On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

In the class on freedom I taught in prison, we read works by dissidents under communism. Soviet political prisoners spoke of the “little zone,” their concentration camp, and the “big zone,” the USSR itself. American incarcerated students, once they heard this formulation, picked it up and applied it to the United States. They were not doing this to provoke me, though I did find it startling. It just fit an experience. The extreme immobility of prison (little zone) seemed to them to be the focal point of the immobilization they had experienced their whole lives (big zone). These incarcerated students were not cynical: they had competed to be admitted to the university program, they wanted to earn a degree, and they were working at a high level. It was rather that they had begun their lives in an America where social policies to aid mobility had largely collapsed, in a way especially unfavorable to them. The idea that Black people were proto-criminals worked against the welfare state, even as white politicians defined policies of social mobility as a benefit for Black people.