When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: 50 Years Later

The Abolition series, hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, examines how the humanities - history, language, storytelling, and the imagination - informs the activism and vision of movement leaders.

In 1973, the men incarcerated at the state prison in Walpole, Massachusetts organized themselves into a labor union and took over the prison for two months. During this period, the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole was remarkably peaceful. The prisoners’ union--the National Prisoners Reform Association (NPRA)--seized on the opportunities afforded both by a prison guard strike and by a radical reformer Commissioner of Corrections to launch an extraordinary struggle for prisoner self-determination and an important chapter in the movement for prison abolition.

This symposium brings together participants in these events to mark their 50th anniversary—panels will include former members of NPRA and other prison organizations, members of Commissioner John Boone’s administration, and civilian observers. In relation to this history, the symposium will also feature discussions of prison abolition grounded in Indigenous knowledge and law, with particular attention to the critical thought of local Indigenous leaders about the carceral state and what lies beyond it.

This symposium is co-sponsored by the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, the Harvard University Native American Program, the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, and the Philips Brooks House.

Learn more about this event here