Daniel Fernandez

This dissertation uses court records, oral histories, and other archival materials to narrate the legal history of imprisonment in 1960s and 1970s America. It traces the evolving strategies developed by incarcerated people and other legal activists to challenge contemporaneous prison practices. By emphasizing the place of humiliation and terror in prison life, these individuals hoped to reveal the many ways in which incarceration was fundamentally at odds with the nation’s democratic commitments. These depictions of prison’s everyday wrongs, the dissertation argues, ultimately led a generation of legal liberals to understand prison abolition as a pragmatic—and potentially constitutional—necessity, a chapter in the history of incarceration that is often ignored by scholars.