Howard Ayers, a member of the Nation of Islam, grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. In 1993 he was sentenced to 25-years-to-life in prison. Between 1968 and 1993 the prison population of the United States grew by 400%. Lawyer Thomas B. Marvell attributes this increase to legislators, who in response to rising fears, “established longer sentences or mandatory minimum sentences for wide varieties of crimes and criminals.” The ‘tough-on-crime’ ideology that emerged received broad bipartisan support, lending the way to President Bill Clinton’s ‘Three-Strikes Bill’, which mandated life imprisonment without possibility of parole for anyone who had committed a minimum of three violent felonies or, in some states, drug trafficking crimes.
Ayers has been to every maximum-security prison in New York State, including Attica Correctional Facility, where in 1994, he joined the Muhammad Prison Mosques, an iteration of the Nation inside prisons. In 1971, Attica was the site of one of the largest prison uprisings in history. In the interim years, it has been notorious for totalitarian-like surveillance of the people incarcerated within it. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Ayers found himself punished for his affiliation with NoI, which has been associated with radicalism, especially in prisons.
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The Nation of Islam intertwined religion with politics long before the famed Attica Uprising. In 1963, for the first time, New York State prisons’ population was majority Black. In 1964, a landmark supreme court case Cooper v. Pate ruled that prison authorities must give equal treatment to imprisoned practitioners of different faiths; in other words, a Black man has a right to practice his Islamic faith in prison. As the prisoners’ rights movement expanded in the 1970s, broader racial and political tensions spilled into the nation’s jails and prisons. In a Journal of Black Studies article, Christopher E. Smith quotes C. Eric Lincoln’s characterization of the Black Muslim movement as “a dynamic social protest that moves upon a religious vehicle.”
Nation of Islam was influential in expanding rights for incarcerated people, both for Black Muslims and broader civil rights in prison. But, fearing another uprising and the ramifications of the group’s philosophies in general, authorities perceived it as a threat, in part because of its roots in organizing and activism.