FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The National Political Prisoner Coalition today launched the NPPC Quiz, a free, interactive quiz about political repression and imprisonment in the United States. The quiz takes about five minutes, requires no sign-up, and is anonymous.
The quiz opens onto a wall of faces: Bill Haywood, Voltairine de Cleyre, Joan Little, Ben Fletcher, and other Americans imprisoned across more than a century for their politics, their organizing, or their dissent. What follows asks the taker three questions the coalition believes every American should sit with: Where do you stand? What do you do? And how much of this history do you actually know?
What the quiz measures
The NPPC Quiz runs in three parts, with an interlude:
- Values — twelve statements about dissent, due process, solidarity with the imprisoned, and the power of the state. There are no right answers; the section maps where the taker stands across four dimensions — the Right to Dissent, Prisoner Solidarity, Due Process, and Resistance — and names the profile that fits: the Dissent Defender, the Prisoner’s Ally, the Due Process Guardian, or the Resister.
- Engagement — ten concrete forms of prisoner support, from writing letters and sending commissary to court support, bail funds, and clemency campaigns, scored from Witness to Organizer.
- The Numbers — an interlude that asks takers to guess the scale of repression before showing them the documented figures: the United States holds roughly one in five of the world’s prisoners with about 4% of its population; about 70% of people in local jails have not been convicted of any crime; roughly 98% of federal convictions come from plea deals rather than trials; and of some 780 men held at Guantánamo Bay, only about 2% were ever charged with anything.
- Knowledge — twelve questions on the history of political imprisonment in America, from Eugene V. Debs and the Espionage Act through the Palmer Raids, the Smith Act, the Hollywood Ten, COINTELPRO, Executive Order 9066, and Attica.
Why a quiz
Political imprisonment is usually discussed as history or as someone else’s emergency. The coalition built the quiz because the numbers say otherwise — and because almost no one guesses them right. Most takers place the United States’ share of the world’s prisoners far below one in five, and assume people in jail have been convicted of something. The gap between what Americans believe about their justice system and what it actually does is, in the coalition’s view, exactly where public education has to start.
The quiz ends the way the coalition hopes every encounter with this history ends: with something to do. Takers are pointed to volunteer opportunities, active petitions, and the coalition’s prisoner-outreach program, where anyone can write a letter to someone inside.
Take the quiz
The NPPC Quiz is available now at nppc-quiz. It runs in any browser, works on phones, takes about five minutes, and collects no names or emails.
The National Political Prisoner Coalition documents the history and present of political imprisonment in the United States, maintains profiles of more than 7,000 political prisoners across American history, and organizes support for those imprisoned today.
