In October 1970, days after prisoners rebelled against the inhuman conditions of the Manhattan House of Detention — the Tombs — Young Lords member Julio Roldán, arrested on a trivial charge during the ferment, was found hanged in his cell. Authorities called it suicide; the Lords, who had watched a string of Puerto Rican and Black prisoners die the same way that year, called it murder by the state, and carried Roldán's coffin through El Barrio to the People's Church, which they occupied a second time — now openly bearing arms — and held for two months as the Julio Roldán Memorial Defense Center.
The Roldán case turned the organization decisively toward the prisons: Lords organized the families of Tombs and Attica prisoners, David Pérez and others sat on observer committees, and the group's prison branch made "political prisoner" a household phrase in the barrio a year before Attica burned the issue into national consciousness.