Alabama prisoners who have been on strike for 10 days over unpaid labor and prison conditions are accusing officials of retaliating against their protest by starving them. The coordinated strike started on May 1, International Workers’ Day, when prisoners at the Holman and Elmore facilities refused to report to their prison jobs and has since expanded to Staton, St. Clair, and Donaldson’s facilities, according to organizers with the Free Alabama Movement, a network of prison activists.
Prison officials responded by putting the facilities on lockdown, partially to allow guards to perform jobs normally carried out by prisoners. But prisoners told The Intercept that officials also punished them by serving meals that are significantly smaller than usual, a practice they have referred to as “bird feeding.”
The Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment, though earlier this month they told local reporters that inmates had “not given any demands, or a reason for refusing to work.”
Prisoners told The Intercept they are protesting severe overcrowding, poor living conditions, and the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which bans slavery and servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” thus sanctioning the legality of forced, unpaid prison labor. Prisoners said they have voiced their requests in meetings with prison officials but were told their demands were “too great.” Last month, after riots broke out at Holman prison twice in four days, prisoners also circulated a list of demands, including federal assistance, the release of inmates who are eligible for parole, and compensation for “mental pain and physical abuse.” They are planning to circulate an updated list today.
A prisoner serving a life sentence at Holman prison shared photos of his meals in text messages over the last several days. One picture shows a meal made of two slices of white bread, cereal, a slice of yellow cheese, artificial sugar and a brown sauce the inmate said was prune stew. Another meal was made up of two slices of white bread, an apple, and an unrecognizable white mixture wrapped in plastic.
The inmates said they were not complaining about the food itself, but about the very small quantities. “It’s only an issue when the deprivation of any necessity becomes a weapon used against us to make us discouraged,” the man sharing the photos said, adding that officials are using the tactic to break prisoners’ resolve. Still, prisoners have refused to return to work.
“The food is a blatant violation and these violations are the reason that we even formed a strike from the start,” that prisoner said. “We r not supposed to be fed the way they r feeding us, it is not 2300 or 2200 calories that we r suppose to be getting that they have been serving us for ten days straight.”
“We r weak feeling nauseated and having headaches from the lack of balanced meals,” he wrote.
Stabbings are frequent, as are suicides.
Alabama’s prisons — the most overcrowded prison system in the country — are operating at nearly 200 percent capacity. In recent years, the state’s department of corrections has been sued over medical neglect, abuse, dangerous conditions, and an extraordinary high level of violence. Stabbings are frequent, as are suicides.
State officials have acknowledged the problems plaguing Alabama’s prisons and recently proposed to shut down 14 prisons, swapping them for four massive, new “state-of-the-art” facilities — an $800 million project they dubbed the “Alabama Prison Transformation Initiative Act.” A scaled-down version of that proposal is currently pending.
Prisoner rights advocates say building more prisons won’t solve the problem. “The crisis with the prisons has to do with culture and management,” Charlotte Morrison, a senior attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which represents Alabama prisoners, told The Intercept last month. “It’s not something that can be solved by just building new prisons.”
Prison strikes have been on the rise in recent years, as prisoners organizing through a network of smuggled cell phones have established communication between prisons as well as with the outside. Last month, prisoners in Texas refused to leave their cells to report to their unpaid jobs, listing a series of demands, including “good-time” credit toward sentence reduction, an end to $100 medical co-pays, and a drastic downsizing of the state’s incarcerated population.
A nationwide strike is also planned for September 9, the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison riot by a group of prisoners coordinating efforts from Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi. As many as 870,000 prisoners are employed nationwide, some in manufacturing jobs for which they are paid a few cents an hour, if they are paid at all.
“We have made a vow to no longer cater to what we know to be inhumane and barbaric in its essence,” the Holman prisoners wrote, when announcing the strike. “We make this stand now and we will remain here.”
“We just refuse to be the components in the institution of slavery.”
Politicians and cops are first one that should be arrested and imprisoned.
