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.
“There are probably 20,000 prisoners on strike right now, at least, which is the biggest prison strike in history, but the information is really sketchy and spotty,” said Ben Turk, who works on “in-reach” to prisons for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World union helping to coordinate the inmate-led initiative from the outside.
Small rallies and demonstrations in support of the strikers were staged in dozens of U.S. cities and a couple of foreign countries, but so far the coordinated strike remains largely ignored on the outside.
“The strike has been pulled off, but we’re not quite breaking through to getting mainstream media,” Turk told The Intercept, noting that the strike was widely covered by independent media. “I talk to people who aren’t in that milieu and aren’t seeing it on their social media, and they’ll be like, ‘We didn’t hear about it, there’s nothing about it anywhere.’”
That’s bad news for the strikers, who rely on the support of outsiders to push for more radical reform but also depend on their outside visibility to mitigate retaliation by prison officials.
A week into the strike, a couple of groups were providing updates on the action, which organizers say will carry on indefinitely, as well as outside demonstrations of solidarity.
The information blackout is largely due to prison officials’ ample discretion in the details they choose to disclose. As the strikes began, reports emerged of several facilities being put on lockdown, some preemptively, but the only way for outsiders to get updates would be to call each facility and ask, usually getting no explanation about the reasons for a lockdown. Reports also emerged claiming that prison leaders in Virginia, Ohio, California, and South Carolina were put in solitary confinement as a result of the strike, according to the Alabama supporters.
The Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment, while corrections departments in Virginia, Ohio, and California — three of the states where strike-related disturbances were tracked by outsiders — denied that inmates in those states participated in the strike.
A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Corrections said that prisons there had resumed normal operations after several hundred inmates staged protests and work stoppages at four facilities. The spokesperson added that several inmates identified in the disturbances were transferred to other regional institutions and will be disciplined “in accordance with procedure.” At the Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan, some 150 prisoners identified as “ringleaders” of the protests were also removed to other facilities after prisoners assigned to kitchen work declined to report to their jobs on September 9 and some 400 prisoners staged a peaceful protest. The situation there grew more tense a day later when prison guards went through the facility to remove suspected leaders, the Wall Street Journal reported, and the prison remains on lockdown.
Retaliation against strikers is also hard to track, but outside advocates said that several leaders were put in isolation and denied communication privileges, making it even harder for information to come out.
In one instance, at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Siddique Hasan, a well-known prison activist sentenced to death for his role in a 1993 prison uprising, was accused of plotting to “blow up buildings” on September 9. Hasan, an organizer with the Free Ohio Movement, was confined to isolation and denied access to the phone for nearly a month before the strike — a deliberate effort to prevent him from communicating with the outside about it, supporters said.
“What people have to realize is that these men and women inside prison — they expected to be retaliated against, but they sacrificed,” said Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, a former prisoner and a supporter of the Free Alabama Movement, the prisoner-led group that first called for the nationwide strike.
“People on the outside are not understanding they are being bamboozled,” he added, expressing disappointment that the strike hadn’t garnered more attention. “A lot of people are not realizing the value in what’s going on, they don’t realize that it’s slavery, that slavery still exists.”
While the most ambitious to date, the September 9 strike was hardly the first such effort by prisoners. Prison protests have been on the rise in recent years, following a 2010 strike during which thousands of prisoners in Georgia refused to work, an action that was followed by others in Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington. In 2013, California prisoners coordinated a hunger strike against the use of solitary confinement that at its peak involved 30,000 prisoners. And this year, prisoners rioted at Holman prison in Alabama — one of the facilities most actively involved in the current strike — and went on strike in Texas.
Across the country, inmates are protesting a wide range of issues: from harsh parole systems and three-strike laws to the lack of educational services, medical neglect, and overcrowding. But the issue that has unified protesters is that of prison labor — a $2 billion a year industry that employs nearly 900,000 prisoners while paying them a few cents an hour in some states, and nothing at all in others. In addition to work for private companies, prisoners also cook, clean, and work on maintenance and construction in the prisons themselves — forcing officials to pay staff to carry out those tasks in response to work stoppages. “They cannot run these facilities without us,” organizers wrote ahead of the strike. “We will not only demand the end to prison slavery, we will end it ourselves by ceasing to be slaves.”
