ABSTRACT
The United States' entry into the Second World War marked a turning point in the uses of incarceration and, as a consequence, key patterns of prisoner activism. This shift was reflected most immediately in the forced removal of nearly twelve thousand residents of Japanese ancestry, the overwhelming majority of them US citizens, from their communities along the mainland Pacific coast. In the 1920s and 1930s, various manufacturer associations identified convict labor as a form of unfair market competition. In unique fashion, they joined prison reformers and organized labor in a full-scale challenge to the use of prison labor not only in products made for the private marketplace, but also in government-funded projects. The prison burst into national consciousness as a result of the Southern civil rights movement. With cameras rolling, African Americans sitting at segregated lunch counters or marching for the right to vote were attacked and arrested throughout the South.
