ABSTRACT
Even as some prison officials and academics brand judicial intervention in matters of prison policy and administration as misguided and counterproductive, some prisoner advocates despair of the capacity of law reform to produce meaningful prison reform. The prisoners’ rights movement should be seen as a sociopolitical movement like the civil rights movement or the women’s movement. From this perspective, individual case holdings that have dominated the attention of legal academics are less significant than the capacity of law reform efforts to shape and sustain a prisoners’ rights movement with adherents inside and outside of prison. It is also important not to adopt too narrow a view of the impacts of the prisoners’ rights movement. Simple studies of compliance with judicial decrees do not capture the complexity of changes occasioned by legal activity. To appreciate fully the impacts of the prisoners’ rights movement on prisons and prisoners’ lives, it is necessary to consider such secondary effects as changes in prison bureaucracies and personnel, public and political opinion, and the self-esteem of prisoners and prison officials.
