Not the Usual Suspects: The Politics of the Prison Boom
by Marie Gottschalk
Throughout American history, politicians and public officials have exploited public anxieties about crime and disorder for political gain. The difference today is that these political strategies and public anxieties have come together in the perfect storm. They have radically transformed U.S. penal policies, spurring an unprecedented prison boom. Since the early 1970s, the U.S. prisoner population has increased by more than fivefold. Today the United States is the world’s warden, incarcerating a higher proportion of its people than any other country.
How did this happen? Why didn’t politicians from Republican Barry Goldwater to Democrat Bill Clinton face more public opposition to the proliferation of harsh talk and harsh penalties, like mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, life sentences, and capital punishment? After all, public opinion polls show that Americans’ views of crime and punishment are not uniformly harsh. Indeed, it wasn’t until the early 1990s--two decades into the prison boom and just as the crime rate was plummeting--that the public identified crime as a leading national problem.
Liberal disillusionment with rehabilitation beginning in the 1970s together with attacks from the right and left on sen-tencing policy (notably indeterminate sentences) certainly provided major openings for penal policy to shift radically in the United States. The profitable prison-industrial complex and conservative groups, like the National Rifle Association, were also key players in promoting hard-line policies. But the picture is more complex than that.
Other groups, some of which are not the usual suspects, helped facilitate, often unwittingly, a more punitive environ-ment. Four movements in particular mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims’ rights movement, the women’s movement, the prisoners’ rights movement, and opponents of capital punishment. The distinctive origins and development of these movements help explain why such a massive carceral state took root in the United States but not in other industrialized countries facing similar crime patterns and similar temptations to exploit law-and-order issues.
The Victims’ Rights Movement
Three decades ago, the United States gave birth to a formidable victims’ movement that was highly retributive and punitive. Victims became a powerful weapon in the arsenal of proponents of tougher penal policies. In a way not seen in other Western countries, penal conservatives successfully framed the issue as a zero-sum game that pitted the rights of victims against the rights of offenders. This movement was remarkably in sync with the country’s growing penal conserva-tism and relatively immune from critical examination.
A highly retributive victims’ movement centered on meting out tougher penalties to offenders coalesced in the United States but not elsewhere for several reasons. The greater development of and public support for social welfare programs in other Western countries help explain why.
Britain and New Zealand, not the United States, were pioneers in making the plight of crime victims a public issue. British interest in victims first took root in the 1950s when confidence in the welfare state and sympathy for offenders were still high, and law and order was not yet a major factor in national politics. Elite pe-nal reformers with extensive experience in helping offenders were at the forefront of drawing public attention to victim-related issues. Victims themselves did not wage a mass campaign. Indeed, they were largely silent and unorganized.
The British government sought to avoid galvanizing a broad victims’ movement. At each stage in the debate over crime victims, the British Home Office was reasonably successful in steering and co-opting the growing public concern for victims. This made it tougher for law-and-order penal conservatives to exploit the victims issue for political gain.
With the passage of landmark victims’ compensation schemes in the 1960s, reformers in Britain and New Zealand sought to bestow compensation on crime victims much as the expanding welfare state bestowed housing, education, and medical services on its clients. In doing so, penal reformers denied crime victims a powerful political identity independent from that of other victims of misfortune. This undermined the political salience of the crime victim issue. It opened up an important avenue to be supportive of crime victims by bolstering the welfare state rather than by expanding the criminal justice system.
This issue developed quite differently in the United States. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the United States became a pioneer in the use of large-scale victimization surveys. The U.S. surveys discovered that the level of victimization was much higher than previously indicated by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). This fostered the belief that much crime went unreported and thus unprosecuted. Concern grew that uncooperative victims and witnesses were undermining the efficiency and operations of the criminal justice system. These narrow surveys did not investigate a wide range of other issues related to victimization. The accepted conventional wisdom was that crime victims were punitive, even though the limited psychological evidence available at the time suggested that retribution and tougher law enforcement did not address victims’ primary needs.
Largely because of the victimization surveys, improving the efficiency of the criminal justice system became the main goal of hundreds of new government-funded victim and witness programs in the United States. These programs became the nucleus of the victims’ rights movement. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, created by Congress in 1968 as an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, was pivotal in creating a victims’ movement that viewed the rights of victims as a zero-sum game predicated on tougher penalties for offenders. The LEAA funded some of the leading victimization studies. It also provided crucial support for key victims’ organizations, like the National Organization for Victim As-sistance (NOVA), and hundreds of victim and witness programs designed to increase cooperation with prosecutors and the police.
