ABSTRACT
More than any one particular method, the prison movement has emphasized the self-activity and collective organizing of people in prison. These efforts, whether peer education or class action lawsuits, have been strongest when prisoners have forged relationships with free-world allies. Institutionally, prison authorities have exhibited ambivalence or outright hostility to most kinds of prisoner organizing. The widespread use of racism, isolation, physical intimidation, sexual assault, behavior modification, and transfer between institutions that the authors have chronicled here are the most common ways that officials have sapped the strength of the prison movement — both as it exists within an institution and as it coalesces with outside supporters. Prisoners must depend on outside support to accomplish a number of things, yet such support also feeds into the institution's tendency to enforce a feeling of helplessness amongst its wards. A new generation began to navigate these tensions in the early twenty-first century.