Prisoners on strike are calling for the repeal of an exception listed in the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which bans “involuntary servitude” in addition to slavery, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
That forced labor remains legal in prison is unknown to many Americans, and that’s something strikers hope to change with this action. But it’s also a sign of how little the general public knows about the country’s massive prison system. “A nation that imprisons 1 percent of its population has an obligation to know what’s happening to those 2.4 million people,” Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, wrote in a blog post about the tepid response to the strike. “And right now, we don’t know.”
But while information on prisons is notoriously hard to obtain, a potentially larger problem for the striking prisoners is the seemingly limited interest in their plight, which remains confined to a few activists, family members, and formerly incarcerated people, even at a time when criminal justice issues and prison reform are high on the agenda of social justice advocates and politicians alike.
Prisoners themselves have been largely excluded from the last few years’ debate on mass incarceration, but the very fact that they were able to coordinate a collective protest of this scale, with all its limitations, is testimony to their determination that the prison system needs radical change, strike organizers say.
“When you have people who are inside, locked up, who have overcome all these obstacles and barriers and have organized in 24 states, 40 to 50 prisons,” said Glasgow, “that means all of us out here need to start stepping up.”
nick is right: When you consider that the majority of those in prisons today were NOT given a fair trial due to either incompetent court appointed “state public defenders”…
or worse, were manipulated, goaded, or guided by these public defenders to “take a plea deal”…just makes all of this more shameful and disgusting. NYT: Plea Bargaining and the Innocent | The Marshall Project
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/26/plea-bargaining-and-the-innocent
Dec 26, 2014 – The November 20, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books included an … Southern District of New York, titled: “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty. … What time they will serve is argued to the judge and on appeal …
you can make theself-interest case: in most states, especially within private prisons, conditions are horrible. You can’t just lock the door and throw away the keys. At some point most offenders get out. Denying people their humanity doesn’t help people get ready to be reintegrated back into society.
Wait what? This is a thing? Please correct me if I’m wrong, but are they striking against prison conditions, fairness, pay etc. What the actual FK? Free Food (good or not good its edible), Health Care, TV, Housing, Work Experience, Education…. all for the fair price of acting a fkng fool in public? Someone please educate me cause I’m confused.
What they committed crimes so they lost their rights. They ought to have prisons on islands so they can’t pull this crap.
Without this being mistaken as any type of commentary on the justice system or advocation for the prison system in its current state, this whole article completely overlooks that most prisoners want to work to stave off boredom, learn new skills and have something within the prison that they can take pride in. Lots of prisons offer certification programs that lead to employment opportunities upon release. Also, higher paying jobs require lower custody levels. Lower custody levels require a history of good behavior. Good behavior keeps everyone, staff and inmates alike, safe. Inmates have the right to refuse work, also. And then there’s the part where their living expenses are completely covered by tax payers. There’s only so much money in a prison’s budget. If inmates are getting paid more staff are getting paid less. How much would you expect to be paid to keep a complex full of violent offenders under control?
5904.1
By any other name, when private corporations profit from prison labor, it is still slavery (this is not the corporate ownership of prisons system of slavery President Obama has recently banned).
Because slavery is so efficient a profit generating system, corporations are ever alert to any opportunity to exploit it in any of its forms. Involuntary/forced prison labor in the U.S. today is one.
IMO if the private market place wants to exploit prison labor the government must allow the prisoners to negotiate a contract with the business – the National Labor Relations Board would be the proper agency to oversee the negotiations.
Let us not forget fascist Germany supplied prison labor to German industry (IG Farben [Bayer, BASF], Siemens, Bosch, VW, Opel [GM], Fordwerke [Ford]).
Prison/slave labor was and remains a part of the cry/demand Never again!
Please just lock all the doors and after they eat all they have smuggled in they will call off the strike. Then make them clean up their mess.
Is against the law to stave imants. That why they receive bag lunch/breakfast during the strikes. Your solution is not plausible.