By the early 1980s, interest in the plight of crime victims was intense in the United States. There was a flurry of legis-lative and other political activity, thanks in part to government-supported organizations like NOVA. Victim advocacy groups played a prominent role in the formation and passage of measures that enlarged victims’ rights and that tough-ened penalties for offenders at the federal, state, and local levels. In a keynote address at a NOVA conference in 1992, then Attorney General William P. Barr credited the victims’ rights movement with restoring “proper balance” in the criminal justice system. “We should not forget that justice is done when people get what they deserve,” Barr declared.
Governmental organizations were not the only ones that exploited the victims issue to promote hard-line penal poli-cies. So did many law-enforcement groups. For example, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the state’s powerful prison guards’ union, provided office space and virtually all the funding for the Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau (renamed the Crime Victims Action Alliance), a fierce advocate of three-strikes legislation and other tough measures.
Many so-called victims’ advocates drew a stark line in the public mind between crime victims and criminals, even though many perpetrators have themselves been victims of violent crime. The U.S. victims’ movement also largely ignored the fact that incarcerated men and women are regularly victimized by a brutal penal system in which prison rape, assaults by correctional officers, and unsanitary, even life-threatening, living conditions are commonplace.
The All-Powerful Prosecutor
The relative weakness of the U.S. welfare state, the proliferation of victimization surveys, and strong government support for victims’ rights organizations were not the only reasons why a punitive victims’ movement took hold here but not elsewhere. Another important difference is the unique role of the public prosecutor in the U.S. legal system. The United States made the transformation from private prosecution to public prosecution earlier on and more extensively than many European countries.
As a consequence, the government historically has monopolized the prosecution process to a much greater extent, leaving victims far more marginalized in the U.S. legal system.
U.S. prosecutors possess huge discretionary powers that the courts have consistently left largely unchecked in key areas, including the initial decision to press charges, what level to charge a suspect, and when to terminate prosecution. Attempts by victims and other private individuals to compel prosecution are usually not successful. Until the advent of the victims’ rights movement, the victim’s role in the U.S. legal process was largely confined to that of a witness in a criminal proceeding. By contrast, victims in many other Western countries traditionally have enjoyed considerable rights to partici-pate in the prosecution of a case.
The common-law judicial system that prevails in the United States further compounded the marginalization of victims and ignited calls for victims’ rights. This accusatorial legal system demands more of victims and incites greater animosities than the inquisitorial, less adversarial legal system that prevails in much of continental Europe. In the United States, the prosecution and the defense have equal standing before the courts, which are relatively passive in developing the case. Defense attorneys go to war with prosecutors as they attempt to tear apart the state’s case. In the process, victims and their claims often are put on trial as well.
In the common-law system, the focus is on eliciting the facts relevant to determining guilt or innocence. Elsewhere, for example in the Netherlands, the public trial mainly serves as a check on whether the investigations have been carried out properly. A greater portion of the trial is devoted to understanding the personal circumstances and why the offense oc-curred. In the European continental system, judges play a more active role in shaping the case by controlling the legal proceedings, including the calling and questioning of witnesses.
Differences in the legal training, professional norms, and career paths of prosecutors and judges are another reason why victims’ rights became such a flashpoint in the U.S. war on crime. Most prosecutors and many judges in the United States are either elected or nominated and confirmed through a political process. This makes them highly dependent on public ap-proval and more vulnerable to political pressures. By contrast, many other Western countries rely on career prosecutors and career judges with specialized training and education to run their legal systems. Once the victims’ rights movement burst forth, U.S. prosecutors and judges were forced to respond to its punitive demands or risk being voted out of office.
The Women’s Movement
Politicians of all stripes, including Goldwater, George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, promulgated the politically potent--but highly misleading--image of white women, preyed on by strangers, as the most likely victims of vio-lent crime. But leading politicians had considerable help from women’s groups in feminizing the crime issue and taking it in a more punitive direction.
Women’s groups and feminists in the United States have a long and conflicted history on questions related to crime, punishment, and law and order. Periodically, they have played central roles in defining violence as a major threat to soci-ety and uncritically pushing for more policing powers. The U.S. victims’ rights movement coalesced at about the same time that women’s groups were mobilizing against rape and domestic violence. This had important consequences for the growth of the carceral state.
