They’re in prison and on strike
Nov 2, 2016 16:22:13 #
More inmates protest dismal conditions by refusing to work or eat.
BY JAWEED KALEEM
In his 29 years in prison, David Bonner has mopped floors, cooked hot dogs in the cafeteria and, most recently, cut sheets of aluminum into Alabama license plates.
The last job paid $2 a day — enough to buy a bar of soap at the commissary or make a short phone call.
“This is slavery,” said Bonner, who is 51 and serving a life sentence for murder. “We’re forced to work these jobs and we get barely anything.”
He was speaking on a cellphone smuggled into his 8-by-12-foot cell in Alabama’s Holman Correctional Facility, where he and dozens of other inmates were on strike.
They’re among a growing national movement of prisoners who have staged work stoppages or hunger strikes this fall to protest dismal wages, abusive guards, overcrowding and poor healthcare, among other grievances.
Prisoners’ rights activists say the coordinated effort is one of the largest prison protests in modern history, drawing in at least 20,000 inmates in at least 24 prisons in 23 states.
State officials have confirmed inmate protests in Michigan, South Carolina and Florida since early September.
In California, at least 300 inmates have been involved in hunger strikes at jails in Santa Clara and Merced counties.
In several states, including Virginia, Ohio and Texas, officials have denied claims by activists that strikes have occurred.
Alabama officials acknowledged the protest at Holman prison, 52 miles northeast of Mobile, though they said it was limited to a one-day strike by 60 inmates who worked in the kitchen and license plate plant — far less extensive than the 10-plus days in September and October that activists described.
“I know there are inmates who are saying there is this big, wide work stoppage, but that is just not the case,” said Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton.
Horton denied inmate reports that the prison had been on lockdown in response to strikes, which he described as peaceful. But he also said he understood some of the prisoners’ complaints about living conditions.
Holman is “overcrowded and understaffed,” Horton said, adding that state officials were working to fix the problem.
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who visited Holman this year, has described the state corrections system as being “in crisis” and has pushed for funding to build more prisons.
Known by inmates as “the slaughterhouse” because of its death row, Holman prison is considered one of the most violent facilities in the South.
Nearly 1,000 inmates occupy a space built for half that many. Tensions have been escalating throughout the year.
In March, riots broke out. In September, a prisoner stabbed a corrections officer to death. In October, after an inmate committed suicide, prisoners said guards had ignored their screams to come and help the man.
Amid the protests, the U.S. Justice Department announced last month that it was beginning a civil rights investigation into prisons across Alabama to determine “whether prisoners are adequately protected from physical harm and sexual abuse at the hands of other prisoners” and “from use of excessive force and staff sexual abuse by correctional officers.”
Activists celebrated. “I’ve been doing this work for four years, and we’ve never gotten this kind of attention to prisoners’ rights,” said Azzurra Crispino, an activist based in Austin, Texas. “There’s a momentum.”
Crispino is a spokesperson for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee , a group that is part of the Industrial Workers of the World union and has played a key role in coordinating the protests.
It has connected prisoners to one another and outside activists, and rallied activists to flood prisons with letters and phone calls on behalf of inmates.
Most states have a prisoner rights organization based at one of their major prisons. The Free Alabama Movement, for example, is at the Holman facility.
Leaders in each prison have used contraband smartphones to coordinate work stoppages and broadcast their complaints and demands through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs. Some inmates have reported being transferred to other prisons or confined in cells as retaliation for organizing.
Organizers said that although the labor strikes had included just a sliver of the nation’s 2.2 million prisoners, they stand the best chance of spurring change.
Putting prisoners to work is standard practice, but many states don’t pay them, pointing out that although the 13th Amendment of the Constitution outlaws “involuntary servitude,” it makes an exception for work done “as a punishment for crime.”
Correction officials say prison labor gives inmates job skills and a sense of independence, a view supported by some studies. Many prisoners say they wouldn’t mind working but want more pay and protections on par with jobs outside prison.
The work goes far beyond maintaining the prisons or producing goods for the government. Prison labor often benefits private enterprises.
According to prisoners, the strikes this fall included inmates at the Perry Correctional Institution in South Carolina who work without pay for a furniture company that operates a factory there. In an interview, Bryan Stirling, who heads the state’s department of corrections, denied there was a strike.
Until it bowed to pressure from prisoner rights activists last year, the grocery store chain Whole Foods bought tilapia and goat cheese from a supplier that raised its animals using inmate labor in Colorado.
