Abstract
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jones, substantive questions remained. Did the Court reach the correct conclusion in the Jones case; or did it use the oldest magic trick in the book: a slight of hand to focus our attention on the troubles associated with American prisons without recognizing the actual facts related to the North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union (NCPLU)? In popular vernacular, did the Court throw prison reform “under the bus” at the expense of judicial conservatism? Could it have helped prison reform by at least considering the possibility that prisons could actually serve as institutions for rehabilitation as opposed to solely doling out retributive punishment? And if yes, did overruling the district court’s decision in Jones forever alter the trajectory of the American punishment system, sending it spiraling downward to where it sits today: as one of the most internationally embarrassing institutions in the world? While we may never know if the Court was influenced by the social times, such as the rise of the Black Power Movement, the trials of Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, or George Jackson, the shootout at Marin County, or the Attica prison rebellions. However, we cannot ignore that there was a significant social history buttressing the legal history leading up to the Jones case.
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Notes
Bradley B. Folkof, “Prisoner Representative Organizations, Prison Reform, and Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union: An Argument for Increased Court Intervention in Prison Administration,” The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 70, no. 1 (1979): 42–56;
William Griffin, “Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union, Inc.: The ‘Hands-Off Doctrine’ Revisited,” Wake Forest Law Review 14 (1978): 647–61; Regina and
Paul Coggins Montoya, “The Future of Prisoners’ Unions: Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Unions,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 13 (1978): 799–826;
Lois M. Traub, “Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union: A Threat to Unionization in Prisons,” New England Journal on Prison Law 4, no. 1(1977): 157–71.
Peniel E. Joseph, “Waiting Till the Midnight Hour: Reconceptualizing the Heroic Period of the Civil Rights Movement,” Souls 2, no. 2 (2000): 6–17;
Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Liberation without Apology: Rethinking the Black Power Movement,” The Black Scholar 31, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2001): 1–10.
Jack E. Call, “The Supreme Court and Prisoner’s Rights,” Federal Probation 59, no. 1 (1995): 36.
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© 2012 Donald F. Tibbs
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Tibbs, D.F. (2012). Epilogue. In: From Black Power to Prison Power. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_11
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