How One Inmate Changed The Prison System From The Inside Code Switch NPR. Martin Sostre on Feb. New York. . Vic De. People like Luis Rivera are being locked out of the formal workforce forever thanks to one youthful mistake. As most prisoners families already know, there arent many comforts from home that you can send to an incarcerated loved one. This is largely due to on. Arizona based nonprofit advocacy organization. Includes campaign details and a review of recent legislation. CROWN POINT Roberto V. Lebron was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison for reckless homicide in a bar stabbing in Highland that killed a 28year. Prison Marriage Ministry. We can help you and your incarcerated spouse. Incarceration is Hard on Marriage. When a career criminals plan for revenge is thwarted by unlikely circumstances, he puts his intended victims son in his place by putting him in prison. LuciaThe New York Post via Getty Images. Vic De. LuciaThe New York Post via Getty Images. Martin Sostre on Feb. New York. Vic De. LuciaThe New York Post via Getty Images. Authors note. His name has been lost to history, but in the 1. U. S. knew of Martin Sostre. He was a fearless prison activist at the dawn of the age of mass incarceration, an inmate willing to risk months in solitary confinement to fight for prisoners rights. He was one of the first prisoners to successfully challenge his conditions in court and won his biggest victory when he crossed paths with a pioneering judge. I met Sostre shortly after he was released from prison in 1. Hed been granted executive clemency by the governor of New York on Christmas Eve in 1. I was a novice reporter, and he was the subject of my first big story. That year, he had been declared a political prisoner by Amnesty International the conviction that put him behind bars was undercut when the primary witness claimed he had been pressured by police to set up Sostre. Decades later, Im still writing about solitary confinement and false convictions interests of mine first sparked by Sostre. Several years ago, I started looking for him. I found a few newspaper stories from the 1. I found addresses in Florida and New York that may have been his. I wrote him a letter, but didnt hear back. I didnt know if he was dead or alive. Unix Advanced Tutorial Pdf: Software Free Download. I kept looking because Martin Sostre who did so much to protect the rights of prisoners deserves to be remembered. Street dude, a hustlerSostre was born in Harlem in 1. His parents were black and Puerto Rican his father a house painter and mechanic his mother, a seamstress. Breaking news articles on inmate topics, many fulltext articles, discussing topics such as inmate searches, sex offender searches, prison conditions, prison suicides. Kyle Patrick Alvarezs The Stanford Prison Experiment, now playing in limited release, took fourteen years to get made, and finally arrived at Sundance 2015. He dropped out of high school during the Great Depression to help support his family. He wasnt political yet, but in Harlem in the 1. Sostre heard the street corner radicals making speeches about black nationalism and leftist movements that promised delivery from racial oppression. Sometimes, Sostre would walk into the African National Memorial Bookstore on Seventh Avenue, where owner Lewis Michaux let customers with little or no money for books sit in the store for hours and read. Sostre also heard his own father make speeches around the house, always referring to the capitalists in Spanish as the vandals, he once told a reporter. My father was a talking communist he talked about it but never did anything. Sostre was born in Harlem in 1. His parents were black and Puerto Rican his father a house painter and mechanic his mother, a seamstress. Courtesy of the Sostre family. Courtesy of the Sostre family. Sostre was born in Harlem in 1. His parents were black and Puerto Rican his father a house painter and mechanic his mother, a seamstress. Courtesy of the Sostre family. Sostre was drafted into the Army in 1. He came back to Harlem in 1. He was, by his own description, a street dude, a hustler. His first arrest was in 1. He was sentenced to six to 1. Sing Sing, on June 1. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed there. Sostre remembered the lights flickering throughout the prison when the switch was pulled on the electric chair. Life changed dramatically once he got to prison. On the streets, he once explained, Youre hustling, youre looking over one shoulder to be sure you dont get busted and over the other to be sure you dont get ripped off. Living in the streets by your wits makes you alert. In jail I decided to put that sharpened awareness to another purpose. For the first time, I had a chance to think, and began reading everything I could history, philosophy, and law. He made a distinction between a political prisoner and a politicized prisoner, a label he preferred. A politicized prisoner, he explained, is one who has become politically aware while in prison, even though the original crime that he committed was not a political crime. His political education began with the Nation of Islam, which found harsh prisons were a good place to recruit new members. The Holiday Ost Rapidshare. Just several years earlier, Malcolm X had gone to prison and become a Black Muslim. I identified with Malcolm X because he was a street hustler, like me, Sostre said. In the prison yard at Clinton prison known as Little Siberia because of its location in cold and isolated Dannemora, N. Y., Sostre would join the other inmates who gathered to teach themselves about black history and Islam. Teddy Anderson was a popular inmate because he was the only one with a copy of the Quran. Sometimes hed let Sostre or another prisoner borrow it for short periods. And even though Sostre would later say he was attracted to Black Muslims for their politics, and not for the religion, he insisted on buying his own copy of the Quran which was a political act in prison. Prison officials did not recognize the Nation of Islam as an authorized religion, but Sostre demanded he be allowed visits from Black Muslim ministers, just like other prisoners could get visits from ministers and priests. In response, prison officials branded Sostre a troublemaker and put him in solitary confinement. In solitary, he later told the writer Arthur Dobrin, I slept on a concrete floor with no bed and no mattress. All I had was a blanket which they gave me at night and took away early the next morning. The floor was so hard and cold that I could sleep only 1. There was no light, no running water, no toilet. He could no longer go to the library, where hed spent long hours reading law books. But he could write and file lawsuits even though nothing was likely to come of them. I slept on a concrete floor with no bed and no mattress. All I had was a blanket which they gave me at night and took away early the next morning. The floor was so hard and cold that I could sleep only 1. There was no light, no running water, no toilet. Martin Sostre. Prisoners, courts had ruled, lost their constitutional rights once they had been convicted. Wardens had wide discretion. Million Thousand Rar. A prisoner could take a complaint to state court but was not protected by federal civil rights law. Sostre read history and the Constitution carefully and believed his right to practice the religion of his choice was a fundamental freedom. He and two other Black Muslim inmates sued the warden, claiming they had been denied the right to buy the Quran and practice their religion and had been put in solitary confinement as punishment. In 1. 96. 1, they won. In Pierce v. La. Vallee and in Sostre v. La. Vallee, federal judges ruled that the men had rights to practice their religion and more broadly that even inmates had rights guaranteed under the U. S. Constitution, including the right to challenge prison conditions. Other Black Muslims around the country would bring similar suits. It would be another Black Muslim prisoner, Thomas Cooper in Illinois, whose similar lawsuit would first reach the Supreme Court. And in 1. 96. 4, the high court, in Cooper v. Pate, agreed that inmates kept their constitutional rights in prison and could sue in federal court over prison conditions. Scholars describe it as sort of the Brown v. Board of Education of the prisoners rights movement, says historian Garrett Felber. It was Sostres earlier lawsuit and another one he won later that set the precedents that Felber says became the building blocks for the Supreme Courts groundbreaking decision in Cooper.