Carol Crooks

Carol Crooks was a Black woman imprisoned at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York who became a central figure in the 1970s women's prison movement. Jailed as a teenager on a first-degree manslaughter conviction and sentenced to up to 15 years in 1972, she sued over being thrown into solitary confinement without notice or a hearing and won a July 1974 ruling establishing incarcerated women's right to due process before segregation (Crooks v. Warne). On August 29, 1974, after she was involved in a brief fight, a squad of male guards in riot gear from a nearby prison forced into her cell, beat her, and dragged her out — provoking the "August Rebellion," an uprising by some 200 women who took over parts of the prison in protest of her treatment; the women later won the class-action suit Powell v. Ward. The Black Panther reported in early 1980 that Crooks, after years of fighting conditions at Bedford Hills and serving as a lead plaintiff in suits over illegal segregation transfers and inadequate medical care, had just been sentenced in Westchester to a further three-and-a-half to fifteen years on an in-prison assault charge, and — instead of a long-overdue parole she had been told she had won — was told she must serve three more years before becoming parole-eligible.