THE MOVEMENT FOR PRISONERS' RIGHT
Siegel, Dan
The movement for prisoners' rights The 1970s have left it in disarray Dan Siegel Early on the morning of May 28, California attorney Fay Stender, a prominent advocate of women's rights and prison...
...Davis was acquitted after a long jury trial in 1973...
...In California, prisoners are no longer deemed "legally dead" and may be deprived of "only such rights as is necessary for the reasonable security of the institution" in which they are confined...
...Another sign has been the transformation of the movement itself...
...One of the prisoners, Ruchell Magee, was captured alive and ordered to stand trial along with Angela Davis, who was accused of plotting the escape attempt with Jonathan...
...Judicial largesse, however, has become increasingly infrequent in the recent years of fiscal conservatism, and in the absence of a mass political movement in support of prisoners' rights...
...One sign of the movement's demise is the ease with which the courts now rebuff efforts of prison reformers to win more humane living conditions for a growing prison population...
...The current mood of judicial hostility is epitomized by Supreme Court Justice Dan Siegel, a labor law attorney, was a prominent activist in the civil rights, anti- war, and student movements of the 1960s and early 1970s...
...The high tide of political struggle which characterized the 1960s was giving way to the ebb of the 1970s by the time of Angela Davis's acquittal...
...Constitution...
...The pressure which builds up behind the walls o! [an] Attica . . . will be released — somehow' The prison movement won some important legal victories in behalf of prisoners...
...As the Indochina war began to wind down and many of the civil rights movement's demands for equality in employment and education appeared to be winning mass acceptance, the prisons became the focus of revolutionary struggle...
...That alliance was epitomized by Cleaver's Soul on Ice, which was dedicated to attorney Beverly Axelrod, and Jackson's Soledad Brother, which included several letters written to his attorney, Fay Stender...
...After years of political and legal struggle, Huey Newton's homicide conviction was overturned and he was freed in 1970...
...The failure of these strategies to accomplish revolutionary change, or to win a mass following, prompted more frustration and fratricidal violence, such as the 1976 murder of Popeye Jackson, a black ex-convict active in reform movements who, like Fay Stender, was accused of "selling out...
...He wrote this dispatch for Pacific News Service...
...History teaches that the pressure which builds up behind the walls of a San Quentin, Attica, or Leavenworth will be released — somehow...
...Box 7773 Berkeley, CA 94701...
...The goal was to free George Jackson and other revolutionary prisoners then awaiting trial...
...Prisoners won the right to possess any and all written materials, other than publications which describe how weapons can be produced...
...Magee was convicted when the courts refused to allow him to withdraw a guilty plea angrily and spontaneously entered in response to the legal straitjacket in which he found himself...
...The movement for prisoners' rights The 1970s have left it in disarray Dan Siegel Early on the morning of May 28, California attorney Fay Stender, a prominent advocate of women's rights and prison reform, was shot six times by an unknown assailant...
...The Court's historic voting rights decisions were based upon a constitutional interpretation summarized as "one man, one vote...
...Violence born of despair was one reaction to the decidedly non-revolutionary situation...
...Rehnquist's "one man, one cell" decision followed other Supreme Court cases denying prisoners the right to take part in the activities of a charitable labor union and severely limiting the rights of prisoners to challenge their convictions through filing writs of habeas corpus...
...William Rehnquist's quip in a recent decision denying relief to prisoners awaiting trial in an overcrowded Federal jail in New York: "We disagree that there is some sort of 'one man, one cell' principle" in the U.S...
...The developing prison movement represented an alliance between, on the one hand, the prisoners and their families, and on the other, students, professionals, and other middle-class intellectuals...
...The Court's new limitation on the traditional remedy of habeas corpus means that state prisoners will be denied access to Federal courts to test the validity of their confinement against constitutional standards...
...With government economy so popular among politicians, including many judges, prisoners' rights appear an unnecessary luxury to bestow upon a constituency without votes or political leverage...
