Let me begin with an example in order to illustrate the complexity of questions of justice and morality. The 1961 film directed by Stanley Kramer and written by Abby Mann,Judgment at Nuremberg, depicts the story of a retired judge from New England who has been called to preside over one of the final war crimes tribunals in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II. The judge, played by Spencer Tracy, must preside over the trial of German judges who served on the bench during Nazi rule and enforced laws that sentenced Jews, political opponents of the regime, the mentally retarded,...

My discussion of justice and natural law in the last chapter argues that one can appeal to moral concepts in a way that is radically visionary without being an idealist. My analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ideas and the practical efforts of critical criminologists and justice reformers like Ruth Morris points toward a complicated relationship between existing legal systems, on the one hand, and moral realist accounts of better and more enabling standards of justice, on the other. Morris’s theory of “transformative justice” moves away from traditional criminological, legal, and penal conceptions of justice as either retribution, fairness, or...

In the introduction, I maintain thatfreedomadmits of multiple meanings. This fact gives rise to the subtlety of the epigraph to this chapter, as well as of Thoreau’s declaration that prison is a “more free and honorable ground [. . .] the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor” (720). There are many traditions of theorizing freedom, ranging from traditional liberal political theory to anarchist thought to existentialism.¹ Perhaps one of the richest and yet intellectually undervalued traditions in the West, however, exists in the autobiographical, literary, political, and philosophical words of...

In one sense, freedom is not just about where one lives (in prison or out) but how one lives. In novelist Toni Morrison’s words, “Freeing yourself [i]s one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self [i]s another” (95). Claiming ownership of that freed self entails, in part, making a number of ethical choices about how one will live in the world. These choices are major concerns of New York–raised Puerto Rican (Nuyorican) prison writers Piri Thomas and Miguel Piñero. A childhood vignette related in Thomas’s prison memoir,Seven Long Times, stresses how freedom for others entails ethical choices about...

In “Toward the United Front,” assassinated prison movement leader George Jackson makes many ambitious claims for what a movement organized around prison conditions and political prisoners can accomplish.¹ Much like other radical prison intellectuals, Jackson does not consider mere prison reform or the release of political prisoners to be among the most significant possible accomplishments of a unified prison movement in the United States. A more significant accomplishment would be the development of “new initiatives that redirect and advance the revolution under new progressive methods” (113). Jackson hopes that the prison movement will be radically diverse and ecumenical, telling his...