The Florida Department of Corrections website says that inmates working in jobs serving various state agencies saved residents $45 million in taxes in 2014. “Inmates performed almost 5.4 million hours of work in our communities, valued at more than $76 million,” the website reads.
By some estimates, prison workers save individual states and U.S. companies billions a year in wages.
“The prison system right now is just a big old business,” said Carlos Sanders, a 53-year-old death row inmate who goes by the name Siddique Abdullah Hasan and helps lead the Free Ohio Movement from the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown.
“We’ve tried hunger strikes and filing grievances with courts,” said Sanders, who entered prison for robbery and was subsequently convicted of helping plan the murder of a corrections officer during a 1993 uprising. “But since super-economic exploitation is what keeps these prisons alive, we decided a labor strike is the way to go.”
The strikes began on Sept. 9, timed to the 45th anniversary of the deadliest prison uprising in modern American history — a five-day standoff over living conditions at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York that left 33 prisoners and 10 guards dead.
The issue of prisoner rights has periodically garnered public attention over the years, fueled most recently by debates over race and justice that have gripped the country.
A 2010 work stoppage involving thousands of prisoners in Georgia was quickly followed by similar strikes in North Carolina, Washington, Illinois and Virginia.
Three years later, 30,000 California inmates refused food — some of them for close to two months — to protest the state’s use of long-term solitary confinement.
But the strikes this fall have a breadth that has seldom been seen. That can only translate to increased awareness for a cause that has rarely enjoyed much sympathy from the public.
“All of us realize this is a long and protracted struggle,” Crispino said. “From our perspective, the fact that a strike occurred at all is a win.”
One recent question for activists inside and outside prison is where guards stand on the push for reforms. They spend more time with inmates than anyone else and have a close view of prison conditions. They also naturally have a strong interest in maintaining peace at their workplace.
When nine guards at the Holman prison didn’t show up for a work shift in September, inmates took it as support for their strike.
“They tired of the administration playing games with their lives,” tweeted Robert Earl Council, a 42-year-old death row inmate and Free Alabama Movement co-founder who goes by the name Kinetik Justice.
But the guards have yet to make their stance public, and corrections officials said the lack of attendance didn’t mean they were joining striking prisoners.
Last week, according to prison officials, an inmate used an unidentified homemade weapon to attack a guard, who was slashed across the head. He is expected to recover.
“They support us,” Council said. “But they also are afraid of being hurt themselves.” jaweed.kaleem
@ latimes.com
AMY TUR
ACTIVISTS show support for prisoners on a hunger strike at Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
AL BEHRMAN Associated Press
“THE PRISON SYSTEM right now is just a big old business,” said Carlos Sanders, a 53-year-old death row inmate who helps lead the Free Ohio Movement.
Alabama Department of Corrections
DAVID BONNER went on strike from his job at Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama. “This is slavery,” he said.
BY JAWEED KALEEM
In his 29 years in prison, David Bonner has mopped floors, cooked hot dogs in the cafeteria and, most recently, cut sheets of aluminum into Alabama license plates.
The last job paid $2 a day — enough to buy a bar of soap at the commissary or make a short phone call.
“This is slavery,” said Bonner, who is 51 and serving a life sentence for murder. “We’re forced to work these jobs and we get barely anything.”
He was speaking on a cellphone smuggled into his 8-by-12-foot cell in Alabama’s Holman Correctional Facility, where he and dozens of other inmates were on strike.
They’re among a growing national movement of prisoners who have staged work stoppages or hunger strikes this fall to protest dismal wages, abusive guards, overcrowding and poor healthcare, among other grievances.
Prisoners’ rights activists say the coordinated effort is one of the largest prison protests in modern history, drawing in at least 20,000 inmates in at least 24 prisons in 23 states.
State officials have confirmed inmate protests in Michigan, South Carolina and Florida since early September.
In California, at least 300 inmates have been involved in hunger strikes at jails in Santa Clara and Merced counties.
In several states, including Virginia, Ohio and Texas, officials have denied claims by activists that strikes have occurred.
Alabama officials acknowledged the protest at Holman prison, 52 miles northeast of Mobile, though they said it was limited to a one-day strike by 60 inmates who worked in the kitchen and license plate plant — far less extensive than the 10-plus days in September and October that activists described.
“I know there are inmates who are saying there is this big, wide work stoppage, but that is just not the case,” said Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton.
