Prisoners, Say No To Being Used As Slave Labor and Withhold Their Labor Power In Nationwide Strike with Cole Dorsey and Michael Forest, Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee Industrial Workers of the World
Prisons can t run without inmates, in more ways than one. Prisoners wash floors, work in the laundries and kitchens, and provide a large amount of the labor that keeps their facilities running. In return, they earn pennies per hour or even no pay at all. That s sparking what may have been the largest prison strike yet as inmates across the country stopped working on Sept. 9. The strikers are calling for an end to forced labor and what they call prison slavery . And, it s no coincidence that they picked Sept. 9 as the strike date: It was the 45th anniversary of the Attica rebellion, when prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York demanded their rights in one of the most significant civil rights occurrences of the century.
"I'M BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT `U.S.A.' STANDS FOR THE UNDERPRIVILEGED SLAVES OF AMERICA" wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, particularly African-American prisoners, who have used the language and narrative of slavery to describe the conditions of their imprisonment. In the year 2000, as the punishment industry becomes a leading employer and producer for the U.S. "state," and as private prison and "security" corporations bargain to control the profits of this traffic in human degradation, the analogies between slavery and prison abound.
produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg
please notify us if you plan to broadcast this program- knash@igc.org
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