“Behind Enemy Lines” is a song about how the prison industrial complex is used against ethnic minorities in America to perpetuate the political status quo and to undermine their civil rights and human rights.

The song opens with sounds from inside a prison with lines written to illustrate how nothing about prison life is designed to make you feel like a human being.

The first verse goes on to explore how generation after generation gets pulled into the toxic prison environment for political reasons, starting with the story of the Hampton Family. Black Panther and Civil Rights Activist Activist Fred Hampton’s granddaughter is waiting for her father to be released from jail after being accused of bombing a Korean grocery store. The Black Panthers were often accused of violence they did not commit in an effort to entrap them in the prison system. These frame jobs were designed to neutralize the social impact the activists were having and to break their spirits. Her famously eloquent and intelligent grandfather Fred Hampton Sr. was murdered in his bed, in the middle of the night, by corrupt Chicago police officers and F.B.I. agents in 1969.

The hook reinforces the truth about how jails and prisons are being used by our corrupt politicians to crush people’s right to petition the government, as part of a master plan of oppression of the masses.

The next interlude reveals the limited human contact prisoners are allowed with loved ones when incarcerated. It also reveals that the prisons make money off of the prison commissary system.

Other side effects of the prison industrial complex include the perpetuation of a cycle of violence in our communities that forces people to adopt a violent lifestyle just to survive in a violent world. Poverty creates desperation that often leads to crime and mental illness. All of this leads to more heartache and suffering for communities and families. Law enforcement is not the cure for poverty and the unjust laws we are subjected to only exacerbate it.

The second hook that closes the track solidifies the message of the song: our prison system is not one of social redemption and rehabilitation but a cruel machine that is being used to keep poor working people and ethnic minorities oppressed.