In his new book, From Black Power to Prison Power, Donald Tibbs achieves precisely what the field of law and society aims to do: demonstrate how a landmark, if largely overlooked, court decision emerges from the historical struggle for black liberation during the Black Power era, a conflict between an inexorable social movement and state power intent on preserving white people's five centuries-old despotic relationship to black people. Through Tibbs’ legal history, we can glean how such a thing as a labor union for prisoners came to be in the first place, how the organizing which made it possible was neither anomalous nor exceptional but rather was the culmination of black struggle across the generations, and how the strategic decisions of prisoners and their supporters indicate what it means to exist within the crosshairs of state repression. While it may be unsurprising that the court ultimately decided against the prisoners (no spoiler alert needed), From Black Power to Prison Power's deconstruction of the court's reasoning in Jones illustrates a basic principle of law and society studies—that is, contradictions between power and jurisprudence betray the law's fundamental tyranny, especially where black people are concerned.

From Black Power to Prison Power is organized into three sections. In the first section, “Foundations,” Tibbs establishes the historical context for the two main strands of political movement that would later come together to comprise the prisoner union movement. On the one hand, there was the struggle within prisons by inmates who sought to exploit the state's ambivalent policies, which, for a time, vacillated between rehabilitation and straight-up punishment. From the 1950s onward, collective action by prisoners, together with individual lawsuits brought by select inmates, steadily carved out an enhanced realm of legal rights and due process claims for the incarcerated. As Tibbs demonstrates, this process was made possible by the increasingly radical organizing occurring outside prison walls, with the emergence of the Black Panther Party as the crucial development leading to the prisoner union movement. In section two, “Formations,” Tibbs looks more closely at the connections between organizing inside prisons and inside the black community in the late 1960s. The incarceration of Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panthers, the political maturation of George Jackson and his subsequent murder, the Marin County Courthouse shootout, the trial of Angela Davis, inmate strikes at Folsom, Soledad, and Attica prisons, and the legal cases of the Raleigh Two, the Charlotte Three, and the Wilmington Ten together represent for Tibbs one concerted movement, distinguished only spatially by the artifice of prison walls. One outcome of this process was the formation of prisoner unions across the country. On this score, Tibbs provides scholars of law and society a crucial insight that reverberates across the archives of black history: black struggle is united across time and space, from coast to coast, and serves as the condition to which the police power responds but ultimately fails. This assertion is no less true in the face of the unmitigated trail of legal defeats recorded in this book, and should stand as a reminder that actions today as seemingly disconnected as the 2011–2012 hunger strikes by inmates in California's Pelican Bay prison and across the Georgia state prison system are in fact part of the same unstoppable movement.

In the third section, “Litigations,” Tibbs mines the legal path that was the inevitable collision course between inmates and the state following the formation of prisoner unions. From Black Power to Prison Power persuasively makes the argument that “there was a significant social history buttressing the legal history leading up to the Jones case” (197). With its decision in Jones to depart from the era's movement toward enhanced rights for criminal suspects and prisoners, the Supreme Court “set a dangerous precedent by lavishing unrestricted discretion into the hands of prison administrators” (195). Whereas the first two-thirds of the book documents the law's intrinsic limits as a venue for redressing black grievances—“law had proven inadequate”—at the end, Tibbs critiques the Court's reasoning in Jones as if antiblack violence has ever been anything but unreasonable (23). Nonetheless, Tibbs’ account reveals how the case stands today as a bulwark behind which the state has authorized all manner of severely punitive carceral methods that have left the U.S. system of mass incarceration grossly out of step with international standards. The reader should not mistake the lesson in this book that the key to interrogating this devastating state of affairs lies with a close reading of, and political solidarity with, the black freedom movement.