A nationwide prison strike over conditions and wages behind bars, which organizers tipped to be the biggest of its kind in U.S. history, was under way in at least several correctional facilities across the country on Friday, according to prison rights advocates.
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On Friday, the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising, inmates at 40 sites across 24 states are refusing to submit to what they say is involuntary servitude.
[In 2013], at least 60,000 immigrants worked in the federal government’s nationwide patchwork of detention centers – more than worked for any other single employer in the country, according to data from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.
IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) according to an announcement from the the organization. In a statement, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee said the “nationally coordinated prisoner workstoppage” beginning on September 9 was an action to put an “end to prison slavery”. They can not run these facilities without us. “The problem is that our work is producing services that we’re being charged for, that we don’t get any compensation from”.
As state budgets have shrunk in recent years, prisons have launched new work programs. And as Prison Legal News editor Paul Wright explained to Mother Jones, those who refuse to work are subject to retaliation, including having their sentences lengthened or being held in solitary confinement.
But the issue is not merely about earning meager amounts of money on the side.
“These strikes are our method for challenging mass incarceration”, Kinetik Justice, a founder of the Free Alabama Movement, who serves at the Holman correctional facility in Alabama, told Democracy Now in May, during a prior 10-day strike which mirrors what he and others planned for Friday.
IWOC, an offshoot of the radical union Industrial Worker of the World, was created in 2014 to help coordinate national efforts for prison strikes and reform in the prison system. “Against prison slavery. For liberation of all”.
“People are left in solitary confinement for years on end, which is torture, literally”, she said.
“Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone”, Republican Senator John Ensign said in 2011, advocating for more of these programs.
The strike follows the success of the Free Alabama Movement in May. He said there have been no incidents of violence or vandalism like those reported in Florida, where the Herald said a riot by 400 prisoners Wednesday night caused significant damage to the facility.
The full scope of Friday’s planned protests, however, has not yet emerged.
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Free Alabama Movement, one of the strike’s primary organizers, has a Facebook group and a YouTube channel with videos of prisoner testimonials about poor living conditions in prison – including claims of food poisoning and police brutality.