The contemporary women’s movement in the United States was among the first to draw widespread attention to the issue of violence against women in the 1970s. By some measures, the U.S. anti-rape and domestic violence movements were remarkably successful.
Nearly every state enacted legislation designed to make it easier to convict and punish people accused of sexual as-sault or domestic violence. These reforms had significant effects on public attitudes. On the positive side, more services became available for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Public officials and members of law enforcement were sensitized to these issues in ways they had not been before. On the negative side, these movements, with their em-phasis on law enforcement solutions, bolstered a more punitive climate.
Feminists allied themselves with law-and-order groups to secure rape reform and domestic violence legislation. If they hadn’t, the simmering backlash against the women’s movement in the 1970s likely would have derailed their efforts in many state legislatures. The costs of these alliances were high. In Washington State, for example, the women’s lobby marketed a rape reform bill to the legislature as a law-and-order bill.
The measure was eventually enacted in July 1975, in part by riding on the coattails of a new mandatory death penalty statute. In California, the rape shield statute was named the Robbins Rape Evidence Law in honor of its co-sponsor, conservative state senator Alan Robbins.
In pressing for limits on the cross-examination of rape victims, including questions about their sexual history, women’s groups generally did not consider what effect such measures would have on a defendant’s right to due process. At the time, this right was under assault as the war on crime intensified. Legal aid societies and civil libertarians were challenging the constitutionality of rape shield laws and other legal reforms designed to protect sexual assault victims.
Mainstream national women’s organizations, notably the National Organization for Women, are credited with putting rape and later domestic violence on the national agenda. But the original rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women in the United States had strong local and radical origins. Over the years, many of these centers and shelters were dramatically transformed.
Apolitical and conservative professionals replaced many of the highly politicized volunteers and staff members who had established these facilities. Shelters and centers cast aside their initial concerns about being too closely associated with the government and developed formal and informal ties with police, prosecutors, hospitals, and social service agen-cies. They became more dependent on government money and more supportive of law enforcement solutions, like stiffer penalties, mandatory arrests, and no-drop policies. Shelters in the United States faced greater pressure to secure gov-ernment funding because the U.S. welfare state is comparatively less developed. British shelters could fund themselves primarily by charging rent to their residents, many of whom received financial support from the government.
Many U.S. shelters and centers had modest goals that turned out to be quite compatible with the growing conserva-tive law-and-order movement. They sought to press public officials to manage violence and eschewed any broader cri-tique of the government’s role in the war against crime. In the process, rape and domestic violence were increasingly re-defined as individual, psychological traumas. This seemingly apolitical view of violence against women complemented the conservative view that attributed the increase in crime to the pathologies of individual criminals and not to deeper social, economic, and political problems in the United States.
It also was compatible with the proliferation of dehumanized images of black criminals preying on innocent white vic-tims, best exemplified by the infamous Willie Horton commercials of the 1988 presidential campaign.
These ads featured the mug shot of a black man who attacked a white couple while on a furlough from a Massachusetts prison and became a centerpiece of George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign that year. These powerful commercials reinforced the mislead-ing view that most violent crime is interracial and that whites are the main victims. In fact, blacks are far more at risk for rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and murder than whites, and these crimes are overwhelmingly intraracial, not interracial.
As the victims’ rights movement took shape, anti-rape activists mimicked some of its key tactics in order to secure leg-islation and funding. For example, they used storytelling tactics that dramatized accounts of a rape victim’s experience. By framing the rape issue around horror stories and victimhood, they fed into the victims’ movement’s compelling image of a society held hostage by a growing number of depraved, marauding criminals.
The main vehicle for greater state involvement in the cause of violence against women was the U.S. Department of Justice, which funneled money, expertise, and philosophy to the emerging movement. The patchwork, incoherent, means-tested U.S. welfare state had neither the will nor the way to help women who were victims of violence. Instead, the U.S. Department of Justice became the champion of abused women. It was a leading critic of the government’s response to domestic violence, including the failure of law enforcement to protect women from further abuse. Law enforcement solu-tions filled a vacuum created by an underdeveloped and much maligned welfare state.
By contrast, Britain’s Home Office and police maintained their distance from women’s groups fighting rape and do-mestic violence. By the time the women’s movement in Britain sought to politicize the issue of violence against women in the early-to-mid 1970s, the needs of crime victims had been an ongoing, though not leading, concern in elite British poli-tics for nearly two decades. The anti-rape and domestic violence movements in Britain emerged at a time when the poli-tics of victims was already on a relatively settled course that emphasized social welfare solutions and that did not pit vic-tims against offenders.
