DeRosia has worked as a prison teacher, probation and parole officer, crime prevention and grant specialist, and a certified police instructor in crime prevention. Based upon a qualitative study of the prison adjustment of advantaged offenders--those who, prior to prison, possessed college degrees and held high status occupations with commensurately high incomes--this book challenges the Greenwood Publishing Group Bolero Ozon. Living Inside Prison Walls: The Prison Inmate A Profile. Prior Research on Adjustment to Prison.
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Research Approach and Methodology. Qualitative Findings Advantaged Offenders. Qualitative Findings Nonadvantaged Offenders. Conclusion Implications and Recommendations. Interview Guide and Discussion. Board [of Education] of the prisoners' rights movement," says historian Garrett Felber. It was Sostre's earlier lawsuit — and another one he won later — that set the precedents that Felber says became "the building blocks" for the Supreme Court's groundbreaking decision in Cooper.
Felber was helping the late Columbia University historian Manning Marable edit the papers of Malcolm X when he first came across Sostre. Felber, who recently finished his dissertation on the Nation of Islam and the politics of black nationalism, is now editing a book of Sostre's papers. Sostre, he notes, paid a price for his court victories. He served the entire 12 years of his sentence for drug possession — four years of it in solitary confinement. Sostre left Attica in October He was 41 and had never held a standard job.
Now out of prison, he would have to reinvent himself. He moved to Buffalo, N.
He began to save to open a bookstore. A year later, he opened the Afro Asian Book Shop and stocked the shelves with leftist literature, from Malcolm to Mao. Those books didn't draw customers at first. Buffalo didn't have the charged political atmosphere of Harlem. He put a loudspeaker outside the store, and the music brought young black men inside. Sostre enjoyed playing the role of mentor. Courtesy of Jerry Ross hide caption.
There was another group that gravitated toward him — white students at the nearby State University of New York at Buffalo.
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Sostre's bookstore was interesting "because it was so unusual," a place dedicated to leftist political literature. He always had this broad smile and a glow. He just was an unusual human being; he obviously was very intelligent. Ross says police were suspicious of Sostre. Once, Sostre said, a detective came into the store and asked why he was selling "commie literature" and left with a warning: So Ross and his friends "just basically took our own bookshelves and all our radical books" — the ones they had bought from Sostre — "and took them down there" to restock the store.
Racial tensions were high in Buffalo in the summer of Young black men complained that police harassed or arrested them unfairly. That same summer, there would be riots and disturbances in more than black urban neighborhoods, notably in Newark, N. In Buffalo, over several days and nights at the end of June, groups of teens and young black men set fires, turned over cars and clashed with hundreds of police in riot gear.
Neighborhood stores closed early. But Sostre's bookstore stayed open. During the uprisings, he took books and pamphlets off the shelves, maybe writings by Malcolm X, and read aloud. Police suspected that Molotov cocktails were being made in the basement of the store and that Sostre was directing people to loot and burn. On July 14 at Sostre was charged with arson, riot and selling heroin. Police found the marked bills in the cash register.
Sostre insisted he'd been framed — saying Williams had simply asked him to hold on to the money and that he had done similar favors for him before, once holding a suit Williams had brought back from the cleaners. Sostre had not been indicted yet, but a grand jury was meeting to consider the charges against him. And although Felicetta did not say the name Martin Sostre, he did tell the members of Congress about a "Martin X" who ran a school to teach young black men how to make Molotov cocktails and that Martin X had instructed the young black men to break store windows and start fires and that Martin X, himself, had thrown some of the homemade bombs.
Felicetta's testimony was front-page news in Buffalo. Sostre always insisted he hadn't sold drugs and had been set up by the police. Ross says the bookstore was known as a place to buy leftist books, not drugs. Sostre maintained a healthy diet, a practice he had picked up from his days as a Black Muslim. He exercised regularly and practiced yoga, a discipline that helped him get through his earliest years in solitary confinement.
Sostre's radical politics made him a cause on the left. By the time Sostre's trial started in March , prosecutors had dropped the arson and riot charges and were focused on the alleged drug crime. But the prosecution had already turned into a wild political spectacle.
During pretrial procedures, Sostre was brought to court in chains. He denounced the judge as a "racial bigot in judicial robes. This was two years before a similar scene would famously play out in a Chicago courtroom with Black Panther Bobby Seale. Sostre acted as his own lawyer. On March 4, he thought he was coming to court to argue for a reduction of his bail. The judge denied his request and the trial started immediately. Sostre didn't query prospective jurors, who very likely had heard the press reports that had depicted him as radical Martin X. He refused to cross-examine prosecution witnesses or call defense witnesses of his own.
