Justice 101: Examining the Justice System and the Unfinished work of the Founding and the Prisoners’ Rights Revolution

Session is for high school, college level students, teachers, and learners of all ages.

A century after American courts embraced the idea that incarcerated people had no rights the law was bound to respect, this panel returns to the Enlightenment premise at the heart of the nation’s founding: that rights are inherent, not granted by the state. Through the modern prisoners’ rights movement, incarcerated people, lawyers, religious leaders, and organizers forced the country to confront the contradiction between its language of natural rights and the realities of prison life. 

The conversation will begin by looking back to the founding ideals explored in the first panel: the belief that human beings possess moral agency, dignity, and natural rights that precede government. It will then trace how those ideals reemerged in the courts and in prisons themselves, beginning with Cooper v. Pate (1964), which helped open the courthouse doors to incarcerated people, and continuing through the wave of prisoner litigation that followed in the 1960s and 1970s. Attica will serve as a defining crisis and turning point, revealing incarcerated people not as passive subjects of state power, but as citizens asserting rights, dignity, and recognition.

The discussion will also examine cases such as Holt v. Sarver and Ruiz v. Estelle, where courts used Eighth Amendment and due process language to challenge the remnants of the “slave of the state” doctrine. Alongside the legal story, the panel will consider the organizing traditions that animated the movement, including Black radical and religious prisoner organizing and the insistence that rights were not privileges to be bestowed, but claims rooted in personhood. Finally, the panel will consider the rollback embodied by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act and ask whether the prisoners’ rights revolution fulfilled Philadelphia’s Enlightenment promise or exposed how unfinished that promise remains with cases today like Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections.