The Legal Fight Over Locs in Prison Is About More Than Hair

A year after Brittany Martin was released from a South Carolina women’s prison, she obtained 11 videos from inside the facility that captured what she calls one of the most traumatic moments of her life. 

Prison guards can be seen pinning her to the ground in a video dated Jan. 23, 2023. As she remained handcuffed, they cut off each loc from her head — including one braided with a loc from her deceased son.

While she filed a lawsuit in December 2025 citing excessive force and other allegations, she still considered whether she could take further legal action when it came to what happened to her hair. But South Carolina has a three-year statute of limitations to file a personal-injury claim.

For formerly incarcerated people like Martin — whose Christian, Rastafari, and Black Hebrew Israelite practices give sacred meaning to every strand of her hair —  the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Landor v. Louisiana closes what may have been their most direct path to accountability. 

On Tuesday, the court barred Damon Landor, a former Louisiana inmate, from suing prison officials who cut off his locs in violation of his Rastafari religious beliefs. While the justices condemned what happened to him, they ruled 6-3 that a federal law — the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act — designed to protect the religious rights of incarcerated people does not permit lawsuits for money damages against individuals even when rights are violated.

For Martin, Landor, and the roughly 2 million people behind bars across the country, faith-based challenges to prison grooming policies remain legally valid in theory — but the ruling strips away one of the few remedies that might have made prison officials think twice.

Martin was convicted in May 2022 on charges stemming from a verbal confrontation she had as a community organizer with police in Sumter, South Carolina, during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

During her incarceration, Martin said her growing understanding of the legal system intensified her fears — childbirth in shackles, delays in her appeal, and separation from her husband, Eric Kennedy, and her five children. She said she never expected that weeks after surviving giving birth, she would be restrained by five prison guards for refusing to allow her locs to be cut, while another officer stood by with scissors and one recorded. Prison officials said her hairstyle violated the facility’s grooming policy. 

On Oct. 6, the South Carolina Supreme Court declined to hear her request to vacate her conviction and sentence.

“My big kids didn’t want to see it [the videos]. They were curious but couldn’t stomach to watch,” Martin told Capital B from her home in Mount Vernon, Illinois, in November.

The sound of her husband and her younger sister sniffing back tears filled the room. As the video played, a distressed Martin can be heard saying in a recording, “Y’all made a bad decision,” and other expletives.  

Her two oldest daughters covered their ears and turned their bodies away from the screen. Her younger sons sat in disbelief, while their 3-year-old sister, Blessing, sat and watched without understanding.

“We all cried,” Martin said. Watching the video, “it just gave my family a realization of what I went through in there.” 

The ACLU of South Carolina represented Martin in petitioning her appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and complaints against the state’s Department of Corrections. Paul Bowers, a spokesman for the legal civil rights nonprofit, described Martin’s conviction in an email statement to Capital B as “a nonviolent offense.” 

They “remain supportive … in her relentless pursuit of justice,” Bowers wrote. 

When prison policy meets religious freedom

In the months before prison officials in Columbia, South Carolina, cut Martin’s hair, she was in the final trimester of her seventh pregnancy and had been allowed to wear her locs freely. As her due date neared, officials warned the locs would be removed — with or without her consent. 

Martin said the decision disregarded her faith and religious practices. She said the discipline violated her civil rights, arguing she should be allowed to wear her hair in accordance with her religious beliefs. 

The Rastafari faith is rooted in 1930s Jamaica, growing as a response by Black people to white colonial oppression. Its beliefs are a melding of Old Testament teachings and a desire to return to Africa. 

The hairstyle has been traditionally known by Rastas as dreadlocks “because it inspires fear in the hearts of people,” Ennis Edmonds, a recently retired religious studies professor at Kenyon College, told Capital B. “Locs are an affirmation of identity.”

“If you try to decode that [the significance of locs], it’s part of this project of taking away people’s subjectivity and people’s creativity and trying to make them conform to some other kind of cultural signification,” Edmonds said, adding, “And I don’t think the West hates anything more than when Black people stand up and affirm themselves and affirm their own culture and their own way of life.”

His 2012 book, Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction, has been cited in legal challenges by Black and white incarcerated people alleging religious rights violations, including Landor’s case.

Landor, a devout Rastafarian, had a few weeks left in his sentence for drug possession when guards handcuffed him to a chair and shaved off the knee-length dreadlocks he had grown over nearly two decades.

