Lynd's play affirms that utopia is not a lie, even (or perhaps especially) in prison, and Big George remembers the Lucasville prison revolt in ways which offer focus and motivation for struggles against what has become known as 'the prison-industrial complex.'Ģ. Daniel Berrigan writes, 'In Hell they say/Heaven is a great lie' (123). The state would like to sentence the spirit of the Rebellion to oblivion: as Rev.

Likewise, it is the utopian moment of the rebellion which makes its recollection-the task of Staughton Lynd's play Big George- necessary for us. This dimension of the rebellion makes its repression necessary for the state. Under seemingly adverse or even prohibitive conditions, the Lucasville rebellion set in motion a provisional Rainbow Coalition of the oppressed. Instead, the uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility offers glimpses of the 'Not yet, which someday will be.' That is, on a smaller scale it exhibits many of the utopian impulses of other suppressed revolutions, such as the Paris Commune of 1871. If ever there were a tale of mere criminal mischief, the story of the Lucasville insurrection is not it. Among the approximately 200 people currently sentenced to death in Ohio are five who participated in what was very probably the longest prison rebellion in US history, the 1993 Lucasville 'riot': Keith Lamar, Jason Robb, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Namir Abdul Mateen, and George Skatzes.

Mutual animosity