A series of high court decisions in the 1970’s promised to part the “iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.” But soon thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court, a conservative Congress, and a compliant president began to draw the curtain closed again. Meanwhile, incarceration rates skyrocketed in the 1980’s and 90’s, pulling disproportionate numbers of African Americans and Latinos into the prison system. Professor Mushlin argues that there is more at stake in prisoners’ rights in this environment than the traditional balancing of needs for prison security against the individual rights of inmates. Rather, prisoners’ rights in the 21st Century must be viewed as part of deeper dilemmas of race in the United States.