Horton denied inmate reports that the prison had been on lockdown in response to strikes, which he described as peaceful. But he also said he understood some of the prisoners’ complaints about living conditions.
Holman is “overcrowded and understaffed,” Horton said, adding that state officials were working to fix the problem.
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who visited Holman this year, has described the state corrections system as being “in crisis” and has pushed for funding to build more prisons.
Known by inmates as “the slaughterhouse” because of its death row, Holman prison is considered one of the most violent facilities in the South.
Nearly 1,000 inmates occupy a space built for half that many. Tensions have been escalating throughout the year.
In March, riots broke out. In September, a prisoner stabbed a corrections officer to death. In October, after an inmate committed suicide, prisoners said guards had ignored their screams to come and help the man.
Amid the protests, the U.S. Justice Department announced last month that it was beginning a civil rights investigation into prisons across Alabama to determine “whether prisoners are adequately protected from physical harm and sexual abuse at the hands of other prisoners” and “from use of excessive force and staff sexual abuse by correctional officers.”
Activists celebrated. “I’ve been doing this work for four years, and we’ve never gotten this kind of attention to prisoners’ rights,” said Azzurra Crispino, an activist based in Austin, Texas. “There’s a momentum.”
Crispino is a spokesperson for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee , a group that is part of the Industrial Workers of the World union and has played a key role in coordinating the protests.
It has connected prisoners to one another and outside activists, and rallied activists to flood prisons with letters and phone calls on behalf of inmates.
Most states have a prisoner rights organization based at one of their major prisons. The Free Alabama Movement, for example, is at the Holman facility.
Leaders in each prison have used contraband smartphones to coordinate work stoppages and broadcast their complaints and demands through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs. Some inmates have reported being transferred to other prisons or confined in cells as retaliation for organizing.
Organizers said that although the labor strikes had included just a sliver of the nation’s 2.2 million prisoners, they stand the best chance of spurring change.
Putting prisoners to work is standard practice, but many states don’t pay them, pointing out that although the 13th Amendment of the Constitution outlaws “involuntary servitude,” it makes an exception for work done “as a punishment for crime.”
Correction officials say prison labor gives inmates job skills and a sense of independence, a view supported by some studies. Many prisoners say they wouldn’t mind working but want more pay and protections on par with jobs outside prison.
The work goes far beyond maintaining the prisons or producing goods for the government. Prison labor often benefits private enterprises.
According to prisoners, the strikes this fall included inmates at the Perry Correctional Institution in South Carolina who work without pay for a furniture company that operates a factory there. In an interview, Bryan Stirling, who heads the state’s department of corrections, denied there was a strike.
Until it bowed to pressure from prisoner rights activists last year, the grocery store chain Whole Foods bought tilapia and goat cheese from a supplier that raised its animals using inmate labor in Colorado.
The Florida Department of Corrections website says that inmates working in jobs serving various state agencies saved residents $45 million in taxes in 2014. “Inmates performed almost 5.4 million hours of work in our communities, valued at more than $76 million,” the website reads.
By some estimates, prison workers save individual states and U.S. companies billions a year in wages.
“The prison system right now is just a big old business,” said Carlos Sanders, a 53-year-old death row inmate who goes by the name Siddique Abdullah Hasan and helps lead the Free Ohio Movement from the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown.
“We’ve tried hunger strikes and filing grievances with courts,” said Sanders, who entered prison for robbery and was subsequently convicted of helping plan the murder of a corrections officer during a 1993 uprising. “But since super-economic exploitation is what keeps these prisons alive, we decided a labor strike is the way to go.”
The strikes began on Sept. 9, timed to the 45th anniversary of the deadliest prison uprising in modern American history — a five-day standoff over living conditions at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York that left 33 prisoners and 10 guards dead.
The issue of prisoner rights has periodically garnered public attention over the years, fueled most recently by debates over race and justice that have gripped the country.
A 2010 work stoppage involving thousands of prisoners in Georgia was quickly followed by similar strikes in North Carolina, Washington, Illinois and Virginia.
Three years later, 30,000 California inmates refused food — some of them for close to two months — to protest the state’s use of long-term solitary confinement.
But the strikes this fall have a breadth that has seldom been seen. That can only translate to increased awareness for a cause that has rarely enjoyed much sympathy from the public.
“All of us realize this is a long and protracted struggle,” Crispino said. “From our perspective, the fact that a strike occurred at all is a win.”