An all-white jury was selected at 10 a. They took lunch at 1 p. Judge Frederick Marshall sentenced Sostre to 30 to 41 years in prison. It seemed disproportionate to the crime. The same judge, a year later, sentenced another black man, convicted of stabbing his wife to death, to a five- to year prison term. In June , Sostre ended up in solitary after dropping an envelope addressed to his attorney in the prison mailbox. Inside was a motion for a change of venue for the woman who had been arrested in the bookstore with him. Sostre had written it out by hand, in tiny print, because paper was hard to come by in prison and expensive in the commissary.
When the warden called him to his office, the document was on his desk. Then he sent Sostre to solitary confinement, charged with breaking a prison "rule" about practicing law. Sostre would spend six years in solitary for violating rules like that one. The hardest part of life in solitary, Sostre said, was being removed from contact with other people. He was entitled to an hour a day in a small, enclosed recreation yard.
But every time he left his cell, guards made him strip, bend over and submit to a rectal search. They knew they wouldn't find anything, he argued, since he was allowed few personal items, other than toothpaste and a toothbrush. They just do this to dehumanize you," he told filmmakers of Frame-up!
To be naked and searched with "two or three hacks leering at you," Sostre said, "that's a sign, of not only of submission, but it's symbolic of being sodomized. And a lot of prisoners submit to that, but I'm not going to submit. All bruises, cuts and scratches along his body. To Sostre, the prison system was a racist place, where guards, who were almost all white only 2 percent were black or Puerto Rican, according to later trial testimony , controlled inmates who were mostly — and increasingly — African-American or Hispanic 70 percent in all New York prisons, according to the testimony.
Sostre had chances to reduce his time in solitary. Once a guard suggested he join a new group therapy session. It was run by guards who had received just a week of training, according to court testimony. Sostre refused to participate.
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From his prison cell, Sostre kept filing legal motions. He challenged solitary confinement, the rectal searches, the insistence that he shave off his neat goatee and mustache prison officials said the facial hair let him hide his identity; Sostre argued it made him stand out since he was the only one , and the refusal of prison authorities to let him receive political literature. And Sostre tried, but failed, to get a new trial on the drug charges that he said were a frame-up.
Three years after his trial, Williams, who had been the main witness against Sostre, was in a drug rehab program in California. He recanted his testimony against Sostre. In an affidavit, he explained he'd been in jail when a detective asked him if Sostre sold drugs.
He wanted to get out of jail so he said yes although he wasn't aware of any drug-selling at the bookstore. He said what police then found in his pocket was heroin he had bought earlier in the day, but not from Sostre. A federal judge called Williams' new version "unworthy of belief" and denied Sostre a new trial. The singular prisoner advocate was about to cross paths with an extraordinary judge. She was the first black female appointed to the federal bench.
She helped write the original complaint in Brown v. Board of Education and was the first black woman to argue a case before the U. In that one, she won the right for James Meredith to attend the University of Mississippi; she went on to win nine of the 10 cases she argued before the high court. Constance Baker Motley was a symbol of a changing America. She was a pioneering civil rights lawyer who became the first African-American woman to serve in the New York state Senate. Here, she is sworn into that job by Mayor Robert Wagner in Two years later, she was the first black woman to be appointed a federal judge.
It was Sostre's good fortune that his lawsuit wound up in her court. She then held a trial and, the next year, issued a scathing ruling, in Sostre v. Rockefeller, about the conditions of Sostre's solitary confinement.
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He had been punished, she ruled, "not because of any serious infraction of the rules of prison discipline, or even for any minor infraction" but for his legal and "political activities and beliefs. In her ruling, Baker Motley called Sostre's solitary confinement "physically harsh, destructive of morale, dehumanizing in the sense that it is needlessly degrading, and dangerous to the maintenance of sanity when continued for more than a short period of time which should certainly not exceed 15 days.
How One Inmate Changed The Prison System From The Inside
Baker Motley's ruling from 47 years ago is still relevant in the current debate over the use of solitary confinement. Today, human rights groups and others that oppose solitary confinement still push for the day period as a maximum someone can safely stay in solitary. But no state nor the federal system, by law, currently recognizes that as a limit.
