‘LARGEST US PRISON STRIKE OF ITS KIND’
Reprinted with Permission
On the official launch day, 24,000 inmates across at
least 12 states, including Alabama, Michigan, Texas,
South Carolina, and Florida, didn’t show up for
work. Following that initial strike, several inmates
carried on with the protests “on a rolling basis.”
Over time, however, the number of participant
strikers decreased. Currently, the “strike [is] apparently winding down,” but if the number of participants is officially confirmed, the FAM-led strike
could still be the largest of its kind in U.S. history.
And their actions may have helped to force officials
to act — at least on paper.
In Alabama, which has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the country, prison guards joined the
strikers, launching an “informal labor strike” to
bring the government’s attention to overcrowd ing
issues, which create conditions that make prisons
unsafe for both guards and prisoners. In order to
address this issue, the U.S. Department of Justice
(DOJ) responded, and on October 7, it released a
statement.
According to the DOJ, officials would begin a
“possibly unprecedented” investigation to determine
“whether prisoners are adequately protected from
physical harm and sexual abuse at the hands of other
prisoners; whether prisoners are adequately protected
from use of excessive force and staff sexual abuse by
correctional officers; and whether the prisons provide
sanitary, secure and safe living conditions.”
According to the IWOC , inmates across the
country “regularly engage in myriad demonstrations
of power on the inside,” launching labor and hunger
strikes that unfortunately receive little to no attention from the media.
The most recent campaigns have included the
“2010 Georgia prison strike, the massive rolling
California hunger strikes, [and] the Free Alabama
Movement’s 2014 work stoppage,” which, according
to the IWOC, “have gathered the most attention.”
But as the movement becomes more popular, it also
becomes more diverse. Now, IWOC adds, prisoners
at “immigrant detention centers, women’s prisons
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