The largest
prison strike in U.S. history has been going on for nearly a week,
but there’s a good chance you haven’t heard about it. 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 effort culminated in a mass
refusal to report to prison jobs on September 9, the anniversary of
the 1971 Attica prison uprising.
“This
is a call to action against slavery in America,” organizers
wrote in an announcement that for weeks circulated inside and outside
prisons nationwide, and that sums up the strikers’ primary demand:
an end to free prison labor. “Forty-five years after Attica, the
waves of change are returning to America’s prisons. This September
we hope to coordinate and generalize these protests, to build them
into a single tidal shift that the American prison system cannot
ignore or withstand.”
Since
Friday, details on the strike’s success have trickled out of
prisons with some difficulty, but organizers and supporters have no
doubt the scale of the action is unprecedented, though their
assessment is difficult to verify and some corrections departments
denied reports of strike-related activities in their states.
Prisoners in
24 states and 40 to 50 prisons pledged to join the strike, and as of
Tuesday, prisoners in at least 11 states and 20 prisons continued the
protest, according to outside supporters in Alabama. Tactics and
specific demands varied locally, with some prisoners reportedly
staging hunger strikes, and detainees in Florida protesting and
destroying prison property ahead of the planned strike date.
More:
Comments
Post a Comment