I don’t think he cares. Americans have a bloodlust
The cruelest people are often those who consider themselves the most righteous.
I support those on strike. Our criminal justice system is a fraud and a racket.
I could only be convinced to support paying inmates more if they were required to pay for their room and board–and restitution for their crime(s).
$5/hour x 2080 hours/yr, invested at 7%, would become more than $250,000 in 15 years and more than $1 million after 30.
Should our prisons really be turned into a place where criminals are rewarded with riches?
It’s hardly “slave labor” when they’re being housed, fed, clothed, given health care (even shitty health care), cable television, internet access, etc. But if paying inmates more for their work, and having them pay for rent, utilities, clothes, etc., makes everyone feel better, that’s fine with me.
Thank you, Scott. I completely agree.
When you consider that the majority of those in prisons today were NOT given a fair trial due to either incompetent court appointed “state public defenders”…
or worse, were manipulated, goaded, or guided by these public defenders to “take a plea deal”…just makes all of this more shameful and disgusting.
Not to mention how the judicial system has redefined the concept of a “jury of your PEERS” . A jury of your peers….by definition, is a jury consisting of individuals who have knowledge of said defendant’s character. No one gets it, even if they end up getting it….very few will stand up or speak up loud enough to provoke any change. This system, this government…..is a corrupted, self-serving and manipulative machine that only survives because We The People allow it to.
“Tolerance and Apathy are the last virtues of a dying society”
For those men and women striking….my thoughts and my support are with you..
Please write an article naming the Companies who exploit these prisoners. I will look online, but won’t hold my breath. Solidarity to those who honestly want improvement.
Literally any private prison system.
Most states have private prisons that are less efficient, more abusive, and focus on the bottom line of profit to keep as many prisoners and guarantee they return if released.
Proof? Federal government is closing all FEDERAL private for-profit prisons due to their awful reports by comparison to federally run prisons.
the 60’s, the beatles, the hippies, humans were starting to think, not so controlled by the corporate/government/ 1% snobs. now, the smart phones have made them tracked,monitored, and more easily CONTROLLED by big brother, who sends the jobs away and provides a pitiful existence for so many . now, go vote, give your approval to that which cares not about you or the world just its top 1%. vote for jill stein if you can. good luck to the prisoners.
So end all prion work programs and leave them locked in their cages 23 hours a day.
They are lousy citizens… why not be lousy slaves too?
As long as rich people profit and they give money to politicians, there will be slavery. Billionaires are the core of the system, they are the problem, they have disease called greediness. Guards, cops, prosecutors, judges are just repressive department of rich people. In any case, the state was created by riches to organize themselves better: to exploit slaves and to protect themselves from other rich conquerors.
In that process of creating the state, they institutionalized punishment, before that, fist prisons are created as private prisons. when the punishment was institutionalized, punishment lost its face, private individual is not guilty for taking your freedom than faceless state is guilty for that.
Stop breaking the law and expecting law abiding hard working citizens to pick up the bill. They are in jail not on a vacation. They need to earn their keep and stop causing trouble.
Agreed!
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I think Gandhi said much the same thing, but substituted the treatment of animals, as how great a society is. We aren’t the worst, but we are a long way from the best…
Agreed, we are not the worst. But we are far from the most civilized. Scandinavian countries lead there.
Although I am almost always critical of the degree to which Ms. Speri takes liberty with the truth in service to her own socially progressive, ideological bias, there are a number of legitimate concerns that nevertheless managed to bubble to the surface in this article – albeit they are obscured by the “winds that roil the water.” In the past I have taken pointed exception to those who advocate for the outright legalization of marijuana or the decriminalization of more powerful mind altering drugs as they always couch their advocacy with arguments that are efficacy driven (e.g. “It is more cost effective to decriminalize drugs than to prosecute and incarcerate abusers)”. Such arguments almost always fail to acknowledge the degree to which tolerance for recreational drug use has crippled the capacity of many cultures to muster enough collective political will to promote the type of change that would negate the need for mind numbing solutions. When I was in Pakistan during the 1970s, I could legally purchase a brick of opium from any local pharmacy. And, again, when I was in Afghanistan I could readily purchase a brick of hashish for personal consumption without worrying that it was technically illegal. Again, the same held true for Morocco, Burma, and Thailand (albeit the choice of recreational drugs varied with local). In everyone of those instances, i witnessed a direct correlation between political apathy and the chronic ingestion of these substances. It was almost always the poor and socially disenfranchised that were prone to chronic drug use. This fact was not lost on the ruling class in these countries as turning a blind eye to such self-anesthetizing patterns only further secured their own hold on power. Anyone who has read about the Chinese opium wars can readily understand how drugs have been employed in the past by imperialist powers to pacify the conquered.
Apropos of the foregoing, I am left wondering to what degree can the current problem of prison overcrowding be traced directly back to the flood of cocaine that was first allowed to illegally enter the American marketplace (via weigh stations in Arkansas) by elements of the dark state during the Reagan years; the off-the-books proceeds of which were used to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua against the “pro-communist” Sandinista government. Did policy makers at that time understand the degree to which cocaine would cripple the urban communities to which they were directed? Were they intended to quell the political unrest that had been evolving in these communities throughout the 1960s and 1970s? Did this modus operandi ultimately allow for the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 which legally mandated life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes? As blacks were already cited for being disproportionately responsible for violent crimes, and most of the illicit drug traffic (crack and heroin) was coming out of poor urban communities, was it not logical to conclude that the Clintons were consciously facilitating an evolving trend of mass incarceration that, by the very inclusion of drug violations, would result in a federal prison population comprised of 37.7% black inmates? This number really stands out when one considers that blacks represent only 13.2% of the US population.
When considering whether the Clinton’s understood the degree to which prison overcrowding could exacerbate intolerable prison conditions for inmates, only needs to look as far as the case of Hutto v Finney (1978) in which footnote #3 of the decision reads:
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/437/678.html
As Yale trained attorney’s, the Clinton’s must have been aware of Arkansas’ very recent, sorted history wherein its penal system had been repeatedly cited in a “sequel” of court decisions dating back to 1969 for systemically violating the constitutional rights of its prison population . As the Clinton’s occupied the Governor’s mansion from 1979–81 and again from 1983–92, they would have been directly responsible for overseeing prison reform during Bill Clinton’s tenure as Governor. So, too, they would have been aware of the CIA sponsored drug traffic that was passing through the state at that time. Thus, by the time that the Clinton’s occupied the White house in Jan 1993, they would have been keenly aware of the potential outcome of overcrowded prisons – especially those that were intended to turn a profit.
Given that the forgoing is accurate, how can the progressive left explain the “African American” preference for Hillary in the current election cycle? Why is it that Trump is being painted as the neo-fascist when it is clearly evident that the Clinton’s actions have consistently facilitated the mass incarceration of blacks and the resultant rise of privatized prisons?
Holy shit Karl. I haven’t felt that level of crazy gust over me since I was last in an actual asylum.
Is there anybody out there who’s old, bitter and racist, and I dunno, wants to keep it to themselves maybe? Ever? Yikes.
Given that it’s almost certainly true that you are “almost always critical”, in your hamfistedly self-revealing and grotesque way, of Ms. Speri and her work, which I’m sure you’ve never contributed anything half as selfless and important in, I am SUPER impressed that she keeps going, and keeps writing articles on important topics like this, whether they’ve got a few flaws or not. Given that *your* writing is more flaw than not, and that I’m sure you’re not alone in just being an asshole for the sake of hearing yourself squawk, this girl has cojones to both tolerate and to not let your yammering get her down.
So you, above all, might have made her my favorite new author. Thanks!
So true. Good questions, Karl.
In Colorado we have a ballot proposal to change the slavery exception:
https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Removal_of_Exception_to_Slavery_Prohibition_for_Criminals,_Amendment_T_(2016)
I’ts part of the New American Dystopia.
Here is an article that deserves to be read and cited copiously:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/08/the-tyranny-of-911-the-building-blocks-of-the-american-police-state-from-a-z/
They used to chain em up and have them break rocks. They are criminals and it used to deter them from committing crimes. They don’t need more rights, letting them garden is a nice rehabilitative thing to do. They should by all means work to pay for their incarceration. People should be scared to commit crimes, not because of the inmates they will be locked away with, but because of the sentence they will incur.
