The History of Political Prisoners in the United States
From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Black Lives Matter movement, the United States has a long and often hidden history of imprisoning people for their political beliefs, activism, and resistance.
Criminalizing Dissent in a New Republic
Before the United States was a decade old, the government passed laws making it a crime to criticize those in power — establishing a precedent that would define centuries of political repression.
Criminalizing Dissent in a New Republic
Before the United States was a decade old, the government passed laws making it a crime to criticize those in power — establishing a precedent that would define centuries of political repression.
The Whiskey Rebellion
Before the Sedition Act, there was the excise. When farmers in western Pennsylvania resisted the new federal whiskey tax — with petitions, liberty poles, and finally arms — President Washington marched nearly 13,000 militiamen across the Alleghenies to put them down. Some twenty suspected rebels were seized in nighttime raids and marched three hundred miles to Philadelphia to stand trial for treason; two, John Mitchell and Philip Weigel, were convicted and sentenced to hang before Washington pardoned them. It was the first time the new republic imprisoned its own citizens for resisting federal power, and it set the template every later crackdown would follow: overwhelming force, exemplary prosecutions, and mercy only after the point had been made.
The Sedition Act
Just seven years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" statements against the government or its officials. At least 25 people were arrested and 10 convicted — nearly all of them newspaper editors and political opponents of the Federalist Party. Among them was Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, who was sentenced to four months in prison and a $1,000 fine for criticizing President Adams in print. Lyon won re-election while still incarcerated, a powerful early symbol of democratic resistance to political repression. The Act expired in 1801 under Thomas Jefferson, who pardoned all those convicted, but its precedent — that the federal government could imprison its critics — would echo through American history.
A geography of repression
The events of the 1700s era spread across the country — from Washington County, PA to Philadelphia, PA. Each marker is a story this database documents.
Abolition, War & the Struggle for Freedom
The fight to end slavery and the upheaval of the Civil War produced some of America's earliest and most consequential political prisoners.
Abolition, War & the Struggle for Freedom
The fight to end slavery and the upheaval of the Civil War produced some of America's earliest and most consequential political prisoners.
The Abolition Movement
As the movement to end slavery intensified, Southern states and the federal government responded by criminalizing anti-slavery activism. It became illegal in much of the South to distribute abolitionist literature, teach enslaved people to read, or publicly advocate for emancipation. Abolitionists were arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to mob violence. Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837. John Brown was executed in 1859 after leading a raid on the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry. His trial and execution made him a martyr and deepened the divide that would lead to war. Across the South, free Black people and fugitive slaves who resisted their condition were treated as criminals for asserting their basic humanity.
The Anti-Rent War
In the Hudson Valley of New York, tenant farmers rose up against the patroon system — a Dutch feudal-style land tenure that bound tens of thousands of farmers to the Van Rensselaer, Livingston, and other manor lords with perpetual leases collected in livestock, labor, and cash. Disguised in calico-cloth masks and sheepskin face paint as "Calico Indians," the tenants resisted sheriffs serving distress warrants, intercepted rent-collection parties, and built a region-wide insurgency across Columbia, Rensselaer, Albany, and Delaware Counties. On August 7, 1845 at the Moses Earle farm in Andes, Delaware County, hundreds of Calico Indians surrounded and shot dead Undersheriff Osman N. Steele, who had ridden out to enforce a rent-distress sale. Four leaders — physician Smith A. Boughton ("Big Thunder"), and Calico Indians John Van Steenburgh, Edward O'Connor, and the elderly tenant Moses Earle himself — were tried at Hudson and Delhi in 1845 before Justices John W. Edmonds and Amasa J. Parker. Boughton received life for robbery (taking a sheriff's rent paper); Van Steenburgh and O'Connor were sentenced to be hanged for Steele's murder; Earle was convicted of manslaughter. All four served at Clinton State Prison at Dannemora. After Anti-Rent voting blocs delivered the 1846 gubernatorial election to John Young, the new governor pardoned every Anti-Rent prisoner in 1847. The patroon leasehold system was effectively dismantled by the new state constitution adopted that same year.
