happened me at Florence medium to where my politics pissed off food because I—Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

**Margaret ** 23:31 No, no, I'm—you should tell the story. I've—I've read a version of it, but you should tell me and the audience what is safe for you to tell?

**Margaret ** 23:40 Right.

**Eric King ** 23:40 Yeah, I was—I was politically active as hell on Florence medium. Um, like I told you I ride with Crazy Pete, do my yoga class.

**Eric King ** 23:42 Um, and I made—I had good friends there. There's people that accepted me there for me. I had tons of fights with uh, with the bigots, but that is just what happens. But so the staff there hated me. I would write articles calling them out. I would, I would put it in calling campaigns about their, how they treated vegan meals, how they treated the Muslims, how they treated the gay—the gay folks. So I beefed them all the time. And then one day I—a lieutenant got beat up. And I sent my wife an email laughing about it. Yeah, cuz I know they have to read my email. So it's not—

**Margaret ** 24:24 Yeah, it's a bad idea. But I understand—

**Eric King ** 24:26 Yeah, yeah. If you go to prison, don't do this. Don't instigate them. They will give you what you want.

**Eric King ** 24:31 They'll show you how real they are. So they call me lieutenant's office, dude throws his big hissy fit, starts calling me a terrorist and all sorts of crazy shit. I laugh in his face because it's so uncomfortable. He pushes me—punches me, and I dog walk him. A dog walking means, it means you beat someone's ass.

**Margaret ** 24:31 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 24:52 Um, so after I got punched twice by this cat, I dog walk him. And then the guards proceed to, you know, beat me half to death, strangle me, choke me, and then put me in four point restraints for seven hours. And those are when you are handcuffed on a steel bed, stretched as far as your body can go, left arm at this corner, right arm at that corner, your legs spread doing the same thing. And they leave you there. I was mostly naked, sometimes in my underwear. Um, and sometimes, like, the captain would come in and bring in a plastic shield—like a riot shield—and strangle—he put it over my face and pushed on it. So they'd choke me.

**Margaret ** 24:52 Oh my god. Uh huh.

**Margaret ** 24:52 Alright.

**Eric King ** 24:56 And other times he'd come in and just put his hand over my mouth. He'd tell me, like, we're gonna get you fucked up. We're gonna rape you. We're gonna get you raped.

**Margaret ** 25:14 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 25:15 You wanna be a tough guy.

**Margaret ** 25:26 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 25:28 So that's what got me moved up to the USP system from Florence. That's how I went from medium to high. And then when I—they prosecuted me for that. They said, I assaulted him.

**Margaret ** 25:52 Right.

**Eric King ** 25:53 So I had—I took him to trial, I refused to take a plea deal. I took it to trial. And when I won, that's when they moved me up to the supermax, the ADX were El Chapo is and the Unibomber, all those guys.

**Margaret ** 26:04 Punish—that—I mean, all of them were just punishment, but that one was like extra punishment. You got found innocent of assaulting a guard so they put you in supermax. Is that pretty much—?

**Eric King ** 26:13 So, I don't want to minimize but, like, you know,you—we just talked about noise demos.

**Margaret ** 26:18  Yeah.

**Eric King ** 26:19 A second ago—your friend, like, you know what they are?

**Margaret ** 26:21 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 26:22 Um, when I was pre trial, they held me in the Englewood SHU for two and a half years. And I was there—and this will happen other activists if you use your voice—they took away my mail, my phone, my email, my visits. I had no communication. I could only write my wife. And people I don't know, I don't know these people, but they didn't always demo New Year's for me one year, and they record it—like it was on live stream. So they had banners and bull horns and fireworks.

**Margaret ** 26:49 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 26:50 And one of them I think busted up a cop car.

**Margaret ** 26:53 All right.

**Eric King ** 26:53 And so they accused me of organizing and Antifa riot. And so I gotta rioting shot. That's one of the most serious shots you can get.

**Margaret ** 27:02 Yeah, even though what happened outside the jail and you had no—

**Eric King ** 27:04 I had nothing to do with it.

**Margaret ** 27:06 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 27:06 Um, so that noise demo was listed on my ADX referral—you have to have a referral and it has to—you have to have an interview. And under the thing it said, like, Mr. King planned and organized an Antifa protest and Antifa threats against staff. So that's what happened, like, when Trump became president. [Laughing] Things got real ugly for antifascists.

**Margaret ** 27:27 Yeah. Okay. Well—god, that brings up so many questions. So one of them is, like—

**Eric King ** 27:32 What about noise demo.

**Margaret ** 27:35 Yeah, exactly. That's kind of my question is, like, should people—there's probably not a right answer, but it's like, when do we have noise demos? Like, when is it useful to a prisoner and when does it interfere with the prisoner's ability to get by in jail?

