IN June 2018 Tiyo Attallah Salah-El died at 85 while serving nearly 50 years of a life sentence without parole in Pennsylvania's Dallas State Correctional Institution.

He was a brilliant and innovative jazz musician and composer, a writer and prison abolitionist. He had fought in the US Army in Korea, and was awarded a Purple Heart. He returned to work in his father's plumbing firm, became involved in drug-related crime and prison life. An eventual life sentence for homicide in Delaware City Prison followed in 1977, after he had attempted to form a prisoners' union.

Throughout his half-century in jail, he played saxophone, composed many musical works, gained degrees and founded the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons, becoming a quaker in 1993.