At a time when the world was changing, the Black Panther Party in Oakland came along to transform the US civil rights movement. How has the world changed (or not) since? What lessons can we learn from the Panthers' radical perspective on US society? Judy Juanita, a member of the party in its early days, describes in her debut novel those times and the people she knew.

Prisons and jails seal people off from their communities; they are zones of isolation and containment. That's a common view, and one that Rashad Shabazz contests. He argues that prisons are in fact porous in a way that threatens the lives of many people living in poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Shabazz describes what he calls forced internal migration and the politics of HIV/AIDS.

If the problem is violence against women, is the solution the criminal justice system? Many anti-violence activists look to the police, prisons, and stepped-up criminalization for help and protection, but Beth Richie says that's a misguided approach, one that feeds the buildup of what she calls a prison nation. Richie describes the contours of the prison nation and the threats it poses to women on the margins.

Last month at Left Forum, Amiri Baraka, Bill Fletcher, Jr., and Haki Madhubuti debated the merits of the late Manning Marable's controversial biography of Malcolm X. And three plays written by Tom Stoppard consider a host of nineteenth-century Russian radicals. Patrick Dooley's Shotgun Players is staging the trilogy's first installment.

What does revolution mean to movement elders Grace Lee Boggs and Angela Davis? What should it encompass, and whom should it involve? Boggs and Davis spoke recently in Berkeley. And Daniel Rasmussen tells the story of the largest slave revolt in US history, which took place in 1811 in and around New Orleans.

What are the real reasons for this nation's unprecedented (in world history) boom in incarceration? Is the prison a tool to fight crime, or does it serve an entirely different purpose? And what about the notion of a prison-industrial complex: does that have any relation to reality? Loïc Wacquant analyzes the rise of the penal state in the context of sustained assaults on welfare and the collapse of the Black ghetto. (Encore presentation.)