America is currently in the midst of the biggest prison strike in the nation’s history.
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Inmates in approximately 12 states and 29 facilities have taken part in the strike to protest free prison labor. Organizers have estimated that about 24,000 inmates have taken part. The strike, which began Sept. 9 on the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, was organized in large part by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC).
As you can probably imagine, it's not easy to organize prisoners. Access to the outside is limited, there is little transparency about what occurs inside, and rules are aggressively enforced. The limitations of such a strike make this movement that much more remarkable. The Intercept reports that "For months, inmates at dozens of prisons across the country have been organizing through a network of smuggled cellphones, social media pages, and the support of allies on the outside."
The IWOC worked with the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), a group of inmates at William C. Holman Correctional Facility, to organize the strike. Holman is one of the worst prisons in Alabama, an understaffed, overcrowded facility where violence is common.
"They cannot run these facilities without us," said one organizing flyer. "We hope to end prison slavery by making it impossible, by refusing to be slaves any longer."
Forcing inmates to labor for little to no money is a common practice in American prisons. The 13th Amendment banned slavery for all except the criminally convicted. This loophole coupled with our mass incarceration system means that every day in America there are hundreds of thousands of people working for little to no money. From Mother Jones:
Inmates in state and federal prisons do many different types of work. All inmates who are medically able must do mandatory jobs, such as maintenance, cleaning, and kitchen duties. Inmates may be paid for this work—usually between 12 to 40 cents an hour. But some states, including Texas, Arkansas, and Georgia, do not pay inmates at all. Eligible inmates may participate in work programs, such as the Federal Prison Industries programs (known as UNICOR) or the Prison Industry Enhancement (PIE) Certification program, which pay wages and generally teach work skills. In UNICOR programs, wages range from 23 cents to $1.15 an hour. However, only about 7 percent of eligible inmates are employed by federal prison industry programs.
Prisoners in America work all types of jobs, from sewing clothes, to cleaning up roadkill, to assembling furniture, to repairing vehicles. In some places, prisoners fight fires or work in chemical plants.
In many places, the similarities between slavery and prison labor are undeniable. Angola, a maximum security prison in Louisiana, is one of the worst prisons in America. Before it was a prison, however, it was a massive plantation, given its name because the slaves were from Angola.
In the early 19th century, the plantation was owned by Isaac Franklin, a slave trader described as "the worst slave trader in all of cotton country." Franklin was very successful, buying and selling up to 500 human beings at a time. He didn't only sell slaves for labor, either. Many of the slave owners were men who had come to this part of Louisiana alone, leaving their families back home as they built new plantations. Franklin sold black women and girls to these white men with the explicit understanding that the white men wanted them for sex. He built much of his fortune off of rape, and he died one of the richest men in the South, worth “something like $24 billion in today’s money.”
Franklin's widow sold Angola to a Confederate major. After slavery, he leased inmates from the state to work for free on his land. The facility became a state prison a few years after he died. Today, Louisiana imprisons more people than any state in America, and America imprisons more people than any country in the world. Angola is the biggest super max prison in the nation.
Currently, almost 80 percent of inmates at Angola are black men, compared to 15 percent of the state population. Disturbingly, many of the inmates are forced to work in the fields daily, the same fields where slaves once worked without pay. (There have been no public reports of a strike at Angola but that doesn't mean anything definitive—as Daily Kos covered in April, inmates at Angola are often illegally punished for speaking to press.)
Inmates want more attention brought to the prison labor industry. “We want people to understand the economics of the prison system,” said Melvin Brooks-Ray, an inmate at Holman and a leader of FAM. “It’s not about crime and punishment. It’s about money.”
Prisons are a money-making business, from privatized corrections facilities to prison labor. Inmates making a few cents an hour have to wait weeks and weeks to buy even a snack from the prison commissary, where everything is already outrageously more expensive than it is outside. Meanwhile, companies like McDonalds, Microsoft, Proctor and Gamble, AT&T, Target, and others profit off of prison labor. Prison labor also drives down wages for workers outside of prison, since corporations have thousands of workers who can produce goods and labor for as little as less than a dollar a day.
Prisoners are determined to bring more attention to the profit motive. "When we abolish slavery, they'll lose much of their incentive to lock up our children, they'll stop building traps to pull back those who they've released," reads a statement released by FAM. "When we remove the economic motive and grease of our forced labor from the US prison system, the entire structure of courts and police, of control and slave-catching must shift to accommodate us as humans, rather than slaves."
Those inmates on strike face an uphill battle. Prison officials seem to be downplaying the extent of the strikes, and the media has barely covered the story. Neither the AFL-CIO nor the SEIU, the nation’s two largest union groups, have expressed their support. Prisoners also know that severe punishment for striking is likely, and already there have been a number of reports of retaliation.
Members of FAM that have gone on strike before were severely punished. In 2014, Brooks-Ray helped organize a work strike. He says prison officials responded by putting him in solitary confinement without clothes or a bed.
Yet thousands of prisoners nationwide are still standing up for reasonable compensation and standing up against those who profit from their labor.
"I think this is a wake up call," said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, to BBC. "This is a very costly action for prisoners - they can be disciplined [...] They can be put in solitary confinement, they can lose good time, thus prolonging their time in prison. That says to me they are at the limits of their tolerance."
“I want to clarify that it is not ‘slave-like conditions’ in prison labor—this is actually institutional slavery,” said one Alabama inmate, as reported by The New Yorker on Monday. “Slavery was always about exploiting the labor of lower-class people in this country.”
“We’re not compensated for our labor,” agreed another inmate in South Carolina. “Slavery is inhumane, no matter its disguise.”
Sign the petition: Stand with prison strikers and demand an end to legalized slavery.