The presence of a more developed welfare state in Britain predisposed British feminists and public officials to view social policy as the most promising arena to address violence against women. State officials in Britain were responsive to calls from women’s groups for more housing, social services, and welfare benefits to help them escape violence by achieving economic independence. They were far less receptive than U.S. officials to criticisms of policing and other law enforcement practices in dealing with domestic violence and rape. By not legitimizing feminists’ criticisms of law enforce-ment’s unresponsiveness to violence against women, the British government reduced the likelihood that feminists would become accomplices in the brewing get-tough movement in Britain. In essence, it neutralized the salience of violence against women as a law-and-order rallying point.
The U.S. women’s movement embraced the cause of violence against women at a moment when the politics of vic-timhood was still very embryonic, fluid, and volatile in the United States. Attention to the needs and rights of rape victims and abused women helped to ignite and politicize a broader interest in victims that stressed victims’ rights and that deni-grated offenders. In the United States, the victims’ movement and the women’s movement increasingly converged, which helped to embolden penal conservatives. In Britain, they remained largely at arm’s length from one another.
Women’s groups in the United States worked closely with state officials and government agencies at a time when the voice of penal conservatives was growing louder in local and national politics. As a consequence, they were not well posi-tioned to resist the rising tide of penal conservatism. Indeed, they ended up supporting policies that emboldened it.
The most notorious example is the federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994. VAWA was a considerable achievement in many ways. It heightened public awareness of violence against women, promoted greater cooperation between agencies with vastly different perspectives on the issue, and provided states with new resources to tackle this problem. But VAWA also strongly emphasized law enforcement remedies.
VAWA was part of the landmark $30 billion Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act signed into law by President Clinton, which allocated nearly $10 billion for new prison construction, expanded the federal death penalty, and created a federal three-strikes law. In the name of protecting women and children, it contained several measures that challenged es-tablished privacy protections, including a mandate that all states establish a registry for sex offenders or risk losing federal money. The crime bill also permitted prosecutors in federal cases to introduce a defendant’s previous history of sexual of-fenses into court proceedings.
The consolidation of VAWA into the crime bill solidified the understanding of domestic violence and other violence against women as primarily criminal matters. VAWA became yet another way for congressional leaders to show they were tough on crime. Although women’s groups had some concerns about VAWA as it wound its way through Congress and became attached to the crime bill, they nonetheless spearheaded the effort to pass it. VAWA’s supporters ended up align-ing themselves with conservative political forces that had been prosecuting the war on crime so zealously.
Years ago, few feminists and women’s groups considered that, by relying so heavily on the criminal justice system to combat violence against women, they might be fostering a punitive political environment conducive to a prison boom. The enormous expansion of the carceral state in the decades since may finally bring about a day of reckoning for feminists and women’s groups. With more than two million people behind bars, the overwhelmingly majority of them men, millions of women are the mothers, daughters, wives, partners, and sisters of men entombed in the carceral state. Moreover, since 1995, women have been the fastest growing segment of the U.S. prison population.
Over the last decade, the chorus of doubts about relying on penal solutions to address violence against women has grown louder. Across a broad range of feminists, crime experts, academics, and social workers, concerns have been growing about mandatory arrest, presumptive arrest, and no-drop policies, and about tougher sentencing. These legal remedies do not necessarily reduce violence against women and have contributed to greater state control of women, es-pecially poor women.
A 2003 report by the Ms. Foundation for Women denounced this over-reliance on the legal system to address vio-lence against women. It conceded that the criminalization of social problems like domestic violence has contributed to the mass incarceration of poor men, blacks, and Hispanics, and has destabilized marginalized communities. In his new book Punishment and Inequality, Harvard professor Bruce Western concludes that men who have been incarcerated are more likely to commit domestic violence. In The Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore of the University of Southern California notes how the presence of a prison in a community increases the rate of domestic violence in that prison town. Pressure is growing today to address the problem of violence against women not by strengthening ties to law enforcement and vic-tims’ groups but by joining other progressive reform movements pushing for social justice, an expanded welfare state, and a retreat of the carceral state.
The Prisoners’ Rights Movement in the U.S.