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You can't treat someone like this. Bob Brown, who was finishing a sentence for armed robbery and murder when he met Sostre in prison, once told me how frightened prison guards were after Sostre's victory. One older guard told him: We might as well close up this place. Brownie, it's all up to you white guys now. You've just got to do something. And they didn't trust that guards wouldn't take it out on them, too, if they fought Sostre and other black prisoners.
That was a sense of outrage that they just couldn't cope with. Indeed, for prison officials, Baker Motley's decision felt like the ground was crumbling under their feet. Courts had generally given prison wardens wide discretion to run prisons how they saw fit to keep order and safety. Now a judge was telling the warden at Green Haven that he would have to change the way he used solitary confinement for one of his biggest troublemakers in prison. An appeals court later overturned much of Baker Motley's ruling and reduced the damages awarded to Sostre.
Still, Thompson says Sostre's victory was so momentous that prisoners and wardens across the country paid attention. It gave prisoners "the belief that if they take their story to the courts, that someone will listen to them and that human rights can, in fact, be had if you're heard in the court of law. This would play out a year later, in , when more than 1, inmates at New York's Attica Correctional Facility took over the prison. The Attica prisoners considered Sostre a hero and demanded the kinds of rights and better prison conditions that Sostre had sought: They asked that Baker Motley be sent as an observer.
Inmates at Attica Correctional Facility considered Sostre a hero. They were familiar with his surprising legal victories that challenged prison conditions and his own solitary confinement. In , more than 1, Attica inmates took over the prison to demand the kinds of rights and improved conditions that Sostre had fought for in his lawsuits. Nelson Rockefeller — who had sought the Republican presidential nomination and still had ambitions to the White House— sent in state troopers to retake the prison, with a deadly hail of gunfire.
Rockefeller reacted harshly, says Thompson, in part because he feared what Sostre had started: He had inspired prisoners to stand up for rights — whether that meant taking over a prison yard or going to court. Litigation by inmates claiming violations of their constitutional rights would grow sharply — until , when Congress passed a law making it harder to bring those lawsuits. In , Sostre's case was still a cause just on the political left, but there were signs that could change.
A key moment came in June, when a federal judge ordered Sostre transferred to a new federal prison in Manhattan, because his life seemed to be in danger after beatings by guards in New York state prisons. Sostre's move to the city "electrified everything," Daniel Berrigan, the activist priest told me then, because it made it easier for nearby advocates to visit him.
Their work started gaining attention. Amnesty International named Sostre one of seven political prisoners in the United States. And another case — across the river in New Jersey — helped Sostre. At the time, the idea that sometimes innocent people end up in jail was not widely understood. But the case of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was sparking a new national interest in false convictions. Carter was in prison, convicted of a triple homicide in a Patterson, N. But he said he had been mistakenly identified by a witness.
Carter, an ex-boxer, was a more romantic figure than Sostre, a political radical. Bob Dylan had just released a popular and stirring ballad about Carter and played a benefit concert. Eventually, Carter's conviction would be overturned. Hugh Carey worried that Sostre's case could get similar attention. And besides, when his staff looked into it, they realized there was merit to Sostre's claims. Still, it was a surprise when news leaked out in December that Carey was thinking seriously about freeing Sostre. In Buffalo, law enforcement and city officials reacted with anger.
Sostre was still remembered there as an instigator of the uprisings. The judge who had sentenced Sostre wrote to say Sostre was not a political prisoner but a drug dealer and a dangerous political extremist who "has expressed, time and again, disregard for our laws, public officials and system of jurisprudence. On Christmas Eve, Carey granted Sostre executive clemency.
He used parole and clemency to free Sostre without saying whether Sostre had been falsely convicted of the drug crime in Buffalo. When I spoke to him by phone while he was imprisoned, he worried about whether he would be able to live freely once he left prison. That made it easy to violate someone's human rights. But they could be violated outside prison walls, too. Sostre walked out on Feb. The next day, he held a press conference at the United Nations. Sostre praised the governor's "courage" to release him, but explained: Of course I am.
I lost nine years of my life. I'm a human being.
I'm bitter this sort of thing goes on in a so-called humane society. My story on Sostre for my graduate school master's thesis was due a few weeks after he came home. My adviser told me to rip up what I'd already written and rewrite it to tell the story of Sostre's readjustment to life outside prison. It would mean asking for a lot of his time. I doubted Sostre wanted to spend his first days of freedom with me.
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I'm a journalism student. And he just spent nine years in prison. So I found ways to be useful to Sostre.