“The struggle between activist prisoners and the authorities, at any rate inside prisons, can be summarized as a campaign to replace the image of the sick prisoner by that of the prisoner as citizen with the same rights as other citizens. With increasing force and effectiveness, prisoners and their legal advocates have wielded the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of the due process of law since the mid-1950s. The first successful cases were fought for prisoners' rights to redress and protection against the most flagrant brutalities of prison life. The United States Supreme Court upheld in 1964 the claim of a prisoner of freedom to buy religious publications, and in 1968 pronounced the whole of Alabama's prison system unconstitutional on the grounds of its practice of racial segregation. It declared in favour of protecting the religious beliefs and practices of prisoners in 1972, condemned the censorship of prison mail in 1974 and, most significant, extended the principle of procedural fairness to the process by which prisoners were disciplined.”
- Robert Adams, Prison Riots in Britain and the United States. Second Edition. Consultant Editor: Jo Campling. London: MacMillan, 1994. pp. 79.