John Brown & Harpers Ferry
After the raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry failed, Virginia tried John Brown for treason, murder, and inciting insurrection while he lay wounded on a cot in the courtroom. He was hanged on December 2, 1859; six of his men followed him to the gallows. Brown used his six weeks in the Charles Town jail to write the letters that made him the most consequential political prisoner of the century — "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." Eighteen months later the country was at war, and Union soldiers marched south singing his name.
The Civil War
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing the government to arrest and hold civilians without charge or trial. An estimated 13,000 to 15,000 political prisoners were detained, including journalists, elected officials, draft resisters, and Confederate sympathizers. Clement Vallandigham, a sitting Ohio congressman, was arrested and tried by a military tribunal for delivering a speech criticizing the war. The suspension of habeas corpus set a significant constitutional precedent for executive authority during wartime and demonstrated how quickly civil liberties could be curtailed when the government perceived a threat to national security.
The Dakota War Trials
In the six weeks after the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, a five-man military commission tried 392 Dakota men — some in hearings that lasted less than five minutes, none with counsel — and sentenced 303 of them to death. President Lincoln personally reviewed the transcripts and commuted most of the sentences, but on December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged together at Mankato, Minnesota: the largest mass execution in American history. Sixteen hundred Dakota women, children, and elders spent that winter imprisoned in a stockade below Fort Snelling, and the survivors were exiled from the state by act of Congress. The census counts the Mankato thirty-eight among the first political prisoners of the modern record.
Coxey's Army
In the depths of the depression that followed the Panic of 1893, Ohio quarry owner Jacob S. Coxey organized the "Commonweal of Christ" — popularly known as Coxey's Army — and led roughly 500 unemployed men on foot from Massillon, Ohio to Washington, D.C., starting March 25, 1894. They demanded a federal $500 million public-works program to build good roads, funded by non-interest-bearing currency. It was the first protest march on Washington in American history. Parallel "Industrial Armies" set out from the West Coast — most notably Charles T. Kelly's 1,500-man column from San Francisco (Jack London was among its members) and Lewis C. Fry's 700 men from Los Angeles, who repeatedly clashed with the Southern Pacific Railroad over commandeered freight trains. Coxey's march reached the Capitol on May 1, 1894. As Coxey, chief lieutenant Carl Browne, and Philadelphia delegate Christopher Columbus Jones attempted to deliver their "petition in boots" from the Capitol steps, all three were arrested by the Capitol Police on the spurious charge of carrying banners and walking on Capitol grass. Convicted in D.C. police court before Judge Thomas Miller on May 8, sentenced May 21 to 20 days in the District jail, and released June 10, 1894. The arrests provoked national outrage and made the right to demonstrate on the Capitol grounds a pivotal civil-liberties question. Fifty years later, Congress invited Coxey to deliver his unread 1894 speech from the same Capitol steps.
A geography of repression
The events of the 1800s era spread across the country — from Boston, MA to U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC. Each marker is a story this database documents.
Labor, Suffrage & the Red Scare
The rise of labour organising, the women's suffrage movement, and the first wave of anti-communist repression brought mass political imprisonment to the United States.
Labor, Suffrage & the Red Scare
The rise of labour organising, the women's suffrage movement, and the first wave of anti-communist repression brought mass political imprisonment to the United States.
The Labor Movement
The early twentieth century saw brutal repression of the American labour movement. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were a primary target. In 1917, federal agents raided IWW offices across the country, and over 100 leaders were convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing World War I and organising strikes. Joe Hill, a labour songwriter and organiser, was executed by firing squad in Utah in 1915 on disputed murder charges. Big Bill Haywood and other leaders faced lengthy prison sentences. State governments used criminal syndicalism laws to prosecute union organisers, and private companies employed armed strikebreakers. The Ludlow Massacre of 1914, where National Guard troops killed striking coal miners and their families in Colorado, exemplified the violent suppression of labour activism.
Suffragism
Women who picketed the White House demanding the right to vote were arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to brutal treatment. In 1917, members of the National Woman's Party began a sustained campaign of picketing. Police arrested over 200 women on charges of "obstructing traffic." Those who refused to pay fines were sent to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. On the Night of Terror in November 1917, guards beat, choked, and brutalised imprisoned suffragists. When Alice Paul and other leaders went on hunger strikes, prison officials ordered force-feeding. Public outrage over their treatment ultimately helped build support for the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920.
