Prison Strike Retaliation
The current nationwide prison strike is getting more press than the one in 2016.
Details of the nationwide prison strike, now in its third day, are gradually emerging from institutions where inmates are staging hunger strikes, refusing to work, and participating in sit-ins to protest unjust sentencing laws, poor living conditions, and the continued existence of slavery within the nation's carceral system.The strike began on Tuesday, with organizers reporting that incarcerated Americans in 17 states had pledged to join the action.
According to a statement from organizers including Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), at least six direct actions had taken place at U.S. prisons in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Washington, and California.
The strike has already spread internationally, with prisoners at Burnside Jail in Halifax, Nova Scotia releasing a statement saying, "We are being warehoused as inmates, not treated as human beings" and expressing solidarity with incarcerated Americans.
For obvious reasons it's hard to determine how many are participating in the strike.
To appreciate the risks these prisoners are taking, consider the costs some are paying.
But only three days into the strike, inmates are already facing backlash from correction officers.Two Florida incarcerated men have been sentenced this week to 18 months of “close management,” a Florida legal term for a kind of solitary confinement, according to IWOC spokesperson and organizer Karen Smith. A third inmate was placed in “disciplinary confinement,” a slightly lighter sentence, Smith said.
Julius Smith, a 30-year-old man serving 20 years at Santa Rosa Correctional Institution was sentenced to close management on Wednesday, for alleged participation in organizing the strike.
...
Ezzial Williams, an inmate serving 10 years at Union Correctional Institution, was also placed in close management in the weeks before the strike began for “inciting a riot” related to the protest. ...A third inmate, Corey Sutton, a 21-year-old housed at Franklin Correctional Institution, was sentenced to 58 years at the age of 14 for a sexual battery charge he says he didn’t commit. Tuesday, Sutton was placed in “confinement,” for charges of alleged gang activity and participation in the strike.
The ability of prisoners to organize and participate in the strike is also being hampered by authorities.
Already, IWOC has confirmed five Florida prisons on lockdown. Another Florida prison, Smith said, has not declared lockdown status, but is limiting inmate movement in parts of the facility. A family member reported to IWOC that inmates are being held in a shower.In a press release Wednesday, representatives from Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and IWOC confirmed additional strike activity in prisons ranging from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Washington, and California, as well as solidarity actions in 21 American cities, and several foreign nations, including Germany and Palestine.
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The Prison-Industrial Complex and Never-Ending Cycle
A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
Missed the school to prison pipeline
with judges in on the act, but maybe that's for another graphic. Prison for profit is almost as bad as wars for profits. When did the for profits prisons start?
It's not just the obscene profits they make from incarcerating people, but then they make prisoners pay for phone calls and now emails as well as things like toiletries and other things that prisons should have to provide. America gets more fucked up daily. Punishment for protesting slave wages is a human rights violation. Solitary confinement is torture. This country circles the toilet faster each day.
A leftist is someone with morally correct politics. A liberal is someone who wants to feel morally correct w/o ever putting themselves at odds with power or costing themselves opportunities or experiencing the uncomfortable emotions that truth causes.
We northern NY Libtards
are going to be in Potsdam at the Post Office tomorrow (Sun. 26) at high noon to draw attention to the prison strike. If you're in the neighborhood stop by!
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
None in Tx yet despite most Tx prisons have NO air conditioning
I know lots of people up North have no air conditioning, but it's going to feel like 100 degrees (in the shade) here tomorrow. The wind feels like a blow dryer. At least I can go inside, but prisoners are in boxes with little to no air flow, and no fans. To me, this is "cruel" punishment, and I don't care if they're guilty.
From 2016:
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2016/06/29/70-texas-prisons-ac-cha...
A law suit that cost tax payers $7M for the idiot AG to fight was recently won by the prisoners, allowing for ac in one single prison. I'm no commercial HVAC expert, but I'm thinking it's cheaper to just install the units and stop being cruel assholes.
Only 78 more to go, at $7M each = $546M PLUS the cost of the actual cooling units and everything else that goes with them, installation and maintenance.
Do prisons up North have heat?
"Homeless veteran dies in overheated Rikers Island cell"
NYC summers are often brutal.
There's just too many of these heartbreaking stories.
(emphasis mine)
"The City is investigating." Imagine the conversations involved in that, the stonewalling, the coverups, the agreed-upon slap-on-the-wrists.
This mentally ill Veteran dies the most excruciating, ignoble death - at the hands of the state - while he's imprisoned for trespassing.
Any more words fail me.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
My god, he baked to death!
I'm flabbergasted! How could guards not be affected too, and put a stop to it? My god.
I guess they do have heat in prisons up North. I never would have imagined this could happen, except for "smart" house thermostats. They give me the creeps for this very reason, which also makes me wonder if this incident was purposeful.
Was very pleased to see scrawled at the foot of the Roosevelt
Island Bridge this morning while out for a bicycle ride with my son:
I posed us and took a picture.
This country is a disgrace in so many ways. The conditions in prisons just seem to get worse and worse, while there are more and more people locked up, far exceeding anywhere on earth per capita.
Attica should never be forgotten either. Such a terrible and avoidable tragedy, ordered by heartless bureaucrats in suits and carried out by heartless, vindictive men in uniforms with guns.
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
#RememberKaliefBrowder, a monstrous tragedy that we all still have blood on our hands from.
And if you want a film that goes inside how utterly corrupt the whole system is, from cops to courts to corrections, watch The Central Park 5.
How many lives are being deprived and wasted, right at this very moment, in prisons all across the country, due to official policy of racial profiling, imagined crimes, set ups, falsified information, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, corrupt DA's and judges, etc etc? There's a litany of filthy, dirty cops and detectives who have covered up and fabricated cases to send so many completely innocent men to long prison sentences. Just thinking of that makes my blood boil.
None of this will get the MSM attention it deserves. They just don't fucking care. (Neo) Librul MSNBC, led by Rachel Madcow and the Democrats she protects, have Russia Tourette's. CNN might as well be the National Enquirer, and Fox is National Fascist News.
At the end of the day these people are human beings, many of whom are victims of a completely out of control, for-profit and racist system (read Chris Hedges' moving piece about teaching inmates). But we've been conditioned to dismiss them as criminals who got what they deserved, while venerating the successful Businessman in a 3-piece suit - when the image of the kind of criminal that will more probably impact your life the most and should be ingrained commensurately would that of a Wall St banker. But the media pounds these stereotypes over and over again, with every top of the hour Evening News tv broadcast across the country beginning with some grainy surveillance b&w surveillance video footage of a black man in a hood stealing a box of cookies, until white America just turns a blind eye to injustice.
There's no talk of rehabilitation here, or programs to get prisoners acclimated back into society. We still like to view our American selves as a punitive and falsely puritanical people. The more I think of it the more diabolical it appears.
I hope these prisoners get the dignity they deserve. But they're up against all this. Fact is this country as a whole has been trained to just not care. Those whose families have been turned upside down though, they know just how evil it all is.
We need more folks like Eugene Debs to stand up for what is right. “While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
In solidarity...
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
I'll never forget what was done to Kalief Browder
I'll never be able to forget his story. Tragic doesn't even begin to describe it.