“Make Them Feel Like a Human Being”

Abstract The history of the Pennsylvania Department of Correction's recreational boxing program for inmates from the mid-1970s through the late 1990s sheds light on a wide range of issues in American life, such as hopes for prisoner rehabilitation, the ideal of sports as a social practice that could lead to change, and the effects of mass incarceration's targeting of racial minorities. The extensive records in the Pennsylvania state archives, and popular media responses to the program and its participants, reveal the many aspirations people had for sports programs in prisons. However, controversies involving the program, the racial makeup of its participants, and its eventual demise, reveal the public pressures that hindered programs viewed as being “soft” on crime, especially when it came to racial minorities.