What were the conditions people were looking to improve?

Frank Smith: First what we called was slave wages. Like myself, I was working for the warden, as the warden, they called me a laundry boy, and I was a full-grown man, but that was the title. I was making 30 cent a day, you know, to hand iron, you know, shirts and sheets and tablecloths, and all that type of stuff.

It had a metal shop, you know, where you weren't making no money. You might make 25 cent a day, you know, to work in a sweatbox, 90- or 100-degree, all day, no shower, one shower a week, and when you wash up, you get two buckets of water, three gallons of water, one for the top and one for the bottom.

And the medical, you know, I lost just about all of my teeth in prison, because when you go to see a dentist you see the medical doctor, and we had two doctors that we call them refuge doctors, Steinberg and Williams. You had to go through them in order to get to the dentist, and if you go in to get an extraction they'll let you through, but if you're not going to go and get an extraction, then they give you two aspirins and you go back to your cell. You follow?

And the education department was really outdated, outdated books. We wanted to get books, the same as people got in the street.

And it was a lot of cell time and we wanted to get better upgraded food, because you had a lot of people there was on not eating meat, especially the pork and stuff. We wanted to change that type of stuff.