**Eric King ** 27:53 So before this happened, if you would have asked me, EK, do you want a noise demo and people to show up at a prison and go crazy for you? My answer would have been enthusiastically yes. Because, especially a jail too, like, jails are different. Always. They do not have the same—it's not the same.

**Margaret ** 28:09 Right.

**Eric King ** 28:10 So visibility can keep people alive. That's something that supporters and you know. Like, you letting the jail know that, like, I see what you're doing to my loved one, my friend, my comrade. Ee're watching you. We're recording you...

**Margaret ** 28:22 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 28:23 That helps. I'm not kidding. That can save someone's life.

**Eric King ** 28:26 In a federal prison, um, I wouldn't recommend doing noise demos at federal prisons anymore, honestly. I don't know—I don't know the—I just think there's better ways to support federal prisoners going—this is gonna sound, you know, stupid and anti-anarchist. But like, we can pressure them using administrators, using politicians, using these people at higher institutions, higher levels of government, because like Cory—Cory Bush, like they were calling the bureau for me. The congressperson from Ferguson?

**Margaret ** 28:26 Yeah.

**Margaret ** 29:04 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 29:05 Different congresspeople from Denver, were calling from me saying, like, why are you guys doing this to this dude, what is going on?

**Margaret ** 29:13 So—go ahead, go ahead.

**Eric King ** 29:14 I was just gonna say, like, we can put pressure without putting boots on our own necks.

**Margaret ** 29:20 No, that makes sense to me. And I think that—I think that we do well when we stay tied into the larger movements that we're part of, and when w,e like, when we show—when we ask for solidarity from groups that we've been showing solidarity with, you know, like, like, because like, you were in jail for solidarity action. And so then folks calling and being like, well what the hell are you doing to him? Make sense to me, you know?

**Eric King ** 29:47 Yeah. And it worked. Like, that's the only thing that's worked for me.

**Margaret ** 29:52 Yeah. Well did you spend the rest of your time in maximum at that point?

**Eric King ** 29:55 So after doing the two and a half years in the SHU for pre trial, they, they sent me to some other prisons to do my ADX referral. Because it's a big like legal referral process. And then when I finally got accepted and approved, they flew me right back to Colorado. So I went from Virginia, all the way back to Colorado, and then I spent the last year and five months at the supermax and ADX, yeah.

**Margaret ** 30:23 Okay.

**Eric King ** 30:24 They did not like me there.

**Margaret ** 30:26 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 30:27 And those—Nazis. They are Nazis. If you look on their Facebook pages, they are full throttle white power, you know, patriot—we're patriots, they're their cry baby, like, Nazis.

**Margaret ** 30:42 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 30:43 It is stunning what they're about.

**Margaret ** 30:46 That doesn't surprise me.

**Eric King ** 30:47 [Laughing]

**Margaret ** 30:50 All right. How do you—you spent two and a half years in solitary.

**Eric King ** 30:55 I spent seven and a half years in solitary.

**Margaret ** 30:58 Oh, Jesus. Okay.

**Eric King ** 30:59 Two and a half just on this pretrial.

**Margaret ** 31:01  Yeah.

**Eric King ** 31:01 It was a part of a five and a half year stretch.

**Margaret ** 31:04 So obviously that is a very different thing to survive than general population.

**Eric King ** 31:08 Yes. It's hard.

**Margaret ** 31:10 How do you do it? I obviously since, I spent one night alone in jail, I obviously understand it completely, because I did one night, but you did seven and a half years.

**Eric King ** 31:20 You are the expert.

**Margaret ** 31:20 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But how'd you do it?

**Eric King ** 31:28 I can break it down. So I didn't realize—when I first came to jail, like when I was in the county, like pretrial the first time, I didn't nine and a half months straight because I fucked up a lieutenant. Because I thought it was, like, serving the revolution. I thought I was like being a good anarchist. And so, once again, SHU in county jail is different. Anyone can survive that. You get visits, you get phone calls, you get food you get sometimes even TV and tablet. But when you get to the feds, or probably the state too, it's different. And when you do long stretches, um, for me, it came in waves were like, I'd be doing really good for like three months, I'd be working out every day, I have a routine. You have to have a routine, do your burpees, do your push ups, do your abs and calisthenics and yoga. Make it—set a time where I'm going to write letters from this time to this time. Like make it, like, if you make a routine, it becomes an important part of your day. And then when you finish doing it, you feel like you accomplished something. Now your day wasn't worthless.

**Margaret ** 32:15 Right.

**Eric King ** 32:24 Now you have purpose to your day. But also, like for me, like, I'm not gonna lie, I went through a lot of depression—like depressive periods.

**Margaret ** 32:34 Yeah.

**Eric King ** 32:35 And when that happens, you really have to check in with yourself and you have to be vulnerable with the people that love you. If, like, my wife would write me sometimes I write or some bullshit letter and she'd have to call me out being like, dude, like, you're hurting and you're not talking about it and it's not