When Landor entered the prison system during his five-month prison term in 2020, he carried a copy of an appeals court ruling in another inmate’s case holding that cutting religious prisoners’ dreadlocks violated the federal law. Minutes before the guards cut his hair, he handed them the judicial opinion demonstrating that they were required to allow dreadlocks for religious purposes — and the guards tossed it in the trash before holding him down and cutting his hair.

In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that state prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law. 

“It is not often that a real-life incident so clearly illustrates Congress’s reasons for adopting legislation, or the Constitution’s wisdom in enabling it,” Jackson wrote in an opinion that was joined by her two liberal colleagues.

There is limited documentation on the historical practice of cutting the locs of incarcerated Rastafarians in the United States. But no matter where in the world an individual with locs enters a correctional facility, “it gets criminalized in one way or the other,” Edmonds said.

Then and now, Martin and her children have worn their hair in locs — a choice that took on deeper meaning after her 18-year-old son, Courtney Harris, was killed in 2022 by a former friend. In his memory, Martin braided one of Harris’ locs into her own. 

It was on Jan. 23, 2023, when prison officials moved to remove her locs. The 12-minute video shows a correctional officer, who appears to be a woman of color, wielding metal shears as Martin is forced to the linoleum floor. As she is restrained, Martin shouts profanities and threats, intermittently addressing the women-presenting guards in the room as “queen.”

Martin said rewatching the footage was stunning. “I shocked myself,” she told Capital B, noting that she believed she remained polite during what she described as humiliating. 

The 37-year-old mom said she was fighting to preserve her last physical connection to Harris, whom she buried months before her conviction. The practice does not strictly align with Rastafari beliefs, Edmonds said, but he noted that religions evolve.

Locs, Edmonds said, affirm Blackness and Africanness while reflecting a commitment to a natural way of living.

“If you wash your hair and don’t subject it to scissors and comb, it will naturally lock,” he said, describing the practice as both a cultural affirmation and a resistance to Western standards of appearance — resistance that often draws punishment from those in power.

In 2015, the nonprofit Americans for Effective Law Enforcement issued guidance urging prison officials to recognize Rastafari and people who wear locs as entitled to equal religious protections under federal and state law. The organization, which provides legal and evidence-based guidance to criminal justice agencies, noted that incarcerated people have limited opportunities to practice their faith because they are confined to correctional facilities.

The report also emphasized that while prison staff are generally free to wear their hair as they choose, institutions must be prepared to justify restrictions placed on incarcerated people. “We’ve always done things this way,” the report said, is not a sufficient rationale for denying a religious accommodation.

Martin was placed in solitary confinement as punishment for her verbal responses to guards during the incident. 

In March 2023, Martin was transferred nearly 900 miles away to a prison in Lincoln, Illinois, without her family’s knowledge. To remain close, her husband relocated the family — including their newborn, who was still breastfeeding — to support her during incarceration. In addition to the ACLU, Martin and her family also received support from national abolitionist organizations, including Black Lives Matter Grassroots.

Martin was released from prison on parole in November 2024 after serving nearly three years of a four-year sentence. 

After her first appeal and a request for early parole were denied in May 2024, Kennedy was relieved to learn she would be released before the holidays. The celebration was short-lived. On Dec. 20, 2024, prosecutors had Martin arrested and charged on two counts of threatening the life of a public official or their family, stemming from statements made during the January 2023 incident.

Martin said she was stunned that prison officials allowed her release while warrants were pending for an incident she said — and prison records show — she had already been punished for, while incarcerated. Since her rearrest, she has appeared in court twice, most recently on Dec. 11, 2025, when the case was postponed indefinitely.

Although Martin’s hair has grown back into locs, she said the harm she endured far exceeds any minimal settlement for pain and suffering. During her time in the Illinois prison, she filed a substantiated claim of sexual misconduct by another incarcerated person, and a separate allegation against a prison guard. She plans to seek at least $200,000 against the Illinois Department of Corrections. 

Martin is the founder of Mixed Sistaz United, a grassroots organization that protests local and national injustices, pushes for accountability, and provides community support, including hot meals, voter registration drives, and free gas giveaways. Chapters have since expanded to Iowa, Illinois, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Texas, she said.

She said any civil settlement would also be leveraged to pursue policy changes and fund her nonprofit. 

“The things we can do for our communities in each state,” she told Capital B, “it’s going to be amazing … once we get the financing.”

Read More:

• Brittany Martin, Convicted for Protesting Police Brutality, Is Home at Last
• South Carolina Court Upheld Brittany Martin’s 4-Year Sentence for Protesting
• The Case of Brittany Martin: Punished Twice for the Same Incident
• South Carolina Punished a Black Woman for Protesting. Her Supporters Demand Her Release

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