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New York

Political repression plays out state by state — shaped by local institutions, prosecutors, and movements for defense. These are the documented political prisoners and cases the census holds for New York.

859Documented
24In custody
787Released
2Awaiting trial

Eras of repression in New York

Where New York’s entries fall across the census’s historical eras.

1950s 137 1910s 137 1970s 87 1960s 87 1980s 81 1930s 65

Documented cases

859 entries in the census — every one stays in the record, whether the case is open or closed.

David Greenglass
Released
Ethel Rosenberg's younger brother; Army machinist at Los Alamos who passed plutonium-bomb sketches to Soviet c...
Priscilla Grim
Awaiting Trial
Priscilla Grim, age 48 of Brooklyn, New York, was a longtime media organizer with Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2...
Nancy Gwin
Released
Nancy Gwin — SOA Watch line-crosser at Fort Benning, Georgia. Convicted of trespass on a military installation...
Basheer Hameed
Bashir Hameed was a Black liberation activist who worked within the Black Panther Party and later became assoc...
Dashiell Hammett
Released
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was the most influential American detective novelist of the twentieth century — the cr...
Syed Fahad Hashmi
Released
Syed Fahad Hashmi is a Pakistani-American student of Brooklyn College and the London School of Economics. He w...
Ali Bey Hassan
Released
Ali Bey Hassan, born John J. Casson, was a Black Panther Party member indicted in the April 2, 1969 New York P...
Jacob E. Haugen
Released
Jacob E. Haugen was a conscientious objector from New York imprisoned during World War I. Court-martialed for...
Howard Gresham Hawkins III
Released
Dartmouth-educated New England construction worker in the 1970s who co-founded the Clamshell Alliance in 1976....
Teddy Heath
Teddy "Jah" Heath joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 and was associated with the Black Liberation Army. Ar...
Julian Heicklen
Released
Julian Heicklen was a Penn State professor who began political activism during the Civil Rights Movement where...
Ammon Hennacy
Released
Ammon Hennacy Hennacy was a pacifist and “Christian anarchist” whose activism emphasized nonviolence, personal...
John Boncore Hill
Released
Mohawk (Haudenosaunee) prisoner and one of the leaders of the September 1971 Attica State Prison uprising in N...
Alger Hiss
Released
Harvard-trained State Department official who served as Secretary-General of the founding UN Conference at San...
Allan Hoffman
Released
Allan Hoffman was a 19-year-old artist and member of the Committee for Non-Violent Action sentenced to 60 days...
Ailene Holmes
Released
Ailene Holmes (born 1906 in Worcester, Massachusetts) was a Finnish-American Communist organizer. The daughter...
Edward Howell
Released
Edward (Ted) Howell was an Irish republican organizer and later a Sinn Fein negotiator. His 1982 US detention...
Brendan Hunt
Released
On January 18, 2021 Brendan Hunt, 37, was arrested in Queens, NY for threatening to murder United States offic...
Alphaeus Hunton
Released
Dr. W. Alphaeus Hunton was a Black scholar and anti-colonial activist, a leader of the Council on African Affa...
Mabel Husa
Released
Mabel Husa was a Young Communist League summer-camp leader at Van Etten, New York convicted in 1930 under the...
Khalil Islam
Convicted (as Thomas 15X Johnson) in the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. The Black Panther Vol. 19 no.7,9 (19...
James E. Jackson
Released
James E. Jackson Jr. was a Black Communist Party leader from the South, indicted under the Smith Act in 1951,...
V. J. Jerome
Released
Victor Jeremy Jerome was the longtime cultural commissar of the Communist Party USA and the editor of the part...
Patreese Johnson
Released
One of the New Jersey 4, a group of young African-American lesbian women from Newark who were attacked by a ma...

Institutions in New York

Prisons, jails, and detention centers in New York that appear in the census’s case files.

Ellis Island Immigration StationNew York, New York
184 cases
Manhattan House of Detention (the Tombs)New York, New York
17 cases
Sing Sing Correctional FacilityOssining, New York
14 cases
Attica Correctional FacilityAttica, New York
13 cases
Metropolitan Correctional CenterNew York, New York
11 cases
MDC BrooklynBrooklyn, New York
9 cases
Metropolitan Correctional Center, New YorkNew York, New York
9 cases
Blackwell's Island PenitentiaryNew York, New York
8 cases