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Massachusetts
Political repression plays out state by state — shaped by local institutions, prosecutors, and movements for defense. These are the documented political prisoners and cases the census holds for Massachusetts.
167Documented
1In custody
153Released
2Awaiting trial
Eras of repression in Massachusetts
Where Massachusetts’s entries fall across the census’s historical eras.
1910s 25
1970s 23
1950s 19
1800s 17
1930s 14
1700s 13
Documented cases
167 entries in the census — every one stays in the record, whether the case is open or closed.
Alexis Papali
Released
Alexis Papali is a non-profit employee from Boston, Massachusetts who was arrested on March 5, 2023 at the Atl...
Theodore Parker
Released
Boston abolitionist indicted in connection with the May 26, 1854 storming of the Boston Court House by an axe-...
James Phillips
Released
James Phillips, a seaman from Boston, Massachusetts, was convicted at the mass IWW trial in Chicago, sentenced...
Wendell Phillips
Released
Boston abolitionist indicted in connection with the May 26, 1854 storming of the Boston Court House by an axe-...
Richard Picariello
Released
Richard Joseph Picariello led the Fred Hampton Unit of the People's Forces, which set off a series of bombings...
Augusto Gonzales Pinto
Released
Augusto C. Gonzales Pinto was a Portuguese-immigrant leader of the 1928 New Bedford, Massachusetts textile str...
Eric Rungnar Platin
Released
Eric Rungnar Platin was a conscientious objector from Massachusetts imprisoned during World War I. Court-marti...
John Porter
Released
John Porter, a young vice-president of the New Bedford Textile Workers' Union and a Young Workers League organ...
Katherine Ann Power
Released
Katherine Ann Power was a 21-year-old Brandeis University student and Susan Saxes co-defendant in the Septembe...
Nicola Sacco
Released
Nicola Sacco was an Italian immigrant and anarchist-leaning labor activist in the United States, part of radic...
Susan Saxe
Released
Susan Edith Saxe was a 21-year-old Brandeis University student in 1970 and one of the principal organizers of...
Job Shattuck
Released
Job Shattuck was a Revolutionary War veteran and one of the principal leaders of Shays’ Rebellion in eastern M...
Daniel Shays
Released
Daniel Shays was a farmer and veteran of the Revolutionary War — he had fought at Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga and...
Thomas Sims
Released
Black man held in Boston federal custody under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 after escaping enslavement in Ge...
Samuel Sterenstein
Released
Samuel Sterenstein was a conscientious objector from Massachusetts imprisoned during World War I. Court-martia...
Dirk Struik
Released
Dirk Jan Struik was a world-renowned MIT mathematician and historian of science indicted by a Middlesex County...
Bethany Terrill
Awaiting Trial
Bethany Abigail Terrill, of Malden, Massachusetts, was charged on October 16, 2025 with threatening a United S...
Henry David Thoreau
Released
Henry David Thoreau, the Transcendentalist writer and naturalist, spent a night in the Concord, Massachusetts...
Anne Timpson
Released
Anne Burlak Timpson, known as "the Red Flame," was a legendary labor organizer and Massachusetts Communist Par...
Kazi Toure
Released
Toure—born Christopher King—became part of the United Freedom Front’s underground politics in the late 1970s a...
William Monroe Trotter
Released
William Monroe Trotter was a civil-rights editor arrested after the July 30, 1903 Boston meeting where he chal...
Robert Valeri
Released
Robert Valeri was one of the five involved in the September 23, 1970 robbery of the State Street Bank and Trus...
Harvey Franklin Wasserman
Released
Co-founded Liberation News Service in 1967 and helped move it to the Montague Farm in Massachusetts in 1968. C...
David Webb
Released
David Webb is a police-accountability activist, a self-described instigative journalist and First Amendment au...
Institutions in Massachusetts
Prisons, jails, and detention centers in Massachusetts that appear in the census’s case files.
Fort WarrenBoston, Massachusetts
15 cases
Norfolk County Jail Dedham, Massachusetts
13 cases
Boston Court House
3 cases
South Weymouth Naval Air Station — Transfiguration Plowshares East
2 cases
Boston JailBoston, Massachusetts
2 cases
Charlestown State PrisonBoston, Massachusetts
1 case
Hampshire County Jail (Northampton)Northampton, Massachusetts
1 case
Salem, MA federal jailSalem, Massachusetts
1 case