Perspective: How incarcerated people can fight for their civil rights and humane conditions through the federal courts
This case — one among many emerging from Oklahoma’s vast network of local and state-operated jails and prisons — highlights the ongoing battle by incarcerated people and their allies to ensure civil rights and humanitarian safeguards for the nearly 50,000 people incarcerated in the state.
Born in 1937, William “Bobby” Battle grew up in segregated Oklahoma City where he earned no more than a sixth-grade education. As a young man, he served for a short time in the U.S. Army before being discharged for theft. By his early 20s, Battle found himself navigating the challenges of poverty and segregation in Oklahoma City, committing some petty crimes along the way. Battle took full responsibility, proclaiming later, “I had the wrong sense of values.
The suit alleged deprivations of rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to due process, the right to petition for redress of grievances, free-speech protections and the right to have access to the court. Throughout what would become nearly three decades of litigation, Battle and the other incarcerated claimants had well-respected private and American Civil Liberties Union attorneys as their legal representation.
The case had repercussions for other states. By 1981, a federal court ordered Missouri’s state prison to reduce its own penitentiary population to 2,000. Later in the decade, inmates in the Kansas State Penitentiary, who filed a complaint similar to Battle’s over prison overcrowding and neglect, won their own case and changes followed.
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