linguistic:paraphrasing
Imprisonment: 1925–1927

In early 1925, the U.S. Court of Appeal upheld the original court decision. Garvey was in Detroit at the time and was arrested while aboard a train back to New York City. In February he was taken to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and incarcerated there. Imprisoned, he was made to carry out cleaning tasks. On one occasion he was reprimanded for insolence towards the white prison officers. There, he became increasingly ill with chronic bronchitis and lung infections. Two years into his imprisonment he would be hospitalized with influenza.

Garvey received regular letters from UNIA members and from his wife; she also visited him every three weeks. With his support, she assembled another book of his collected speeches, Philosophy and Opinions; these had often been edited to remove inflammatory comments about wielding violence against white people. He also wrote The Meditations of Marcus Garvey, its name an allusion to The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. From prison, Garvey continued corresponding with far-right white separatist activists like Earnest Sevier Cox of the White American Society and John Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America; the latter visited Garvey in prison.

While Garvey was imprisoned, Ashwood launched a legal challenge against his divorce from her. Had the divorce been found void then his marriage to Jacques would have been invalid. The court ruled in favor of Garvey, recognising the legality of his divorce. With Garvey absent, William Sherrill became acting head of UNIA. To deal with the organization's financial problems, he re-mortgaged Liberty Hall to pay off debts and ended up selling off the SS Booker T Washington at a quarter of what UNIA had paid for it.

Garvey was angry and in February 1926 wrote to the Negro World expressing his dissatisfaction with Sherrill's leadership. From prison, he organized an emergency UNIA convention in Detroit, where delegates voted to depose Sherrill. The latter's supporters then held a rival convention in Liberty Hall, reflecting the growing schism in the organization. A subsequent court ruling determined that it was UNIA's New York branch, then controlled by Sherrill, rather than the central UNIA leadership itself, that owned Liberty Hall. The financial problems continued, resulting in Liberty Hall being repeatedly re-mortgaged and then sold.

The Attorney General, John Sargent, received a petition with 70,000 signatures urging for Garvey's release. Sargeant warned President Calvin Coolidge that African Americans were regarding Garvey's imprisonment not as a form of justice against a man who had swindled them but as "an act of oppression of the race in their efforts in the direction of race progress". Eventually, Coolidge agreed to commute the sentence so that it would expire immediately, on 18 November 1927. He stipulated, however, that Garvey should be deported straight after release. On being released, Garvey was taken by train to New Orleans, where around a thousand supporters saw him onto the SS Saramaca on 3 December. The ship then stopped at Cristóbal in Panama, where supporters again greeted him, but where the authorities refused his request to disembark. He then transferred to the SS Santa Maria, which took him to Kingston, Jamaica.