Mass Incarceration

CCR works hard to empower those who have been imprisoned, supporting movements begun by prisoners and foregrounding their stories and voices in our work. With the National Lawyers Guild, we provide our Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook to prisoners and their families, giving them the tools to file lawsuits and fight against mistreatment and prison conditions. Our challenges to mass incarceration have included a lawsuit arguing that long-term solitary confinement is unconstitutional; fighting onerous restrictions and secretive facilities for certain groups of prisoners; convincing the U.S. Supreme Court to require due process for transfers to Supermax facilities; a successful campaign against exorbitant prison phone call rates; and efforts to hold prison and government officials responsible for killing and wounding prisoners during the Attica rebellion. In our litigation and in our advocacy, CCR draws the connections between mass incarceration and racial injustice, discriminatory policing, economic oppression, torture, and abusive immigration practices. We seek to challenge particular circumstances that cause suffering to and violate the rights of imprisoned individuals, as well as to help broader efforts to dismantle the system of mass incarceration as a whole.

September 2015: Landmark settlement ends indeterminate long-term solitary in CA. This is the story of the prisoners who led the fight to make it happen.