Criminal should go on strike and refuse to commit crimes.
word!
From palace to prison, our nation is coming unglued. I still hope to exit this life before the defecation begins to really hit the ventilation, but I fear for future generations. In time, not even money will be able to stave off the oncoming collapse and chaos.
Have a sparkling day!
The prison slave economic model has not fulfilled its potential. So it is worth examining why the wage slave economic model is still predominant.
From an economic viewpoint, the problem with classical slavery is that the slave doesn’t have very much incentive to work. No matter how hard the slave works, at the end of the day, he is still a slave. In contrast, a wage slave, if he works hard, can buy lottery tickets and dream that one day he will win the lottery and no longer be a slave. In my opinion, therefore, the people running the prison slavery system have simply been too greedy. They need to provide the prisoners with some incentive to work, since simply threatening them with punishment hasn’t been enough. You need both a carrot and a stick.
However, if you pay prisoners enough to buy lottery tickets, you lose much of the cost advantage of prison slavery. In addition, you must build expensive jail facilities and staff them with prison guards who are being paid to do nothing productive. So your overheard is higher than the capitalists you are competing against. Of course, it is the tax payers who pay your overhead, so you still have a cost advantage. The problem, however, is that as more and more people are put in jail, there are fewer and fewer tax payers to subsidize your costs.
So that is why there will always be a need for wage slaves, and the prison slave economic model will never completely displace it.
There is something about slavery that excludes satire/sarcasm Benito .
Well maybe that’s just me .
I thought I should tell you this because I do enjoy reading your comments .
I’d like to know the names of the private companies that profit from prison labor. This is pretty clearly, IMO, slave labor.
On the other hand, when you’ve been convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison, why shouldn’t you have to do some cleaning and maintenance? Taxpayers foot the bill to keep you incarcerated. You should have to contribute to that.
Where I live, it’s pretty common to see prisoner work crews who clean up roadsides and empty lots. Some people I know express revulsion at this, but it’s my understanding that these crews are voluntary and prisoners welcome the opportunity to spend a day away from the tedium and horrors of prison life. They might even pick up some skills that could be useful on the outside.
It seems like there are a bunch of issues mixed up in this strike. If the strike ever does make it into the MSM, you’re apt to have an unsympathetic (or apathetic or ambiguous) audience.
Focus on naming the names of the companies that profit. People are pretty angry these days about corporate abuse, and this angle could stir up some real outrage.
Here you go :
http://usuncut.com/class-war/these-7-household-names-make-a-killing-off-of-the-prison-industrial-complex/
The problem with this stuff is that everywhere we’re lied to. Wal-Mart says it doesn’t use prison labor … then you find out that’s all bullshit. Martiori Farms says they stopped in 2012… but do you believe them? Barack Obama had eight years as the first black president, and never once did he tell the public that Jim Crow is still the dominant economic model of the land? So who the fuck?
No justice until the last speck of oil shale is squeezed, the last drop of methane rises, the last ocean boils, the last filthy microbe is forever cleansed from the face of the Earth. Let the one who made it try to do a DECENT job next time.
“So who the fuck?”
Jill Stein.
Vote for the the one you think is the best person . Any other criteria is indicative of insanity .
What it comes down to is simply
—–VOTE FOR WHO YOU THINK IS BEST “—–
That said ,, this ” Election ” ,, will be “Democratically/$$” decided .
I think you are urinating into a very strong headwind.
Now that’s more like it! Holy shit, totally disgusting. DISGUSTING!
Thanks for the link.
The California prison strike of 2013 over repressive solitary confinement torture had some lasting effects and changed prison officials behavior in California:
http://www.vice.com/read/how-california-prison-inmates-fought-to-change-solitary-confinement-and-won-902
Here’s a statement from that strike, worth reading, with relevance to American society as a whole:
As far as this current strike, it seems like common sense that prison labor should be voluntary and paid at the minimum wage rate.