One recent question for activists inside and outside prison is where guards stand on the push for reforms. They spend more time with inmates than anyone else and have a close view of prison conditions. They also naturally have a strong interest in maintaining peace at their workplace.
When nine guards at the Holman prison didn’t show up for a work shift in September, inmates took it as support for their strike.
“They tired of the administration playing games with their lives,” tweeted Robert Earl Council, a 42-year-old death row inmate and Free Alabama Movement co-founder who goes by the name Kinetik Justice.
But the guards have yet to make their stance public, and corrections officials said the lack of attendance didn’t mean they were joining striking prisoners.
Last week, according to prison officials, an inmate used an unidentified homemade weapon to attack a guard, who was slashed across the head. He is expected to recover.
“They support us,” Council said. “But they also are afraid of being hurt themselves.” jaweed.kaleem
@ latimes.com
AMY TUR
ACTIVISTS show support for prisoners on a hunger strike at Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
AL BEHRMAN Associated Press
“THE PRISON SYSTEM right now is just a big old business,” said Carlos Sanders, a 53-year-old death row inmate who helps lead the Free Ohio Movement.
Alabama Department of Corrections
DAVID BONNER went on strike from his job at Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama. “This is slavery,” he said.
Nov 2, 2016 16:32:23 #
true enough prisons are not a nice place to live ........tough shit do the crime--do the time.....you don't like, do not commit the crime again, or back you go ...............seem to me this country is way to soft on criminals already.. seems to me sheriff joe is right. "this is not a day care, this is a PRISON"
Nov 2, 2016 16:35:52 #
Progressive One wrote:
More inmates protest dismal conditions by refusing... (show quote)
You should send this to hellary. She would appreciate the heads-up.
Nov 2, 2016 19:27:17 #
Big Bass wrote:
You should send this to hellary. She would appreciate the heads-up.
Save yourself some trouble and go ahead and accept the fact she will be your POTUS-elect this month.
Nov 3, 2016 06:30:12 #
Progressive One wrote:
More inmates protest dismal conditions by refusing... (show quote)
Not getting paid? That's ridiculous!! Three hits and a cot. Cable TV, recreation rooms, gyms, etc. it costs a tone of money to house a prisoner, depending on the source you quote, and where the prison is, estimates are anywhere from 20k to upwards of 50k a year a piece. Where do you think this "pay" they get is coming from? It comes from the people that go to work every day and pay taxes. Prisoners rights? They have the right to shut their mouths and do what they are told. They need to be making small rocks out of big ones 12 hrs a day six days a week. They had the right to not commit the crimes that put them where they are. Hunger strike? Sounds good to me. Less tax money to spend feeding them.
Nov 3, 2016 09:56:47 #
Progressive One wrote:
Save yourself some trouble and go ahead and accept the fact she will be your POTUS-elect this month.
Pathetic
Opportunist who's a
Totally
Unscrupulous
Siren.
Nov 3, 2016 13:01:47 #
gaconservative74 wrote:
Not getting paid? That's ridiculous!! Three hits a... (show quote)
I should have known better..........
Nov 3, 2016 13:08:52 #
Progressive One wrote:
I should have known better..........
You are correct, you should have known better than to post some jibberish such as this and expect anyone to take it serious.
Nov 3, 2016 13:12:37 #
gaconservative74 wrote:
You are correct, you should have known better than to post some jibberish such as this and expect anyone to take it serious.
No...I should have known better to expect intelligent answers that address the issues raised in the article as opposed to people talking about how they feel about something like children do.......sorry about my high expectations....as I said....I should have known better............
Nov 3, 2016 15:05:06 #
Progressive One wrote:
No...I should have known better to expect intelligent answers that address the issues raised in the article as opposed to people talking about how they feel about something like children do.......sorry about my high expectations....as I said....I should have known better............
Ok, how bout this, I feel we have a lot of more important things to worry about than the "plight" of the oppressed prisoner. What about the over taxation of the middle class, what about the over one million babies aborted every year in this country. What about the complete collapse of the family unit? What about the trashing of the us constitution? Man, that's my point. Why would any decent hard working American be worried about the oppression of someone who chose to completely disregard the law and now whines about it because they have to work little bit and don't get paid "enough". I feel like they shoulda thought of that before they decided law doesn't apply.
Nov 3, 2016 15:45:34 #
gaconservative74 wrote:
Ok, how bout this, I feel we have a lot of more im... (show quote)
what about all of it? Incarceration is their punishment...not none of the right's sadistic bullshit.........on top of that.........
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