Political activism in prison extended a $70 robbery conviction into a life sentence.

Evidence

In 1961, the eighteen-year-old George Jackson had been sentenced to serve one year to life for armed robbery; allegedly he had used a gun to steal 70 from a gas station. He had been transferred to Soledad in 1969, after experiencing a political transformation akin to Malcolm X's and Cleaver's, but his prison activism turned his 70 conviction into a life sentence. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1033

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s stated goal: here policy (the carceral system punishing political activism) precedes and explains outcomes — a concrete case for testing Kendi’s policy-over-ideas inversion against the narrative that Jackson’s ‘crime’ drove his sentence.