The U.S. women’s movement was exceptional. So was its prisoners’ rights movement that burst forth in the 1960s. A forerunner in the prisoners’ rights revolution, the United States ended up being a forerunner in the construction of the car-ceral state. For a time, the United States experienced a considerably more open and progressive public debate about prisoners’ rights and penal policy. But that public debate was eventually captured by law-and-order conservatives waving the bloody shirt of victims’ rights, in part because of the distinctiveness of the U.S. prisoners’ movement.
The U.S. prisoners’ rights movement emerged earlier and had deeper roots in and out of prison than prisoners’ movements elsewhere. Several important developments explain why, including the rising proportion of blacks behind bars, the government’s initial efforts to desegregate federal penitentiaries, and the emergence of the black Muslims as a formidable organization inside U.S. prisons. The Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement pried open the courts, ren-dering them important arenas for prison activism. In the process, prisons were pried open and subjected to intense public scrutiny. The racially charged political atmosphere in which the prisoners’ rights movement emerged provided an opportu-nity for race and imprisonment to become tightly linked issues.
Some imprisoned blacks and other minorities became ce-lebrities with significant bases of support on the outside. With the help of the New Left and other outside groups, they made powerful and highly publicized claims that they were the true victims. They promoted the idea that lawbreaking should be seen primarily as a political act aimed at a racially, economically, and politically repressive system.
These claims to victimhood together with the high profile nature of the prisoners’ rights issue helped foreclose any role for the state in brokering a détente between offenders, their sympathizers, and the emerging victims’ movement. In-deed, these claims served to push the U.S. victims’ movement in a more punitive direction as women and other victims of violent crime sought to wrestle the status of victim away from the prisoners’ rights movement and its allies. This helps ex-plain why the backlash against prison activism was so strident in the United States and why the government was so ef-fective at decimating the movement once it sought to impose a lockdown on political activism behind bars. It also helps explain why penal conservatives ultimately won the day.
The New Black Majority
Between the 1930s and 1970s, the prison population in the United States was racially transformed. In the 1920s, fewer than one in three prisoners was black. By the late 1980s, blacks comprised the majority of prisoners for the first time in U.S. history. This transformation coincided with fundamental changes in the nature of prison unrest.
Earlier waves of prison riots and protests in the 1920s and 1930s focused on calls for improvements in day-to-day liv-ing conditions. These disturbances were led by ad-hoc, isolated organizations helmed mostly by whites. Subsequent waves of prison unrest, beginning with the dozens of major riots and protests in the early 1950s, were far more political in nature and had significant racial overtones.
The presence of a growing and disproportionate number of blacks in U.S. prisons at a time of rising political mobili-zation and tension around racial issues focused government and public attention from the 1950s to 1980s on prisons in a way not seen in other countries. For a time, prisons became an important part of the political fabric and the touch-stone for debates about fundamental political questions involving race, justice, and oppression.
World War II had a transformative effect on U.S. prisons, as it did on many other institutions in the United States. The war brought an influx of new kinds of prisoners into federal penitentiaries for violations of the 1940 Selective Service Act, including Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, who was sent to a federal facility in Minnesota in 1942 after refusing to be drafted. These conscientious objectors, many of whom were sentenced to lengthy terms, tended to be more educated, politically active, and ready to challenge prison authorities on a number of fronts, especially race rela-tions.
World War II also focused national and international attention on segregation in the U.S. armed forces, which spurred a wider debate about segregation in other government institutions. In the 1940s, the leadership of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons set out to challenge the deeply entrenched segregationist practices in federal penitentiaries. The Bureau’s director pushed to end discrimination in federal penitentiaries and grant blacks the same opportunities and privileges that white prisoners enjoyed.
The Bureau sought to end segregation, but in its own time and in its own way. It stridently resisted efforts by prisoners themselves to lay claim to the race issue, be they politicized conscientious objectors who challenged the color line or, later, black Muslims who organized their own tightly knit groups. With their commitment to desegregate, federal prison administrators, wittingly or unwittingly, put race at the center of prison life, changing the very nature of prison protest.
In other ways, government authorities fostered the creation of a highly politicized prisoners’ rights movement that had deep roots behind bars and significant ties and political notoriety outside. The growing confidence in the 1940s about the constructive role that government and education could play in remaking society infused penal policy in many states. Belief was widespread that incarcerated people could be remade into constructive citizens through education and closer contact with the world outside prison gates.
