#incarcerated workers

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Content warning: Prison (in the context of supporting incarcerated people coerced to work), system of colonial genocidal state

The link is a copy of a letter asking for solidarity and support from Canadian unions for incarcerated workers. Their wages are currently capped at $6.90 per day and they're exempt from employment standards, labor laws, health and safety regulations. Average hourly pay is estimated to be 30 cents.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Months ago, inmates across the U.S. began planning a strike over prison conditions, including low or nonexistent wages. To start getting the word out, they didn’t target big news organizations. Instead, organizers posted about the imminent strikes to their own social-media followers. And they contacted publications with an activist bent, like Shadowproof, a press organization focused on marginalized communities, and the San Francisco Bay View, a black-liberation newspaper.

They worried, based on past experience, that mainstream outlets would emphasize that prisoners’ often anonymous accounts of the strike couldn’t be verified and the fact that the impact of the strike was hard to predict. But more radical publications, they believed, would focus on the strikers’ message, about unjust prison conditions and what should be done about them. That message could be amplified online, and picked up by bigger publications. “We intentionally went from the bottom up,” Brooke Terpstra, an organizer in Oakland with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a group that has been supporting the strike, told me.

The strike began on August 21 and is set to last through September 9, the anniversary of the Attica prison uprising of 1971. In addition to calling for prisoners to be paid the prevailing wage where they live (under the current regime, they can be paid a couple of dollars an hour, or, in some states, nothing at all), the strikers’ list of 10 demands includes voting rights for “ex-felons” and better funding for rehabilitation services. Thus far, it’s not clear how widespread the protest has been. Organizers report that prisoners are striking in Washington, Georgia, South Carolina, and California, among several other states, where prisoners are refusing to work and eat. That’s a conservative estimate, Terpstra told me, as organizers want to remain cautious in order to maintain credibility. Early on, one organizer suggested in an interview that non-prisoners should demonstrate their solidarity by protesting outside prison gates, which appears to have happened at some facilities. In general, prison officials have largely countered the organizers’ claims, saying they’re not aware of any strikes at their facilities.*

Still, the strikers’ strategy, designed for the current media moment, has proved extraordinarily successful by the measures set by the strikers themselves. Following initial pieces in publications like Shadowproof and the Bay View, mainstream outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR started covering the protest. Social-media posts from the strike organizers and their supporters have gone viral. People are talking about the strike and, by extension, about poor prison conditions across the U.S. and prisoners’ demands to see them changed. In an era in which most people experience public events by reading, hearing, and watching videos about them online, the inability to get an inside look at the current prison protest doesn’t seem to have hampered its reach.

“Just as the men in Attica knew that it was important to reach out to the media when they protested inhumane prison conditions in 1971, so too do the folks inside today,” Heather Ann Thompson, a historian and the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, told me in an email. “Prisons are allowed to be the terrible places they are because, despite being public institutions that we fund and are run in our name, we are allowed no look at what goes on inside.”

For all the public attention, Terpstra pointed out that mainstream lawmakers and political organizations, including labor unions, haven’t said much. A day after the strike began, Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman representing Silicon Valley, tweeted his support. “Instead of focusing on rehabilitation, inmates are exploited for cheap labor,” he wrote, noting that prisoners working for a dollar an hour are fighting wildfires in his home state. “That is simply inexcusable.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congressional candidate from New York, wrote, “I don’t believe slavery should exist anywhere in the United States. Including in our prison system.” But many higher-profile politicians have remained silent.” - Vauhini Vara, “The Viral Success of a Strike No One Can See.” The Atlantic, August 30, 2018.

[jaspahh]

The following prisoners are facing repression because of alleged participation in or planning for the 2018 nationwide prisoner strike. Please send them letters of love and support. People who are wrongly accused or facing retaliation on baseless grounds are included in this list. Whether they participated or not, we wish to protect them from reprisals.

“...prisoners are facing repression because of alleged participation in or planning for the 2018 nationwide prisoner strike. Please send them letters of love and support. People who are wrongly accused or facing retaliation on baseless grounds are included in this list. Whether they participated or not, we wish to protect them from reprisals.    When writing letters, make no assumptions. Keep your statements general, or unrelated to the strike, as discussing it or their role might get your letter blocked, or enable further action against them.”