World War I
The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 criminalised opposition to the war effort. Over 2,000 people were prosecuted, including Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, sentenced to ten years for an anti-war speech. Debs ran for president from prison in 1920, receiving nearly one million votes. Hundreds of conscientious objectors were court-martialled and imprisoned, with some subjected to physical abuse and solitary confinement. The Espionage Act remains in effect today and has been used in the twenty-first century to prosecute whistleblowers.
The First Red Scare
Following the Russian Revolution, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a sweeping campaign against suspected radicals. The Palmer Raids of 1919–1920 saw federal agents arrest over 10,000 people, often without warrants, in coordinated raids targeting immigrant communities, labour organisers, and suspected communists. Hundreds of foreign-born residents were deported, including the prominent anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Many detainees were held in overcrowded facilities without access to legal counsel. The raids represented the largest mass violation of civil liberties in American history up to that point.
The Scottsboro Nine
Nine Black teenagers pulled off a freight train in Alabama in 1931 were convicted of a fabricated rape within two weeks, eight of them sentenced to death by all-white juries. Their case became a worldwide cause: the Communist Party's legal arm fought it to the Supreme Court twice, winning the right to counsel in Powell v. Alabama and the right to jury pools that included Black citizens in Norris v. Alabama. One accuser recanted entirely; Alabama kept retrying and reconvicting anyway, and the last of the nine did not leave prison until 1950. The state issued posthumous pardons in 2013 — eighty-two years after the arrests.
The Bonus Army
In the summer of 1932, more than 40,000 First World War veterans and their families camped in Washington to demand early payment of their service bonus. On July 28, on orders that ran from President Hoover through General Douglas MacArthur, the Army moved on its own veterans with cavalry, tanks, and tear gas, burning the Anacostia camp to the ground; two veterans were shot dead by police and hundreds were injured and arrested. No protest before television did more to show Americans what the state was willing to do to peaceful petitioners — and the image of the burning camps helped end a presidency.
A geography of repression
The events of the Early 1900s era spread across the country — from Haymarket Square, Chicago, IL to Anacostia Flats, Washington, DC. Each marker is a story this database documents.
McCarthyism, Civil Rights & Vietnam
The Cold War, the struggle for racial justice, and opposition to the Vietnam War produced waves of political imprisonment that reshaped American society.
McCarthyism, Civil Rights & Vietnam
The Cold War, the struggle for racial justice, and opposition to the Vietnam War produced waves of political imprisonment that reshaped American society.
World War II
The most sweeping act of political imprisonment during World War II was the forced incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. Following Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forcibly removed from their homes and confined in internment camps. The government presented no evidence of disloyalty. Resisters like Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi were arrested and convicted. It took decades for the government to acknowledge the injustice; reparations were not authorised until 1988.
McCarthyism
Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade created a climate of repression that pervaded American life. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated suspected communists in government, academia, and entertainment. The Hollywood Ten were imprisoned for refusing to testify. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 on espionage charges in a case that remains deeply controversial. Thousands lost their jobs through loyalty oaths, blacklists, and guilt-by-association investigations. The Smith Act was used to prosecute Communist Party leaders. McCarthyism demonstrated how fear could be weaponised to suppress political dissent across an entire society.
The Smith Act Trials
The 1940 Smith Act made it a crime to advocate — or to belong to a party that advocated — the overthrow of the government, and after the war the Justice Department used it to decapitate the Communist Party. Eleven national leaders were convicted at Foley Square in 1949 after a nine-month trial; their defense lawyers were jailed for contempt alongside them. The Supreme Court blessed the convictions in Dennis v. United States (1951), and more than 140 party officials were indicted nationwide before Yates v. United States (1957) gutted the doctrine — too late for the men and women who had already served their years for a conviction built on books and speeches.
