Danny Lyon is known for photographing people outside the world of social justice and human rights advocacy. As the first photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s, he was actively involved in the civil rights movement as both a participant and a photojournalist. In the mid-1960s, he joined the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club and spent two years traveling and photographing bikers. In 1967, recognizing the inequalities of the correctional system, Lyon drove from his home state of New York to Huntsville, Texas, to undertake what many consider his most powerful work. With full access granted by the director of the Texas Department of Correction (TDC), Lyon visited seven different prisons housing the general population (The Walls and Ramsey), as well as juveniles (Ferguson), women (Goree), the elderly and mentally ill (Wynne), newcomers to the system (Diagnosis), and those considered most dangerous (Ellis). The photographs detail the daily lives of the convicts, including highly regulated meals, brutal working conditions, and dehumanizing "extortion." In his own words, he tried "to make this image of incarceration as distressing as it actually is."