Uprising! 20-day Nationwide prison strike kicked off #August21
The sky grows darker, bits of light flash in the sky. Storm clouds roll in, grumbling like an aggravated giant. Tension electrifies the air. Eyes glance away furtively.
Already there are people trying to deny the storm, rob it of its thunder. But that won’t work. America’s hidden slaves are rising up. It’s too late, their storm is already here. It’s crashing down on the shores of our collective consciousness as we speak.
And it’s got hella intensity.
The raw intensity of people who are downtrodden and scared, but also courageous and full of unlikely hope. The intensity of men and women and non-binary people coming together across bitter social divides to execute a common mission — a mission for human rights from within a deeply toxic and morally depraved system, the one called the Prison Industrial Complex.
Beginning August 21 and extending through September 12, 2018, prisoners from across the United States of America are taking an unyielding stand for their own liberation by going on strike against this country’s racist and inhumane prison system.
In striking, American inmates are risking everything to deny, for just a short period, their own penal slave labor, valued in the billions of dollars annually, to the corporate and state overlords who profit off the prison labor racket. The fatcats are about to blow their tops over this one, guaranteed!
But even more than an act of economics, this strike is an all-too-human response to structural dehumanization — the chronic, deep-seated dehumanization enforced and reproduced by all prison and policing systems, here and around the world. The prisoners’ mass action is at the cutting edge of the larger international movement to abolish police and prisons.
Nationwide Prison Strike, 8/21–9/12
During the strike period, within federal and state prisons, local jails, youth lockups and immigrant detention centers, large groups of prisoners will lead mass actions including work strikes, sit-ins and civil disobedience, commissary boycotts, as well as hunger strikes.
Beyond the prison walls, supporters will hold demonstrations and marches, picket prison profiteers, engage the larger community in conversations about mass incarceration and prison slavery, and poke the media to cover this historic moment of collective resistance.
The upcoming strike has been endorsed by organizations including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), a section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union. Our brave prison strikers have supporters cheering them on from all over the world. And they’re already being retaliated against.
The most immediate reason for the #prisonstrike is the bloody prisoner massacre that occurred at South Carolina’s Lee County Prison in April of this year.
That tragic, seven-hour-long event saw gross administrative negligence leading to the preventable deaths of trapped prisoners at the hands of other prisoners incited to violence by prison officials. It was the nation’s deadliest prison riot in a quarter-century, according to USA Today’s Greenville News.
Incarcerated people across the nation reacted with horror to this engineered mass trauma, the result of violent authorities collaborating with violent inmates in a context of institutionalized impunity.
There are many other issues of grave importance to inmates motivating the planned labor strike. These concern general prison conditions; prison labor conditions and pay; opportunities for rehabilitation, parole and education; and systematic racial discrimination against criminalized, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people of color.
The 2018 nationwide #prisonstrike will be the second of its kind in recent history, a followup to its record-smashing precedent in 2016. That first wave of nationally coordinated strikes became the largest prison uprising in U.S. history.
Despite incredible odds, the prisoners’ movement has only grown stronger since then, so this year’s mass action is expected to be huge. Ahead of the action, prisoners in at least seventeen states were reportedly preparing to strike, according to the Solid Black Fist Official National Prison Strike Newsletter. We will hopefully learn more about the actual level of participation as the strike continues to progress.
Prisoner liberation in 2018
Who am I? I write this as a non-incarcerated supporter of the prisoner-led movement for incarcerated lives; my work is based out of Sacramento, California. I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned through my participation, including how to make sense of this upswelling of prisoner resistance.
In recent years, I’ve learned that prisoners are among the most vulnerable and maltreated people in our society. Unfortunately, many people readily dismiss prisoners as an undifferentiated mass of Bad People to whom we owe literally nothing, not even the most basic rights and respect. When this hardline, dehumanizing attitude prevails in civil society, you can be sure that things are ugly on the inside.
And so it is in the United States, a rogue state when it comes to the human rights of prisoners and detainees. The U.S. is a massive country with an astounding 1 in 110 of its own citizens incarcerated, to say nothing of undocumented detainees. It is arguably the most carceral state in the world, with blatantly inhumane prison conditions denounced by international human rights organizations.
To quote Mother Jones from a 2013 investigation into the country’s worst prisons, in a statement that still applies today:
Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect.
These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year — men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.
Since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, among other factors, Americans have learned more about mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. More people than ever know how grotesque and disconnected from justice the nation’s penal system really is. Nevertheless, little tangible progress has been made. Incarceration rates have decreased only slightly after decades of dramatic increases. Prison conditions remain atrocious, while prison slavery continues unabated.
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Progress has stalled out. The status quo is intolerable. Therefore it has fallen to the slaves themselves to engineer their own liberation.
I will quote Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, political prisoner and incarcerated journalist:
Across Amerika (home of the world’s largest prison population) growing numbers of the imprisoned are coming to realize that they are victims of social injustice.
Foremost, as victims of an inherently predatory and dysfunctional capitalist-imperialist system, which targets the poor and people of color for intensified policing, militaristic containment, and selective criminal prosecutions. While denying them access to the basic resources, employment and institutional control needed for social and economic security. Deprivations which generate “crime”: economic crimes, crimes of passion, and crimes of attempting to cope (through drug use and addictions).
Secondly, once imprisoned they become victims of inhumane abuses, warehousing, and one of the most decadent and dehumanizing forms of social economic injustice: slavery.
The expanding political consciousness of America’s ‘untouchables’ signals a new front in the struggle against white supremacy and state domination in this country. A new day is dawning.
The List of Demands
We are humbled, though unsurprised, to see a radical movement for human rights rise from within the belly of the beast — from within the prison camps and detention centers of the Incarceration Nation.
The incarcerated strikers of 2018 are advancing a list of non-negotiable demands, which are as follows:
- Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.
- An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.
- The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.
- The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.
- An immediate end to the racist overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.
- An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans.
- No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.
- State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.
- Pell education grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.
- The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count.
Support the prisoner’s movement
The prisoners’ demands are well within the realm of practical possibility. Moreover, there is solid research indicating the myriad benefits that could come from a rehabilitative and humane approach to justice. To learn more about the issues, take a look at The Sentencing Project website.
As for the prison uprising, striking prisoners need your solidarity! You can help out by spreading the word to your friends, family, neighbors and colleagues; contacting your elected representatives to express support for the prisoner’s demands; or picketing a corporate prison profiteer near you, like Whole Foods or McDonalds.
If you know someone who has been or is still affected by the prison system, talk to them about the upcoming nationwide prison strike.
That’s the #August21 #PrisonStrike, from August 21 through September 9, 2018. Don’t forget to check social media for updates, and thank you for your solidarity.
