Joseph Hayden, a lieutenant in a notorious Harlem drug gang who cycled in and out of prison for decades, then turned his life around to become an activist for criminal justice reform and a well-known figure in Harlem, wielding a camera to document possible police harassment, died on Jan. 6 in Northampton, Pa. He was 82.
While behind bars in the 1990s, Mr. Hayden recouped the formal education he had ignored as a street hustler earlier in life, earning bachelor's and master's degrees. As I educated myself and developed, I began to see opportunity in other areas, he told The New York Times in a 2009 interview. I started to work on changing the system, on trying to reform the system. Mr. Hayden filed a class-action lawsuit in 2000 to restore voting rights to prisoners and parolees. Hayden v. Pataki, which was argued in federal court by the Legal Defense Fund, a civil rights group, ultimately failed.
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