National Office for the Rights of the Indigent.
Haywood Burns, Lowell Johnston, Margaret Burnham, New York City, on the brief, amicus curiae, for The National Conference of Black Lawyers.
Before LUMBARD, Chief Judge, WATERMAN, Senior Circuit Judge,* and MOORE, FRIENDLY, SMITH, KAUFMAN, HAYS, ANDERSON and FEINBERG, Circuit Judges.
IRVING R. KAUFMAN, Circuit Judge:


1
We voted to hear the initial argument of this appeal en banc, a procedure we reserve for extraordinary circumstances, so that we might give plenary review to a complex of urgent social and political conflicts persistently seeking solution in the courts as legal problems, a phenomenon de Tocqueville commented upon many years ago.  Democracy in America, vol.  I at 290 (Vintage ed. 1945).  The elaborate opinion and order below raise important questions concerning the federal constitutionalrights of state prisoners which neither Supreme Court precedent nor our own past decisions have answered.  The sparse authority from other courts is for the most part either inconclusive or conflicting.

I.
PROCEEDINGS BELOW AND JURISDICTION

2
This is an appeal from an order entered May 14, 1970, by Judge Motley, sitting in the Southern District of New York, 312 F.Supp. 863, which granted plaintiff Martin Sostre punitive and compensatory damages against defendants Follette and McGinnis as well as a wide variety of injunctive relief in his action pursuant to the Civil Rights Act of 1871, 42 U.S.C. 1983, and 28 U.S.C. 1331, 1343(3).  At the time Sostre filed his handwritten complaint, he was incarcerated in New York's Green Haven Prison (now called Green Haven Correctional Facility), serving a sentence