Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990

This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.

The Transnational Geography of Sexual Rights

Among the signal developments of the last third of the twentieth century has been the emergence of a new politics of human rights. The transnational circulation of norms, networks, and representations has advanced human rights claims in ways that have reshaped global practices. Just as much as the transnational flow of capital, the new human rights politics are part of the phenomenon that has come to be termed globalization. Shifting the focus from the sovereignty of the nation to the rights of individuals, regardless of nationality, the interplay between the local and the global in these new human rights claims are fundamentally redrawing the boundaries between the rights of individuals, states, and the international community. Truth Claims brings together for the first time some of the best new work from a variety of disciplinary and geographic perspectives exploring the making of human rights claims and the cultural politics of their representations. All of the essays, whether dealing with the state and its victims, receptions of human rights claims, or the status of transnational rights claims in the era of globalization, explore the potentialities of an expansive humanistic framework. Here, the authors move beyond the terms -- and the limitations -- of the universalism/relativism debate that has so defined existing human rights literature.

[Book review] Rights of the Accused, Crime Control and Protection of Victims

Review of: Rights of the Accused, Crime Control and Protection of Victims. Edited by Eliahu Harnon & Alex Stein. A special volume of the Israel Law Review, Vol. 31, Nos. 1-3, Winter-Summer 1997. Published by the Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Meaning of "residing with" and succession rights

Reviews case law on the meaning of the phrase "residing with" as used in the Housing Act 1985 s.87 to identify one of the qualifying requirements for the right to succeed to a secure tenancy. Focuses on the Court of Appeal decision in Freeman v Islington LBC on whether a daughter intended to have her settled home with her father where, in the year preceding her father's death she lived with him full time in order to care for him whilst retaining her own flat and using it as her correspondence address for everything but her credit card. Lists conclusions that can be drawn from the case law.

Performing injustice: human rights and verbatim theatre

Discusses the theatrical treatment of human rights, by reference to three British productions: Guantanamo: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" (2004), My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) and Called to Account (2007), noting the use of verbatim testimony in such plays. Reviews legal scholarship highlighting the limitations of human rights laws. Considers the theatrical context of each of the plays and the ways in which they represent the status of human rights laws. Comments on the extent of theatre's practical impact on the advancement of human rights.

Urgent review

Explains the rights of mortgagees to take possession of and sell property where mortgagors fall into arrears, considering the application of the provisions of the Administration of Justice Act 1970 allowing courts to adjourn or stay proceedings to allow borrowers to meet their obligations under the mortgage. Highlights the Chancery Division ruling in Horsham Properties Group Ltd v Clark, in which the property was sold without vacant possession and an action taken for possession of the property from the mortgagors as trespassers, which meant that the 1970 Act did not apply. Notes the concerns of the Council of Mortgage Lenders which may lead to a review of the law. [from Legal Journals Index]

Watching the clock

Discusses the implications of the Court of Appeal ruling in Ashe v National Westminster Bank Plc on whether a mortgagee's right to possession ran from the date that the legal charge was made over property, meaning that attempts to enforce possession 12 years after the mortgage was agreed were statute barred. Considers the reasons for banks to delay possession, the application of adverse possession rules in this context and the issue of public interest. Advises mortgagees on the benefits of limiting rights to possession to only become actionable when mortgagors are in default to avoid claims becoming statue barred. [From Legal Journals Index]

Rights for cohabitants

Reviews the guidance given by the House of Lords in Stack v Dowden on quantifying the beneficial interests of cohabiting parties in their former family home when one party seeks to rebut the presumption of joint beneficial ownership. Comments on the subsequent application of the principles by the county court in Adekunle v Ritchie and by the Privy Council in Abbott v Abbott, highlighting the approaches used to establish an equitable interest and to quantify the parties' shares in the properties. Considers whether statutory intervention is now needed to resolve the difficulties. [From Legal Journals Index]

Counter-terrorism, anti-extremism, armed conflict and human rights: using a Russian case study

This paper critically examines Russia’s compliance with human rights obligations and the rule of law in its ‘war on terror’. It seeks to draw wider parallels with respect for human rights in the framework of the fight against ‘new global terrorism’. Threats to due process, the discriminatory application of the forces of law and order specifically against perceived “non-traditional” Muslim communities, and a ratcheting up of fear of an Islamist threat can be traced following the war in Chechnya and the handling of the Dubrovka Theatre and Beslan school sieges. To what extent are there commonalities with UK complicity in the practice of extraordinary rendition, with atrocities perpetrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, and abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Are the impact of these reflected in domestic security policy and British minority ethnic community relations? [From the Author]