Sentences to labor or “hard labor” are constitutional but are also long out of style.
Internal housekeeping chores are not illegal or unconstitutional as long as no coercion is involved. Let volunteers be rewarded with privileges and favorable reports.
Unless a prisoner has been explicitly sentenced to labor or “hard labor”, work for profit must also be both voluntary and paid at least minimum hourly wage without threat of clawbacks or seizure of savings for any reason.
No constitutional amendment is required if this is done, because it is explicitly conforming to the Constitution as it is actually written and not as slavers have chosen to interpret it.
As this is a Constitutional matter the President already has the authority to require that all slaves be explicitly sentenced to slavery, and no state may impose slavery without an explicit sentence of slavery.
Thank you, well said.
I laugh at this news as well. If I get arrested and put in jail for years, yeah, I’ll do slave labor. After all, I do get free healthcare, free dental, free room, 3 meals a day. Ridiculous to think its ok to do the crime, get caught, then sit on ya butt with all counts of your well-being taken care of.
Inmates are sentenced to incarceration, not incarceration plus slavery, beatings, and torture.
Even if the state pays just minimum wage to inmates the amount of money will be enormous.
You sound like someone who never has – nor wants to face the reality versus your imagination of it – had that free “healthcare”, free “dental”, free “room”, or 3 “meals” a day.
Try it.
Methinks that you are slightly deranged. Better get your head checked out.
Let me tell you about the three meals a day–they are shit you wouldn’t feed to a dog. Free health care. You’re stupid right. They don’t give a shit about your health and when your return home you are so physically damaged by the lack of health care you will be lucky if you can heal. Have a headache, menstrual cramps, broken bones sorry you can only receive over the counter pain medication via commissary if you have money in your account and the slave wages aren’t enough. So laugh all you want. It’s the conditions you moron. And the punishment is being removed from society not giving up your most basic constitutional and humab rights. And everyone who goes to prison is guilty. You my friend would be someone’s bottom and no the guards wouldn’t give two craps about your bleeding assholes.
I work in a prison in California with around 4,000 inmates and this is the first I have heard about this. At least in California, inmates have many more rights than they used to. I had an inmate laugh at me the other day and tell me that he has better health care than I do. Another had cataract surgery in one eye and is about to be paroled. He says he wants to come back to get the other eye done (says a lot about the sad state of our health care on the outside). We have inmates that regularly swallow needles and put pencils in their penis so they can be sent to an outside hospital for the food, morphine and the pretty girls they can look at. Just thought I would balance out your argument a bit :-)
Look up the Armstrong, Clark and Coleman Court decisions and that will tell you a lot about where inmates stand in regard to rights :-)
May be you too should put a pencil in your penis in order to obtain better medical treatment.
Wow! Your completely anecdotal experiences have really changed my mind! Thank you
Its called real life not anecdotal….I’m sure your key board warrior/commentary experience far outweighs the experiences of people who are actually out in the trenches. Also notice how I posted actual court cases that can be looked up by anyone so they can make up their own mind about the state of inmate rights in California. Contrast that with your knee jerk smart ### comment that adds nothing to the conversation. Job well done.
It’s your personal real-life experience, but it’s still anecdotal. You are citing a few examples out of 4,000 inmates where you work… And there are 2,000,000+ nationally and the conditions vary from state to state. Your experience doesn’t mean it’s the norm on a national level.
So your implying that you and every outside researcher has spoke with all 2,000,000 + incarcerated individuals. With your own words you have proved your theory to be more “anecdotal” than the person’s who has an applied theory inside that very controlled environment you are unreasonably attached to by your hyper liberal inquiry turned obsession. How about this become a corrections officers eat, sleep, work next to them “slaves” and you’ll actually find that the conditions they are afforded are actually a standard or two above their normal way of life. Judging by your snobby responses I’m assuming you are one of the Clinton type democrats that bear all the signs and fight all the fights but immediately called the police when a person or Persons of Color enter your neighborhood. The problem with being educated in a classroom is that far too often the student never applies the “theory” they are presented with, to a real world situation. Leaving their education rendered a theory and the obsession than becomes well idealistic views.