The Civil Rights Movement
The movement for racial justice produced political prisoners on a massive scale. Across the South, tens of thousands of activists were arrested for sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches, and voter registration drives. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested 29 times. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail" became one of the defining documents of the movement. Freedom Riders were imprisoned in Mississippi's Parchman Farm penitentiary. Fannie Lou Hamer was arrested and savagely beaten for registering Black voters. In Birmingham, thousands of schoolchildren were arrested during the 1963 Children's Crusade. The systematic use of arrest and imprisonment exposed the deep entanglement of the criminal justice system with racial oppression.
The Vietnam War
Opposition to the Vietnam War led to the imprisonment of thousands. Over 200,000 men were formally accused of violating draft laws, and approximately 8,750 were convicted. The "Chicago Seven" were prosecuted for conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing title and convicted of draft evasion in 1967; his conviction was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court. Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Catholic priests who destroyed draft files, were imprisoned and became symbols of the anti-war movement.
A geography of repression
The events of the Mid 1900s era spread across the country — from Manzanar / U.S. internment camps (CA) to Kent State, Kent, OH. Each marker is a story this database documents.
COINTELPRO & Independence Movements
The FBI's covert war on domestic political movements and the ongoing struggle for Puerto Rican independence produced political prisoners who remain incarcerated — or only recently freed — to this day.
COINTELPRO & Independence Movements
The FBI's covert war on domestic political movements and the ongoing struggle for Puerto Rican independence produced political prisoners who remain incarcerated — or only recently freed — to this day.
Puerto Rican Independence Movement
The struggle for Puerto Rican independence produced some of the longest-held political prisoners in the Western Hemisphere. In 1950, members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party staged an armed insurrection and an attack on Blair House. Lolita Lebrón led a 1954 attack on the U.S. House of Representatives as an act of protest against colonial rule; she served 25 years. Oscar López Rivera, a Vietnam veteran and advocate for independence, was sentenced to 55 years on charges of seditious conspiracy. He spent 36 years in prison — including 12 in solitary — before President Obama commuted his sentence in 2017. His case drew international attention to the question of political prisoners in the United States.
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO — the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program — was a covert and often illegal campaign to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt domestic political organisations. Originally targeting the Communist Party USA, the programme expanded to include the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other groups. Hoover authorised tactics including wiretapping, blackmail, and forged correspondence. Fred Hampton was assassinated in a 1969 raid carried out by Chicago police in coordination with the FBI. Geronimo Pratt was framed for murder and spent 27 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. Leonard Peltier, convicted in connection with the deaths of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge in 1975, spent nearly 50 years in prison before his release in 2025. COINTELPRO's full extent was only revealed after activists broke into an FBI office in 1971 and leaked the files.
Attica & the Prison Rebellion Years
On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners seized the yard at Attica and issued demands that read like a bill of rights: medical care, religious freedom, an end to censorship, a minimum wage. Four days later New York State took the prison back with helicopters and shotguns, killing thirty-nine men — hostages and prisoners alike — in fifteen minutes, and torturing survivors in the days that followed. Sixty-two prisoners were indicted for the uprising; no trooper was ever prosecuted for the retaking. Attica turned the prisoners' rights movement into a national force and put the phrase "political prisoner" back into the American vocabulary, where the census has kept it.
AIM & Wounded Knee
For seventy-one days in 1973, American Indian Movement activists and Oglala Lakota traditionalists occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, under fire from federal marshals, the FBI, and armored personnel carriers. The siege produced more than 500 arrests and a wave of federal prosecutions; the leadership case against Dennis Banks and Russell Means collapsed in 1974 when a federal judge dismissed all charges for prosecutorial misconduct, calling the government's conduct a "pollution of justice." The violence on Pine Ridge did not end with the occupation — and out of the 1975 firefight that followed came the case of Leonard Peltier, the census's longest-running entry.
A geography of repression
The events of the Late 1900s era spread across the country — from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Wounded Knee, SD. Each marker is a story this database documents.
Terror, Technology & New Movements
The post-9/11 era brought sweeping new powers of surveillance and prosecution, while movements for environmental justice, digital freedom, economic equality, and Black lives continued the long American tradition of dissent — and its consequences.
Terror, Technology & New Movements
The post-9/11 era brought sweeping new powers of surveillance and prosecution, while movements for environmental justice, digital freedom, economic equality, and Black lives continued the long American tradition of dissent — and its consequences.