California took the rehabilitative ideal most to heart in the postwar years. Republican Governor Earl Warren and other public officials portrayed California’s prisons as places to reform minds rather than punish bodies, as Eric Cummins shows in The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. Group counseling, family picnics, greater access to reading materials through “bibliotherapy,” and more contact with the outside world were cornerstones of this new approach. Ex-perts and new ideas streamed into prisons, courtesy of the state, helping to politicize prison life and to pull aside the iron curtain that had shrouded prisons from the public. By making prisons less closed institutions, state authorities provided an opening for people in prison to develop and retain identities imported from outside. Their primary identity was no longer just their status as a prisoner.
California’s zeal for rehabilitation helped to create the first in a long line of U.S. prisoners who became celebrities in the postwar years. Caryl Chessman, sentenced to death in 1948, became a prolific and best-selling author. For penal re-formers, Chessman was exhibit A in defense of the rehabilitative ideal as he challenged his death sentence on the basis of his writings and his contributions as a legendary jailhouse lawyer.
Chessman became a national and international cause célèbre. He was a model of how a prisoner could be empow-ered through writing and could subvert San Quentin’s controls on reading and writing. He inspired a worldwide movement opposed to his execution and capital punishment. His May 1960 execution in the gas chamber spurred angry demonstra-tions around the world. With his death, U.S. prisoners and their supporters became increasingly disaffected from the promised land of rehabilitation. His execution exposed the apparent hollowness of the promise that rehabilitation would bring, if not release, at least reprieve.
Emergence of the Nation of Islam
This disaffection coincided with the emergence of the Nation of Islam as a powerful force within prisons and beyond by the early 1960s. The black Muslims set in motion a radical transformation in how prisoners viewed themselves and in how society viewed them. They introduced the idea of prisoners as victims of the system rather than as transgressors of the system. This had major consequences that lasted long after the Nation of Islam ceased to be a major factor in penal politics by the mid-1960s.
The black Muslims established a collective and disciplined organization that was unprecedented in prison politics. In doing so, they provided a model for other groups to organize in prison. By introducing a new ethos of group solidarity into prison life, they upended the prison norm of “do your own time” that had defined prison subculture. Furthermore, once they went above ground with their strikes and lawsuits, the black Muslims became an important window through which prisons became visible to the wider public. The barrage of litigation they instigated in the 1950s and 1960s prompted the media and the public to focus intently for the first time on the inhumane conditions in many prisons.
The black Muslims, despite their small numbers, engineered a dramatic shift in how prisoners viewed themselves and how society viewed them. With their emphasis on group identity and collective oppression, they laid claim to the idea that blacks were society’s victims and that the difficulties they faced were not primarily the result of their own personal deficiencies.
From Rights to Revolution
Once the Nation of Islam sought salvation through court challenges, the legal profession and other prison reform groups streamed in. The black Muslims were aided and abetted by a potent civil rights movement that had established important precedents for using the courts to challenge the color line. The civil rights movement initially focused on the ra-cial ills of the Jim Crow South. It primed the public to take a hard and sympathetic look first at penal farms in the South and then at penal facilities elsewhere. The movement also provided important legal and other resources for the prisoners’ rights movement that emboldened it.
With the fitful abolition of formal segregation in prisons in the 1960s and the barrage of legal challenges to prison ad-ministration and penal conditions, a void in prison structures and authority opened up. U.S. prisons exploded, paralleling wider political unrest and rioting in many cities. For much of the 1960s, relations between blacks and whites in prison were highly antagonistic. The massive race riot in San Quentin prison in January 1967 exemplified this antagonism and was a ma-jor turning point for the prison movement.
Many prisoners acknowledged the self-defeating nature of the San Quentin riot. Following the upheaval, underground prison publications and radical ones on the outside began to emphasize the need for cross-racial struggles centered on economic issues. They began to challenge the basic legitimacy of prisons, portraying them as an extension of an oppres-sive racial and class structure. This was a direct rebuke to the Nation of Islam, which emphasized strict racial segregation. It also was a rebuke to the civil rights movement, which attacked explicitly racist practices like Jim Crow laws, but ap-peared unable or unwilling to indict larger social and economic structures like class.
By the late 1960s, prison activism in the United States became enmeshed in revolutionary causes in a way not seen elsewhere. The activities of the more radical strands of the prison movement began to overshadow the efforts of civil rights lawyers and other legal groups working on behalf of prisoners. The U.