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<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theintercept.com/2016/04/04/prisoners-in-multiple-states-call-for-strikes-to-protest-forced-labor/">https://theintercept.com/2016/04/04/prisoners-in-multiple-states-call-for-strikes-to-protest-forced-labor/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
<br>
<big><big><big><b>Prisoners in Multiple States Call for Strikes to
Protest Forced Labor<br>
<br>
</b></big></big></big>alice.speri@theintercept.com - April 4,
2016<br>
<br>
PRISON INMATES around the country have called for a series of
strikes against forced labor, demanding reforms of parole systems
and prison policies, as well as more humane living conditions, a
reduced use of solitary confinement, and better health care.<br>
<br>
Inmates at up to five Texas prisons pledged to refuse to leave their
cells today. The strike’s organizers remain anonymous but have
circulated fliers listing a series of grievances and demands, and a
letter articulating the reasons for the strike. The Texas strikers’
demands range from the specific, such as a “good-time” credit toward
sentence reduction and an end to $100 medical co-pays, to the
systemic, namely a drastic downsizing of the state’s incarcerated
population.<br>
<br>
“Texas’s prisoners are the slaves of today, and that slavery affects
our society economically, morally and politically,” reads the
five-page letter announcing the strike. “Beginning on April 4, 2016,
all inmates around Texas will stop all labor in order to get the
attention from politicians and Texas’s community alike.”<br>
<br>
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state’s
prisons, “is aware of the situation and is closely monitoring it,”
spokesperson Robert Hurst wrote in a statement to The Intercept. He
did not comment on the prisoners’ grievances and demands. Prisoner
rights advocates said at least one prison — the French Robertson
Unit in Abilene — was placed under lockdown today, but Hurst denied
any prisons in Texas were on lockdown because of planned strikes. <br>
Constitutional Servitude<br>
<br>
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution bans
“involuntary servitude” in addition to slavery, “except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted,” thus establishing the legal basis for what is today a $2
billion a year industry, according to the Prison Policy Initiative,
a nonprofit research institute.<br>
<br>
Most able-bodied prisoners at federal facilities are required to
work, and at least 37 states permit contracting prisoners out to
private companies, though those contracts account for only a small
percentage of prison labor. “Ironically, those are the only prison
labor programs where prisoners make more than a few cents an hour,”
Judith Greene, a criminal justice policy analyst, told The
Intercept.<br>
<br>
Instead, a majority of prisoners work for the prisons themselves,
making well below the minimum wage in some states, and as little as
17 cents per hour in privately run facilities. In Texas and a few
other states, mostly in the South, prisoners are not paid at all,
said Erica Gammill, director of the Prison Justice League, an
organization that works with inmates in 109 Texas prisons.<br>
<br>
“They get paid nothing, zero; it’s essentially forced labor,” she
told The Intercept. “They rationalize not paying prison laborers by
saying that money goes toward room and board, to offset the cost of
incarcerating them.”<br>
<br>
In Texas, prisoners have traditionally worked on farms, raising hogs
and picking cotton, especially in East Texas, where many prisons
occupy former plantations.<br>
<br>
“If you’ve ever seen pictures of prisoners in Texas working in the
fields, it looks like what it is,” Greene said. “It’s a plantation:
The prisoners are all dressed in white, they got their backs bent
over whatever crop they’re tending, the guards are on horseback with
rifles.” In the facilities Greene visited, prisoners worked all day
in the heat only to return to cells with no air conditioning. “The
conditions are atrocious, and it’s about time the Texas prison
administration had to take note.”<br>
<br>
In 1963, in an effort to reduce the cost of running prisons, Texas
began employing inmates to manufacture a wide array of products,
including mattresses, shoes, soaps, detergents, and textiles, as
well as the furniture used in many of the state’s official
buildings. Because of labor laws restricting the sale of
prisoner-made goods, Greene said, those products are usually sold to
state and local government agencies.<br>
<br>
Although they comprise nearly half the incarcerated population
nationwide — about 870,000 as of 2014 — prison workers are not
counted in official labor statistics; they get no disability
compensation in case of injury, no social security benefits, and no
overtime.<br>
<br>
“They keep a high conviction rate at any cost,” reads the letter
circulated by prisoners ahead of today’s strike, “all for the
well-being of the multimillion-dollar Prison Industrial Complex.”<br>
An Underground Prison Network<br>
<br>
The Texas action is not an isolated one. Prisoners in nearby Alabama
and Mississippi, and as far away as Oregon, have also been alerted
to the Texas strike through an underground network of communication
between prisons.<br>
<br>
“Over the long term, we’ll probably see more work stoppages,” said
Gammill. “In prison, you think it’d be difficult to spread
information, but it actually spreads like wildfire.”<br>
<br>
On April 1, a group of prisoners from Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, and
Mississippi called for a “nationally coordinated prisoner work
stoppage against prison slavery” to take place on September 9, the
45th anniversary of the Attica prison riot. “We will not only demand
the end to prison slavery, we will end it ourselves by ceasing to be
slaves,” that announcement reads. “They cannot run these facilities
without us.”<br>
<br>
Prison protests and strikes have seen a revival in recent years
after a slowdown resulting from the increased use of solitary
confinement to isolate politically active inmates. In 2010,
thousands of inmates from at least six Georgia prisons, organizing
through a network of contraband mobile phones, refused to leave
their cells to work, demanding better living conditions and
compensation for their labor. That action was followed by prison
protests in Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington. In
2013, California prisoners coordinated a hunger strike to protest
the use of solitary confinement. On the first day of that protest,
30,000 prisoners across the state refused their meals.<br>
<br>
Last year in Texas, nearly 3,000 detainees demanding better
conditions seized and partially destroyed an immigration detention
center.<br>
<br>
In March, protests erupted at Holman Correctional Facility, a
maximum security state prison in Alabama, where two riots broke out
over four days. At least 100 prisoners gained control of part of the
prison and stabbed a guard and the warden. Those protests were
unplanned, but prisoners there had also been organizing coordinated
actions that they say will go ahead as planned.<br>
<br>
“We have to strain the economics of the criminal justice system,
because if we don’t, we can’t force them to downsize,” an activist
serving a life sentence at Holman told The Intercept. “Setting fires
and stuff like that gets the attention of the media,” he said. “But
I want us to organize something that’s not violent. If we refuse to
offer free labor, it will force the institution to downsize.”<br>
<br>
“Slavery has always been a legal institution,” he added. “And it
never ended. It still exists today through the criminal justice
system.”<br>
<br>
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