Biography
Joe-Joe Bowen was a BLA activist who was in prison for killing a Philadelphia police officer in a confrontation. When Joe-Joe met with his warden advocating for the better treatment of Muslim prisoners in his prison, the warden threatened his life. In retaliation, Bowen murdered the warden and deputy warden and wounded the guard commander. For this he got two life sentences.
Joe-Joe also is heavily involved with radicalizing the prison population (in his own words, "teach[ing] the brothers how to turn their rage into energy and understand their situations,”) wherever he is being held. Because of this, he has had numerous stints in solitary confinement and other measures to separate him from the rest of the prison population.
The Pennsylvania Governor's Panel's August 1982 Graterford report supplies an official chronology: Bowen entered the state prison system in 1965 at age nineteen and served the full six-year maximum on the earlier assault, robbery and related convictions. It dates the police killing to February 17, 1971 and the second-degree murder conviction to October 2, 1974; the event date is not independently an arrest date and does not replace the existing February 21 arrest entry. The panel dates his Holmesburg murder convictions to March 1975 and sentencing to September 1975, with two life terms and additional ten-to-twenty-year and two-to-five-year terms. It reports a transfer from Huntingdon to Graterford in July 1974, a December 1976 consent decree concerning restrictive custody, and actual placement in general population on November 7, 1977. These are institutional movements within confinement, not releases to freedom. The report acknowledges his psychiatrist's opinion that maximum-security confinement was medically harmful and that the consent-decree process involved a constitutional due-process challenge. Source: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88092NCJRS.pdf#page=15; https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88092NCJRS.pdf#page=16
The panel describes Bowen's participation in the October 28-November 2, 1981 failed escape and hostage incident and records his transfer to federal Lewisburg custody at 8:15 p.m. on November 2 after the negotiated surrender. The agreement promised safe conduct and no more than six months of disciplinary custody absent further misconduct; this promised maximum is not a verified segregation total. The panel characterized the initial purpose as escape rather than a protest over prison conditions, while also recording Bowen's complaints of racist, inhumane treatment. These are attributed perspectives. Montgomery County charges were filed March 17, 1982, with arraignment March 18 and a preliminary hearing March 25; those prosecution dates do not establish a fresh physical arrest or a conviction in the hostage case. Source: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88092NCJRS.pdf#page=13; https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88092NCJRS.pdf#page=17; https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88092NCJRS.pdf#page=42; https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88092NCJRS.pdf#page=43
The 2017 guide describes Bowen’s participation in a six-day Graterford prison standoff in 1981 and repeated placements at Marion and in isolation. These were events within ongoing custody, not separate prison terms.
