Forgotten Rebellions: American Penal Radicalism Between the World Wars

Historical accounts of prison uprisings within the United States have overwhelmingly situated the origins of incarcerated people’s large-scale, organized rebellions in the mid-twentieth century. The literature most often presents World War Two as an epochal moment that created the preconditions for modern activism within prisons. This article employs a content analysis of 44,000 interwar-era (1919-1941) newspaper stories of prison unrest to show that pre-war levels of radical rebellion in the United States were comparable to post-war levels. This finding suggests a certain continuity in penal radicalism over the twentieth century and undermines the notion that the effects of World War Two were necessary preconditions to the creation of a national political identity among incarcerated Americans.