Resistance to the Vietnam draft produced criminal referrals against more than 200,000 men; roughly 25,000 were indicted, nearly 9,000 convicted, and over 3,000 imprisoned, with sentences commonly running two to five years. The Resistance, founded in 1967, made refusal public and collective — draft cards returned by the thousand, induction centers blockaded — and its leaders went to prison deliberately: David Harris was seized from the house he shared with Joan Baez and served fifteen months. Muhammad Ali, the era's most famous resister, was convicted in 1967, stripped of his title, and spared prison only when the Supreme Court reversed in 1971.

The resisters' distribution told its own story: Jehovah's Witnesses and poor and Black defendants — who lacked the deferments that sheltered the middle class — filled the cellblocks, and Black Muslims prosecuted for refusing induction followed the path Elijah Muhammad had walked in the 1940s. President Carter's 1977 pardon of draft offenders closed the ledger, but the movement's veterans counted the prison terms as the war's forgotten American casualties — and its proof that conscience could be organized on a mass scale.