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Strike Statement to the Press; August 22, 2018

Statement regarding the ongoing Nationwide Prison Strike,  issued August 22, 2018, Day 2 of the strike.

Issued by the Prison Strike Media Team

Amani Sawari official outside media representative of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak [email protected]

Jared Ware Freelance Journalist covering prisoner movements [email protected] @jaybeware on Twitter

Brooke Terpstra Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) National Media Committee [email protected] @IWW_IWOC on twitter

Statement August 22, 2018

So the prisoner strike has been underway for more than 24 hours now. In the first day we got word of actions coming out from the prisons from Halifax, Nova Scotia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington and Folsom Prison in California reported strike action.

We saw outside solidarity actions in at least 21 cities around the US and as far abroad as Leipzig, Germany. We saw Palestinian political prisoners give a statement of solidarity from their prisons in occupied Palestine.

We called this conference call because those of us who have been coordinating media relations on the outside have been overwhelmed by the number of reporters and outlets who are covering the strike. Some of us who were involved with media relations in 2016 can say that the difference is dramatic and we thank you for your interest in this prisoner-led movement. Many of you have the same questions and so we want to give you all an opportunity to hear our responses in one place.

We want to note that although there aren't widespread reports of actions coming out of prisons that people need to understand that the tactics being used in this strike are not always visible. Prisoners are boycotting commissaries, they are engaging in hunger strikes which can take days for the state to acknowledge, and they will be engaging in sit-ins and work strikes which are not always reported to the outside. As we saw in 2016, Departments of Corrections are not reliable sources of information for these actions and will deny them and seek to repress those who are engaged in them.

We have spoken with family members who have suggested that cell phone lines may be being jammed at multiple prisons in South Carolina, New Mexico had a statewide lockdown yesterday. The Departments of Corrections in this country are working overtime to try and prevent strike action and to try and prevent word from getting out about actions that are taking place.

As you report the strike, we encourage you to uplift the actions that we do know about, but also acknowledge that strikers may be resisting in ways that are tougher to quantify and view. We encourage outlets to issue FOIA requests to prisons that we believe will show attempts to quell the strike and also evidence of boycotts and other strike activity.

We also really want to remind the media that this strike is about ten different demands. While prison slavery has become a galvanizing force in the public eye, and it is a key element that prisoners are protesting against, they have given you ten specific demands and it is important to talk about all of them or report on them individually. People need to understand how truth in sentencing laws function, how gang enhancement laws function, and how the prison litigation reform act works and why these are things that prisoners are targeting their protest around. We need to be talking about the lack of rehabilitation programs, mental health care, and the lack of education programs and how this undermines the ostensibly rehabilitative nature of the prison system itself.

Prisoners crafted these demands carefully through national organizing, based on the circumstances of the Lee Prison violence that occurred earlier this year, in an understanding of how the state brings about the conditions of violence like that, and the types of changes that are necessary to prevent that sort of violence from recurring. This is a human rights campaign and each of these demands should be understood through a human rights lens.

[jaspahh]

[deadgiants]

I got two orders for the charity art prints in June, so in the interest of holding myself accountable. Here’s the receipt for the donation made because of them.

[subversiveskype]

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.

Subversive Skype #9: Incarcerated Workers Take the Lead! Zine Discussion

Hosted by Houston IWOC and Monkeywrench Books (May 2016)

The I.W.O.C. (Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee) is a committee of the I.W.W (Industrial Workers of the World) that emerged following the Alabama strike in 2014. The I.W.O.C. “functions as a liaison for prisoners to organize each other, unionize, and build solid bridges between prisoners on the inside and fellow workers on the outside.” The Houston chapter of IWOC has compiled a zine highlighting some of the struggles that inmates have engaged in from 2008 until the more recent state wide strikes that shook the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in April, 2016. Building to a nation wide strike scheduled to start in September of this year, this zine aims to inspire our friends on the inside, as well as those on the outside committed to building an alliance against the prison industrial complex. Read the zine online here: http://unityandstruggle.org/2016/05/05/incarcerated-workers-take-the-lead-prison-struggles-in-the-united-states-2008-2016-3/