The rights of offenders should not necessarily rest on considerations of either rehabilitation or general utility. Instead, prisoners' rights should be based on a notion of the social contract which specifies clearly which liberties may be lost when a person commits a serious felony. The existence of justice mechanisms which allow inmates to claim rights in everyday prison practice is critical to the maintenance of inmate rights. A working democratic framework as seen in Osborne's 'Mutual Welfare League' is one model which is capable of assuring both de facto and de jure inmate rights. The recommendations by several authors to make education a strategy of prison reform are easier to defend in terms of a conception of fundamental social right rather than in terms of treatment, social control, or other psychological theory. Using this conception, education is a social good, much like money, right to life, health, or other such social intangibles. Thus, society distributes educational goods unevenly. The reformer's task is therefore not simply to create an educational prison program for some psychological aim directed at the inmates. Instead, prison reform focuses on establishing the optimum balance of educational goods with emphasis on the rights of one of the least advantaged groups in society: the prisoner population. The individual's expectation of access to a quality education should be honored independently of the crime committed, in that no reason exists for logically linking the loss of this right to the conviction of a crime. Thus, educational reform is part of a theory of justice rather than an aspect of a psychological theory of prisoner reform. Nineteen references are included.