1970s

The 1970s are a hinge point in the book’s account of American punishment: mass incarceration was beginning to expand, while reforms in prisons and mental-health care unfolded alongside economic changes that left many poor people exposed to new forms of hardship. The decade does not appear as a single, self-contained episode. Instead, its significance emerges across national policy, Alabama’s changing economy, and the later lives of people sent into institutions as children.

A Starting Point for Mass Incarceration

The book identifies the early 1970s as the point from which the American prison population began a transformation without historical parallel. When Bryan Stevenson first visited death row in December 1983, the country was already in the early stages of becoming a more punitive nation. The book sets the scale of the later change against an early-1970s prison population of 300,000 people, compared with 2.3 million at the time of writing; nearly six million more people were on probation or parole. The figures do not describe the decade’s endpoint, but they make the 1970s a baseline for understanding the expansion that followed.

That growth was tied to policies and public language that made punishment seem like a measure of resolve. The book connects the broader punitive shift to the abandonment of rehabilitation, education, and services for incarcerated people, and to laws that could impose life sentences for offenses such as petty theft or a minor property crime. Slogans such as “Three strikes and you’re out” condensed that approach into a promise of severity. The longer-term consequence was not only more imprisonment, but a durable tendency to define people by criminal labels, even when circumstances or later changes in their lives challenged those identities.

Prison Conditions and the Legacy of Attica

The prison crisis of the 1970s became visible to the wider public through the Attica Prison uprising. Its exposure of abusive and inhumane conditions—including solitary confinement and other degrading punishments—brought national attention to what happened inside prisons. The standoff ended with forty-two people dead. Its consequences included Supreme Court rulings that provided imprisoned people with basic due-process protections and reforms in several states intended to end the most abusive practices.

The book also stresses the limits of those reforms. Wary of further violence, states made changes after Attica, but the rapidly growing prison population contributed to a deterioration in confinement conditions again about a decade later. In the later account of prisoners’ complaints, people reported beatings by correctional staff, humiliation in stockades, and deaths in cells. Thus, the decade’s reform moment did not resolve the underlying problem: attention and legal protections could produce change, yet institutional expansion placed those gains under renewed pressure.

Economic Change in Alabama’s Black Belt

In Monroe County and the wider Black Belt of Alabama, the 1970s followed a longer transition away from cotton agriculture. The region’s plantation economy had depended on enslaved labor and, after the Civil War, on Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers whose survival remained tied to white landowners. During the Great Migration, thousands of African Americans left the region, while those who stayed continued to work the land. By the 1950s, small cotton farms were becoming less profitable, and the State of Alabama encouraged white landowners to move toward timber and forest products through tax incentives for pulp and paper mills. Black residents were largely excluded from this new industry even as the older agricultural order weakened.

Walter McMillian’s livelihood shows how that transition could create both an opening and a boundary. He started a pulpwood business that developed with the timber industry in the 1970s, borrowing money to buy a power saw, a tractor, and a pulpwood truck. By the 1980s, the business gave him a degree of independence, though it did not produce much extra money. It also allowed him to avoid the dependence on white mill or factory owners that often shaped unskilled work for poor Black people in southern Alabama. His position remained constrained by racism, but owning a business in a growing sector gave him latitude many others did not have. That independence brought respect from some people and suspicion from others who doubted that a poorly educated Black man could have achieved it legitimately.

Mental-Health Reform and Institutional Change

The 1970s were also part of the period in which states increasingly sought to reduce involuntary confinement in mental institutions. In the 1960s and 1970s, new laws made commitment more difficult, while advocates and lawyers won court decisions requiring states to move institutional residents into community programs. These reforms addressed serious abuses and expanded the rights of people with developmental disabilities, including the right to refuse treatment.

The book places that necessary change beside an unintended institutional consequence. As mental-health beds declined, mass-imprisonment policies expanded criminal statutes and harsh sentencing. Poor people with mental disabilities who could not obtain care or medication became more likely to encounter police and end up in jail or prison. By the 1990s, some states had reduced their state-hospital populations by more than 95 percent; across the longer comparison, the number of psychiatric beds had fallen from one for every 300 Americans in 1955 to one for every 3,000 fifty years later. The decade’s turn toward deinstitutionalization therefore belongs to a broader account of how social needs could be transferred from health systems to criminal punishment rather than met in the community.

Long-Term Consequences for Children and Prisoners

The conditions established during the 1970s remained present in later accounts of people sentenced as children. Many of the Louisiana clients represented by the Equal Justice Initiative had arrived at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary) in the 1970s or 1980s. The prison had a history of violence and dangerous forced labor: people could receive disciplinary punishment for conflicts with staff or other prisoners, and work in brutal conditions could result in severe injury. Prisoners who refused to pick cotton in the fields could receive write-ups and months in solitary confinement. When their cases later came before resentencing courts, those accumulated disciplinary records could be used against them, even though they had been built in an environment that offered little prospect of release and harsh consequences for resistance.

Seen across these different settings, the 1970s are less a clean break than a convergence. Prison reform followed public exposure of abuse, mental-health reform sought to end unjust confinement, and Alabama’s timber economy offered some individuals new forms of independence while leaving broader poverty in place. At the same time, the decade’s early-1970s prison-population baseline became the starting marker for a much larger system. Its importance lies in these overlapping changes and in the later consequences they set in motion.