"Rioting Peacefully" in Carceral States: Rethinking Sunbelt Prison Rebellions after Attica, 1970–85

In the 1970s, prison administrators became increasingly alarmed over a series of nation-wide prison revolts that were inspired by the prisoners’ rights movement, but that were seen by many in the press and cast by law and order politicians as examples of lawlessness and violent criminality. At the same time that prisons experienced these uprisings, state prison systems were faced with civil rights lawsuits in federal courts.  Overwhelmingly, the success of these class action lawsuits occurred in Sunbelt prison states.  This paper explores prison work strikes, uprisings, and a hostage crisis as organized inmate protests in the aftermath of the 1971 Attica prison uprising.  As its focus, it offers a comparative analysis of the 1978 peaceful Texas work strike and prisoners' rights movement; the 1981 nonviolent hostage crisis and takeover of the Tennessee prison system in the midst of another court-ordered reform effort; and the bloody prison riot of 1980 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.   Utilizing oral histories, court documents, and newspaper accounts, this paper considers the ways that inmates in Tennessee and Texas planned, coordinated, and organized protest efforts built on the lessons of Attica and the famed Soledad Brothers, and drew upon traditions of disruption from the labor movement and, pointedly, a nonviolent civil rights heritage in an effort to gain the sympathy of the media, the public, and the federal court. The New Mexico riot, by contrast, stands apart from these other stories for its full embrace of violence, and as a result offers an important point of comparison.   This paper will explore why that was the case, and how prisoners in all three states rebelled in different ways against internal mechanisms of social control within Sunbelt prison systems that simultaneously drew upon a slave past, as well as a dramatically hierarchical internal system of inmate privilege.