Prison is evil. It is also atavistic. It’s so weird that people can’t see this. It came in to vogue around 1820 as a sincere yet profoundly misguided measure to reduce cruelty and rehabilitate malefactors. People falsely think that the idea of prison has been around as long as civilization, but this simply isn’t true. People were held in captivity to await the outcome of a trial, maybe, but not for years or decades on end as punishment. If we really want to locate the idea of prison historically, we need to place it alongside other discarded notions from that era: phrenology; bloodletting; bear baiting; dueling; and so on. I’m sure there are several reasons prison has persisted over time, but one probably has to do with the fact that the idea itself is carried through time via architectures of stone and concrete. Make no mistake. The humanitarian project of our era consists in dismantling our mass prison program. These work strikes are encouraging because it means that these prisoners are insisting that their humanity be recognized, and they are doing it nonviolently. I hope they are successful in their efforts. If the whole prison is participating, then I guess not everyone can be sent to solitary.
Right on
Hear, hear!
Make them farm. If they dont work and grow their crops; they dont eat. There are plenty of families who are not felons that are starving. When you break the laws of society, you should not expect society to take of you. I think Alabama need to fire up the Big Yellow Mama and start thinning out the numbers in these prisons. If you want to be treated well dont get yourself put in prison. If you want a philosophical look at how to treat prisoners read some Kant.
Or we can treat them like human beings like a civilized society does.
You know, your idea isn’t as bad as it sounds, apart from the “making” and “not eating” parts, but it is too liberal for the prison establishment to accept. You give the impression you want prisoners to be able to grow stuff for their own use, grind it and cook it to eat. These are healthy activities, and would offer productive prisoners a way to be appreciated by their peers without having to shiv somebody. But that’s not how Jim Crow works! Jim Crow says the prisoner gets his 85 cents to pick crops, and the farmer with the sweetheart deal with the warden goes and sells his crop and laughs with the banker, “This sure beats the shit out of hiring illegals to do it.” And then the prison taps into its scarce public funds and serves up this shit, and the prisoner is supposed to be thankful if he can save up his pennies and buy a morsel of extra food now and then.
One picture shows a meal made of two slices of white bread, cereal, a slice of yellow cheese, artificial sugar and a brown sauce the inmate said was prune stew. Another meal was made up of two slices of white bread, an apple, and an unrecognizable white mixture wrapped in plastic.
WTF?
First, the yellow ‘cheese’ is likely not cheese – more likely reconstituted textured recolored artificial flavored starch. I believe you have heard the phrase “singles” before.
Second, white bread is a nutrition drain — it takes more stuff to digest and process that crap than what the body gets from it.
Third, artificial sugar is cancerous.
I guess in the US the unemployment worshipping hoo’ers for wallstreet who are voted in by some or many ignoramus GFN voters (yeah, it’s that time) have found a new formula for slavery and genocide.
nice country.
I don’t think even Satan would make anybody eat ‘prune stew’ on top of that mess.
This story is compelling, but it leaves out the issue of the “commissary”. As I understand it, in many US prisons, the prisoners who have well-meaning people on the outside sending them money can avoid all the unpleasantness of limited prison food – whereas the others are left trying to make their 85 cents to get an extra morsel now and then. Even in the worst jails, the poor can never be allowed to imagine they are equal to the rich – and so long as the rich don’t have to worry about a starvation program like this, no one important is going to care about it.
“A society is judged on how it treats its most vulnerable citizens: babies, the elderly and its prisoners.”
I am beginning to wonder if we are really much better than North Korea.
Given the death and misery our last war has already caused, and the torture and indefinite detentions our leaders embrace, the prison system using slave labor (for who?), the war on drugs i.e. the injustices carried out to continue to oppress descendants of African slaves… North Korea is worse by a lot, actually, but America has its share of moral failings.
Watch the 2006 documentary, ‘Crossing the Line.’ Hearing Dear Leader being praised in American accent really highlights the similarities of the political mindset of the two countries.
The exploitation of the powerless never ceased.
And if prisoners can fight back, everybody can.