...The prison movement, now hopelessly split between those fighting for prisoners' rights and those in active support of what they considered to be revolutionary violence on the part of some prisoners, never recovered...
...Magee took the position that the escape attempt was a justified "slave rebellion" by blacks subjected to inhuman treatment and denied the rights of American citizens...
...George Jackson and two other "Soledad Brothers" were acquitted on charges of murdering a prison guard...
...Friends and supporters of her long years of work in behalf of prisoners and indigent clients may send letters and contributions to: The Fay Stender Trust Fund Bank of California P.O...
...It is ironic, but not incomprehensible, that he might well have been a beneficiary of the radical lawyer's years of tireless efforts in behalf of California's self-proclaimed prison revolutionaries...
...The Marin County incident began when Jackson's seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan, burst into a courtroom with a satchel full of weapons, armed three prisoners, and attempted to escape with several hostages...
...It was furthered by the writings of two black California prisoners who were to become conscious revolutionaries, Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson...
...Supreme Court decisions have guaranteed prison inmates access to legal materials and to fellow inmates with legal knowledge...
...Suits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union have resulted in judgments declaring the entire state prison systems of Alabama, Rhode Island, and Tennessee unconstitutional because the conditions prevailing in them constitute cruel and unusual punishment...
...The mass mobilizations, petition drives, and other familiar tactics they employed helped the movement win its first successes...
...The revolutionaries on the outside failed to recognize the reality hidden from the revolutionaries inside — that revolution was not imminent in the United States of the 1970s...
...You can help A special trust fund has been set up in behalf of Fay Stender, who faces permanent paralysis and will need many months of rehabilitative treatment...
...naled in 1967 by the thousands of people who rallied to demand freedom for Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton, jailed for fatally shooting an Oakland police officer...
...In the gun battle that ensued, Jonathan Jackson and several others were killed...
...The new reality was a bitter disappointment to the revolutionary prisoners released in the early 1970s, and it was unacceptable to, and unaccepted by, some of those in the support movements outside...
...But the economic benefits derived from present policies may be short-lived...
...Differences between Davis and Magee over defense strategy forced a severing of their trials and signaled an even greater split in the prison movement...
...She had been forced at gunpoint to sign a statement saying she had betrayed a former client, the late prison militant George Jackson...
...Groups such as the Tribal Thumb and the Symbionese Liberation Army unsuccessfully attempted to substitute a strategy of anarchism and terrorism for the mass demonstrations of the 1960s...
...The attempt on Fay Stender's life, which left her facing permanent paralysis from the waist down, drove yet another nail into the coffin of the prisoners' rights movement...
...The rise of prison reform activism was sigThe new reality was a bitter disappointment...
...Two weeks later, Berkeley police arrested a young ex-convict, Edward Glenn Brooks, and charged him with attempted murder...
...America's economic problems do not augur well for the several hundred thousand confined in this nation's Federal and state prisons...
...Limited due-process rights have been guaranteed to prisoners facing disciplinary proceedings for the violation of prison rules...
...Brooks has entered a not-guilty plea and is awaiting trial...
...Violence by and in behalf of prisoners became a line of demarcation between liberal reformers and radicals/revolutionaries — especially after the Marin County courthouse escape attempt during the summer of 1970 and the Attica rebellion of 1971...
...They jarred tens of thousands into awareness of prison conditions, as well as of the societal conditions that send young black men to prison in numbers far exceeding their share of the total population...
...Like other movements of the 1960s, the multi-racial alliance built to support political prisoners and to fight for the rights of inmates has all but disintegrated in the 1970s...
...Davis denied any involvement in the escape attempt and based her defense upon her claim that she had been singled out for prosecution because she was a Communist Party member devoted to the struggle for the rights of prisoners and black people generally...
...The prison movement activists, at least those "outside," included many people who had been active in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s and the anti-war movement, which began in earnest in 1965...
Vol. 43 • December 1979 • No. 12
