It's interesting that in hindsight, those were the times when US was most staunchly opposed to communism - yet everything written in this article makes me think of the way USSR treated its citizens. Yes, there were laws that protected you, yes you could appeal to courts and at least in theory your rights were always protected. In practice, it was the same as the situation in Texas - people put in charge of prisons or judges answered to absolutely no one and the laws were completely arbitrary and could be dismissed without any reason. The targeting of lawyers and demanding they be fired from institutions that employed them looked exactly the same under communist rule. In any case, what is described here seems more like a torture system, not a prison system - no wonder it had such poor rehabilitation rates.