Was the guy with the cataract locked up from before Obamacare? Coming out of prison with no income he should be just about immediately eligible for Medicaid, and even if he is able to land a job that pays enough to disqualify him, he’ll then get either employer coverage or be eligible for Obamacare with probably still very deep subsidies.
That is, of course, unless he’s unlucky enough to get him second cataract under Donald Trump, in which case in prison or out he’d better get used to being blind. (Well, actually, there’s a sort of miracle salve called lanosterol that is similar to the cyclamen salves the ancient Romans used for the condition, but the odds he’ll hear about it are practically nil)
Either the inmate is clueless or you have stunningly bad health care — or you are lying.
Health care in the California prison system was so deficient (at least one unnecessary fatality per month), for so long, that it has been under federal receivership since October of 2005.
Yes..Doug..you are partially correct…health care was so bad that prisons in Cali were forced to improve…and rightly so. You shouldn’t have inmates crawling from a bus to their yard because they weren’t provided a wheelchair when they needed one. That’s downright criminal and led to the above mentioned court cases that forced necessary changes. I am not lying and have pretty good health care..the point I’m trying to make is that inmates do have more rights than you think and many unfortunately abuse those rights.
I’m much more worried about CDCR abusing prisoners and their rights than I am about prisoners abusing their right to decent healthcare.
The vast majority of those prisoners will be leaving your system and returning to the community. Their experience in prison is certain to be a major determinant of their attitudes toward the society that put them there and, thus, a significant factor in the equation that determines whether or not they will re-offend.
A smart society wouldn’t want to institutionalize practices that help produce bitter and angry ex-cons who will, sooner or later, be roaming the streets and parks again.
Both are a concern Doug. I’m in complete agreement with you. Many of the prisoners are just doing their time for doing something very stupid that they did. When It comes to abuse though, inmates are abused far more often by other inmates and its hard to put a stop to that because no one talks. The system is far from perfect, but I’d like to think its better than it once was. I am no way trying to defend a broken system, just trying to add my two cents.
I understand your position and I’m appreciative of your openness, unusual for an insider.
I also understand that prisoners abuse each other — in all sorts of ways from the subtle to the truly brutal — on a regular basis. And of course no one talks. That would be a dangerous violation of the code they are forced to live by.
However, it seems pretty clear, to me, that much of that abuse arises from reaction to the environments in which prisoners live. Rats in overcrowded cages behave, predictably, in very similar ways.
Also, of course, abuse by one’s peers is pretty likely to affect attitudes and behavior in the community upon release, just as is the case with abuse by people in authority.
It appears that we, as a society are both unwilling to spend the money required to build and operate humane systems of incarceration and that our culture of vengeance predisposes us to harsh treatment of people we deem worthy of incarceration. It’s fairly common for humans to feel and act like this, but it’s not universal.
Bastøy Prison
Pretty much spot on Doug..thanks for the rational and thoughtful discourse.
I treat quite a few of these prisoners. They get whatever they want and if they complain the doctors get punished. They get just what you would expect a population would get if they were medically uneducated and wanted as much treatment as possible and this doesn’t even include Insanity of the hepatitis C treatment. In this case the taxpayer is paying 3 to $400,000 per year for the medication in the prisoners go right back to tattooing themselves and Performing other acts and getting reinfected so it basically is a financing method for the big pharmaceutical companies like Gilead whose CEO gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year which is really made on the backs of publicly-funded hepatitis C treatment which is primarily provided to prisoners and drug users and heavily advertised on television.
Yes Felix..I too am a first responder in a TTA and the Harvoni is a travesty. It is $1000 a dose and the inmates will go right back to tattooing once they think they are free from Hep C. The biggest scam they do is claim suicidal ideation. We always get 4-5 inmates who say they want to kill themselves after a big football game or boxing match. They are at the losing end of the bet and now they have to pay up and don’t want to be killed when they cant. Some just simply wont pay up drug money they owe. This sets up a 1:1 suicide watch where the state gets to pay about $1000 a day for staff to come in and observe them to make sure they don’t follow through with their threat. Average cost to the taxpayer is about $10,000 by the time they are cleared to go back or get transferred to another institution. These guys are smart and know how to work the system to get what they want.
