From a Spark to a Raging Fire

Abstract

The commitment to prison reform swelled during the early 1970s. While the West Coast was locked in a battle to transform it’s prisons, banner-waving contingents nationwide urged state legislatures to reconsider their position on incarceration. They argued that imprisonment was a capitalist endeavor: to capture America’s poor for the sole purpose of utilizing their labor. The political Left was transitioning itself, from late-1960s Vietnam antiwar rants and speeches beseeching American imperialism, into a movable social force within the national dialog about carceral reform. Universities sponsored prison “teach-ins,” and newspapers and books on prison conditions slowly peeled back the “iron curtain,” revealing to the public the atrocities of human rights violations occurring behind prison walls. Attorney groups also entered the fray. Fay Stender’s Prison Law Project, its later splinter organization the Prison Law Collective, and the National Lawyers Guild were receiving letters by the busload from inmates complaining of conditions and alleging unfair treatment from prisons all around the country.