In December, a federal judge sentenced Matthew Ware, a former Oklahoma supervisory correctional officer, to 46 months in federal prison, followed by three years of probation for violating the civil rights of detainees held at the Kay County Detention Center in Newkirk, Okla. Ware was convicted of ordering the cells of two Black inmates to be unlocked, allowing for violent attacks by a white-supremacist prison gang.
This case — one among many emerging from Oklahoma’s vast network of local and state-operated jails and prisons — highlights the ongoing battle by incarcerated people and their allies to ensure civil rights and humanitarian safeguards for the nearly 50,000 people incarcerated in the state.
Oklahoma offers important examples of the rich revolutionary past inside America’s Midwestern prisons and jails. In a state where incarceration rates trend higher than the national average, prisons and jails have served as places where vulnerable Black people have long fought to ensure that their civil and constitutional rights were recognized and protected.
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The struggles of Oklahomans William “Bobby” Battle and his daughter Jasmine Battle haven’t garnered significant national attention, but they are important. Incarcerated Black Oklahomans like the Battles relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to challenge how the state treated its imprisoned populations. In doing so, they helped refashion Oklahoma’s prisons and jails into deeply contested battlegrounds where we can see the legacies of the civil rights movement and an extension of those strategies and successes.
Born in 1937, William “Bobby” Battle grew up in segregated Oklahoma City where he earned no more than a sixth-grade education. As a young man, he served for a short time in the U.S. Army before being discharged for theft. By his early 20s, Battle found himself navigating the challenges of poverty and segregation in Oklahoma City, committing some petty crimes along the way. Battle took full responsibility, proclaiming later, “I had the wrong sense of values.” Yet the impact of residential segregation, persistent racial discrimination, limited access to education and economic precarity presented him with few choices.
Disregarding his circumstances, Oklahoma law enforcement considered him a criminal. Battle was in and out of jails until 1969, when he landed in Oklahoma’s notorious state penitentiary in McAlester — nicknamed “Big Mac” — for armed robbery. As “Prisoner #75621,” Battle witnessed overzealous guards violently attack other inmates, infringe upon their few remaining rights and mete out punishments along racial and religious lines. Battle himself spent many days in solitary confinement — the “dungeon” — whenever guards deemed it necessary to punish him further.
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Eventually, Battle and his fellow inmates grew desperate for change. Fed up with the abuse and neglect, Battle and nearly two dozen of his fellow inmates launched a major federal class-action lawsuit, Battle v. Anderson, in July 1972 that would become one of the longest and most consequential legal fights against the state penitentiary system in Oklahoma — with national consequences.
The suit alleged deprivations of rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to due process, the right to petition for redress of grievances, free-speech protections and the right to have access to the court. Throughout what would become nearly three decades of litigation, Battle and the other incarcerated claimants had well-respected private and American Civil Liberties Union attorneys as their legal representation.
By 1993, at last, the federal court found two state prisons — both the main prison at McAlester and the nearby Granite penitentiary — in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment due to extreme prison overcrowding and inadequate or nonexistent care services that put the inmates’ health and physical well-being at risk. Judge Luther Bohanon reminded state officials in his ruling that “[i]t is incumbent on the incarcerating body to provide the individual with a healthy rehabilitative environment” where rehabilitation was indeed possible.
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As a result of the litigation brought by Battle, a great deal changed. Battle’s victory led to an end to excessive prison overcrowding and inmate segregation, a prohibition against excessively violent disciplinary measures — including the use of chemical agents such as tear gas or mace as punitive devices — and improved access to medical, dental and psychiatric care for imprisoned people. People incarcerated in Oklahoma could also enjoy greater access to counsel, privacy when opening legal mail and use of the prison library’s legal materials. What’s more, Muslim inmates were now allowed to gather for religious purposes and prison authorities were required to alert them to any prison food containing pork.
The case had repercussions for other states. By 1981, a federal court ordered Missouri’s state prison to reduce its own penitentiary population to 2,000. Later in the decade, inmates in the Kansas State Penitentiary, who filed a complaint similar to Battle’s over prison overcrowding and neglect, won their own case and changes followed.
Once he left prison in 1989, Battle remained committed to his pursuit of justice, and he dedicated his life to community activism and addressing the problems that often plagued the formerly incarcerated — unemployment, homelessness and high rates of returning to state custody. In 1990, he debuted a 90-minute radio show called the “Bobby Battle Forum” in Oklahoma City. The show dispensed sage advice, matched callers — most of them formerly incarcerated people — with much needed social services throughout the city and even helped many to register to vote.
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When, in 2005, Battle’s 19-year-old daughter, Jasmine, was charged as an accomplice to a violent crime, she chose to cooperate with prosecutors in an attempt to avoid her father’s fate and stay out of Oklahoma’s prisons. But as she awaited trial, she was locked up in the Oklahoma County jail for several months. There, she encountered unsanitary conditions, was denied feminine napkins, could not register to vote and was barred from accessing the jail’s law library. Following the model of her father’s activism, Jasmine filed her own federal suit to challenge the Oklahoma County jail. She hoped the federal courts would also intervene in the county’s correctional affairs as they had done previously regarding the state’s prison system. Her case was resolved in 2014, with the county choosing to settle with Battle.
From the 1970s through the early 21st century, Battle and his daughter embraced one of the most effective civil rights strategies — litigation — to highlight and then end years of abuse, neglect and discrimination in Oklahoma’s prisons and jails. Their collective efforts have provided other incarcerated Oklahomans both a model to follow and an abiding faith that many of the ongoing issues affecting the state’s confined populations might be remedied someday.
Even with the heightened attention to such problems, incarcerated people in Oklahoma continue to suffer the kinds of abuses that outraged the Battles, spurred inmate protests and led Bohanon to question whether the state’s prison system understood human decency.
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Like the Battles before them, incarcerated people in Oklahoma are using whatever tools they can — social media, celebrity attention and the legal system — to bring attention to carceral abuses. And public awareness of these harms is sparking action — the state of Oklahoma has made clear and laudable aims to curb the rate of incarceration, especially for women and African Americans. But more is needed, as the recent sentencing of Ware made clear, particularly when it comes to protecting the rights of those who must serve time.
This essay is the third in the Black Western Conversations series sponsored by the Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, highlighting diverse regional histories within the United States.
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