I wish you would go away and stick a pencil up your ass – your very dumb,and ignorant, uninformed ass that is.
Nice…this post was worthy of the Daily KOS or the Huffington Post. I defer to your superior intellect.
Going away would be an excellent option for you — one the vast majority of us here would appreciate.
I’m leery of this being taken too far here. On one hand, we all realize that Jim Crow labor camps, or the traditional punishment of breaking rocks, are abuses comparable to slavery. But on the other – is it “slavery” if prison officials demand that prisoners clean their cells, wash their clothes, wipe their asses? It would seem to me that the collective tasks of prison self-maintenance (“cook, clean, and work on maintenance and construction in the prisons themselves”) are more akin to the latter than the former.
So I think it would make more sense to focus our attention on the issue of the private companies, or any products leaving the prison that actually earn outside money. And one advantage of this is that – IF someone had a list handy of who these companies are, what products go out – we could find out from the outside if these products and services remain available as usual, or if they have been suspended. The exploitative aspect of this sector makes it vulnerable to our sight when we exploit it.
A man who steals to eat is not a thief. Humans are born with a God given entitlement to food and habitat. That this has been removed and withheld from us is wrong and places people in an environment of contention and vulnerability to trespass.
There are very few people who would not work to enjoy freedom, food and habitat in comfort which we should all be entitled to. It’s what the earth and life is for. This nonsense about competing for survival is the work of demons running a con on societies. Prisons are an advent of racist policies and corruption in the US. Were we genuine Christians and righteous about God’s will, there would nary be a prison.
You can take one’s time but not his labor. Refusing to be a slave will surely bankrupt the system. Refuse to fight wars and you bankrupt military nonsense. Refuse the currency and in stead trade – yep, chicken lady was right – and you bankrupt the print-to-loan-to-own wallstreet. Refuse to buy corporat goods and you bankrupt the crooked corporations. Refuse trade with israel and you bankrupt their resources to commit genocide. All of this is a matter of personal responsibility and karma. That we need so many prisons means we are on the wrong track.
Bankrupt the prison “system” and replace it with guaranteed life support and earned comfort as God’s will would have it.
free and clear is wallstreet’s fear
“Competing for survival?” What’s the point of working if the boss never promotes you but promotes the people who have been riding on your blood, sweat and tears?
The industrial revolution changed the way humans compete to survive. To think otherwise is unimaginable and unAmerican.
quote”You can take one’s time but not his labor. “unquote
Hahahaha.. says one who’s never questioned the 16th Amendment.
” A man who steals to eat is not a thief”. Where is your morality and ethics? God has given all humans a brain to use. Take care of yourself by working and producing yourself. What if someone stole from you?
Life is not about entitlement but independence and providing for yourself. Since the beginning of times people had to struggle and work hard to survive. People in the Nordic countries had to plan to have enough food to survive harsh winters.
Prisons are NOT an advent of racist and corruption in the US. Open up some history books.
Maybe the reason why some European countries have much lower incarceration rate is that they commit a lot less crime.
Since you are invoking God’s name so much, how about living by the ten commandments . If you treat others the way you want to be treated, with respect there would be a lot less people in prison.
what if those who are imprisoned for pot offences were forced to work for big pot growing corporations…wouldn’t that just be the shit! lol
An excellent piece. To fully appreciate what is happening in the prisons now the background info provided by The Politics of Incarceration is essential.
http://monthlyreview.org/2003/09/01/capitalism-and-incarceration-revisited/
“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.”
I actually laughed when I read that.
I’ve been trying to follow the strike, but to my disappointment, even online media that I’d consider independent stopped covering it on the 9th. This is literally the first update I’ve been able to find. Even a Google search hasn’t shown anything.
Google Twitter and Facebook have been actively suppressing topics and in some cases redirecting users to results they want to push. Welcome to 1984.
“I actually laughed when I read that.”
That seems to be your response to everything …
it’s probably better than crying every time you read something.
I think so also.