The War on Terror
Following September 11, 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act granted sweeping authority to monitor communications, freeze assets, and detain non-citizens. Guantánamo Bay held 780 detainees — many without charge — and many were subjected to what international bodies characterised as torture. Material support statutes were used to prosecute humanitarian workers and charity organisers. Muslim communities faced widespread surveillance. The legal architecture created during the War on Terror fundamentally altered the relationship between civil liberties and national security.
The Green Scare
In the mid-2000s, the FBI declared environmental and animal rights extremism the leading domestic terrorism threat. "Operation Backfire" led to dozens of arrests for property destruction that harmed no person. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 created enhanced penalties even for peaceful protesters. Activists like Daniel McGowan were held in secretive Communications Management Units that severely limited contact with the outside world. Critics coined the term "Green Scare" as a reference to earlier waves of political repression.
Anonymous
The hacktivist collective Anonymous emerged as a new form of political dissent. Members carried out attacks against government agencies and corporations they deemed oppressive. The government responded with aggressive prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Jeremy Hammond received 10 years for hacking Stratfor. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years for disclosing classified documents to WikiLeaks — one of the longest sentences ever for a leak to the press. Obama commuted Manning's sentence in 2017. The cases raised questions about digital dissent and the treatment of whistleblowers as enemies of the state.
The Whistleblowers
Since 2010 the Espionage Act — written for German saboteurs in 1917 — has become the government's standard weapon against its own truth-tellers. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years for giving the public the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, then jailed again for refusing to testify to a grand jury; Reality Winner received sixty-three months for a single page about election interference; Daniel Hale got forty-five months for proving that most drone-strike victims were not the intended targets. More Espionage Act cases have been brought against journalistic sources since 2009 than in the statute's entire prior history — and none of the defendants was permitted to tell the jury why they did it.
Occupy Wall Street
The Occupy movement challenged economic inequality and corporate influence on governance. Over 7,700 protesters were arrested nationwide. Police used mass arrest tactics, kettling, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. More than 700 were arrested in a single incident on the Brooklyn Bridge. Journalists covering the protests were also targeted. Internal documents later revealed coordinated surveillance by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local law enforcement through Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
Black Lives Matter
The movement for Black lives sparked the largest wave of protest in American history. In the summer of 2020, an estimated 15 to 26 million people participated in demonstrations. More than 14,000 were arrested. Federal authorities used unmarked vehicles, agents in camouflage, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Protest leaders faced surveillance, infiltration, and targeted prosecution. Several states introduced anti-protest laws increasing penalties for demonstrations. The movement drew direct comparisons to the civil rights era, and the government's response underscored that the tension between political dissent and state power remains one of the most unresolved questions in American democracy.
Standing Rock
The camps that rose against the Dakota Access Pipeline drew thousands of water protectors to Standing Rock — and one of the largest protest prosecutions in modern American history: more than 800 people arrested, many charged with felony rioting for standing on their own treaty land. Private security firm TigerSwan ran military-style counterinsurgency operations against the movement, briefing police that the water protectors were an "insurgency." Red Fawn Fallis served fifty-seven months in federal prison in a case built on an informant who was also her boyfriend. Standing Rock wrote the modern playbook — conspiracy charges, surveillance contractors, felony counts for misdemeanor conduct — that every pipeline and forest fight since has faced.
Stop Cop City
The movement to stop a police training center in Atlanta's Weelaunee Forest became the test case for treating protest itself as terrorism. Beginning in December 2022, forest defenders were charged under Georgia's domestic-terrorism statute — many for offenses as slight as trespassing — and in January 2023 state troopers shot and killed Manuel "Tortuguita" Paez Terán in the forest. That September, sixty-one people were indicted together under the state RICO act, the broadest conspiracy prosecution of a protest movement in a generation, sweeping in legal observers and a bail fund. The forest cases entered the census as a cohort in 2024, and most defendants are still waiting for trial.
A geography of repression
The events of the 2000s era spread across the country — from New York, NY (Holy Land Foundation) to Weelaunee Forest, Atlanta, GA. Each marker is a story this database documents.
The Fight Continues
Today, political prisoners remain incarcerated across the United States. Learn about their cases and how you can take action.
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