What Prisoners Across America Are Really Striking About

In April, a seven-hour riot in a South Carolina left seven prisoners dead. While officials cited the violence as gang-related, the inmates maintain that it was the result of overcrowding and deliberately housing rival gangs together. Since then, Lee Correctional has been on lockdown, meaning that prisoners haven't been able to leave their cells in in nearly four months.

In response, prisoners across the country, using cell phones and outside organizers, planned a nationwide prison strike from August 21 to September 9, respectively the anniversaries of prison revolutionary George Jackson's death and the massive prison uprising at Attica in New York state. Attica forced the nation to acknowledge the horrid conditions of prison life, far beyond what could reasonably be considered just punishment, and reckon with it. Today's strikers warn that prison conditions have gotten so bad that another Attica is ripe to happen, and they have a myriad of demands to bring prisoner treatment in line with basic human rights: an end to overcrowding and racist sentencing laws, access to basic health care, restoration of voting rights, and an end to what they call "prison slavery."

The U.S. has over 1,800,000 people currently incarcerated. That's one-fourth of all the imprisoned people in the world, despite the fact that the U.S. has about 4 percent of the global population. The reasons for that disparity are largely economic: there's money to be made in aggressively over-policing communities and, as at least one sheriff admitted recently, there's a lot of free labor you can get out of nonviolent offenders.

In recent decades, private companies have shifted production for all sorts of industries into prisons. Pennsylvania boasts shampoo, mattresses, grills, picnic tables, and weightlifting machines. Louisiana, which until earlier this summer had the highest incarceration rate anywhere in the world (Oklahoma overtook it), offers office furniture like desks and conference tables, personalized embroidery, soap, metalworks, garments, and furniture restoration. If they're lucky, the prisoners will make a pittance for this work, like the California inmates who have been fighting fires for one dollar an hour. But it's common, and completely constitutional, for them to receive no pay at all.

Organizers originally expected strikes to happen in 17 states, though as of now there are only confirmations from four or five. But there are some huge problems with reporting on activity inside of prisons, first and foremost being that it's incredibly difficult to get information to people on the outside. Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, has been in touch with inmates in South Carolina and elsewhere for her extensive research into prison conditions and prison strikes. She spoke to GQ about prison strike, human rights abuses, and how inmate labor even hurts people on the outside.

GQ: What makes this particular prison protest unique? Why is it getting so much national attention?

I’m not sure anyone knows the answer. There are routinely prison protests that happen on a regular basis, but my sense of it is that two years ago when folks were protesting the terrible conditions on the inside, there was bipartisan criminal justice reform discussion in the air. And maybe for that reason, the media was loathe to really listen to the prisoners. After all, it seemed like all of this would be solved at the federal and state level by politicians. And then two years later we now understand how fleeting that moment of potential criminal justice reform was, and yet conditions inside remain terrible, arguably worse than they were two years ago. So when prisoners have spoken up in an even more deliberately public manner, I think folks are paying attention. Because there’s no illusion right now that things are going to be handled or bettered through the ballot box.

How have conditions inside prisons gotten worse?

When we think about prisons of the olden days, we imagine these very barbaric institutions that are dungeon-like and people are treated terribly inside of them. And somehow with modern prisons we have improved, and prisoners have some basic human rights and they have the ability to file lawsuits—and for all of those reasons, prisons, how bad can they be? In fact, in the wake of Attica, as we became the world’s largest prison nation and had more people behind bars than at any point in our history and more than any other country on the globe, what that has meant is that we have severe overcrowding. I mean, so badly that we have a problem with disease, sanitation, we have a problem with sufficient nutrition in prisons, we have a real problem with folks getting basic and adequate medical care, and in addition to all of that, we have a serious problem with too many people serving too much time in solitary confinement. We have more time in solitary than any physician would deem humane, and more than any other country, and we also have younger and younger people in these institutions serving life sentences. We have not only made our system so much larger but also so much more inhumane.

Prisoners cannot just go to the courts like they could in the 1960s because we have pretty much barred their ability to do that through something called the Prison Litigation Reform Act. And so their ability to tell us what’s happening and do anything about it is also clamped down, and thus [we have] these moments of periodic explosion.

Can you talk about the difficulties with organizing a prison strike like this? I imagine the logistics are hard but that it also invites some serious retribution?

It’s sort of ironic. On the one hand because of social media and because of really important prison publications like Prison Legal News and the Bay View, there is a lot of communication between prisoners—also because of cell phones that prison officials will assure you are a problem because they’re contraband. In fact, they’re a problem because they can’t profit off them, and because it is via these cell phones that folks communicate to people on the outside the terrible conditions on the inside. And so communication between prisoners is actually pretty good, but the costs of rebelling are so high, the retaliation is so severe—and that is everything from having your visitation revoked so you can’t see your children anymore, to having time added on to your sentence to literally physical abuse to solitary confinement to lockdowns.

Do you have a sense of what the public perception is toward prison strikes in general?

There’s always the core group of Americans that feel pretty strongly that if you commit the crime, you do the time, and that if prisoners are forced to work, there’s nothing wrong with that. They have committed an offense and therefore pretty much anything that happens to them is fine. But I also think there’s an increasing number of citizens who have been made newly aware that our constitution allows for slavery as long as someone has been convicted of a crime, and that’s troubling. Not only are they not getting the money to help offset the poverty that their children at home are placed in, or to help them have some meager nest egg when they leave prison, but neither are the folks on the outside who were doing those jobs. When we have prisoners clean up the BP oil spill or fight fires or make Anderson flooring, those are jobs that folks on the outside aren’t doing. Neither folks on the outside nor on the inside are getting living wages, and that’s exploitative.

I think that when people imagine prison labor, they think of something public service-y, like cleaning up litter on the highway.

Right, one thing that’s important to understand is there’s different kinds of prison labor. There is the kind that’s always existed, like making the license plates to sell to other state institutions like the DMV. But one of the things that happened with mass incarceration was businesses that had been largely barred from accessing prisoners as laborers—thanks to regulations put in place during the New Deal—worked very, very hard to overhaul those regulations. That was important because they recognized that when you have almost 2 million people in the system, that’s a captive labor force that you can exploit.

So over the last 30 years, we have not just the making of lockers or license plates for other institutions, but for the first time since the end of the Civil War we have private companies being able to use prisoners rather than workers. That’s the kind of distinction that folks don’t really understand.

Do you have a sense of how big an industry prison labor represents?

Well that’s a wonderful question, and it is very disturbing that I can’t answer it. And the reason I can’t answer it is because despite being public, despite being paid for by the citizenry through taxation, we don’t have any particular information about what goes on inside of prisons, neither the poor conditions nor exactly what the impact of using prisoners as labor has been. So unless it’s a very specific contract, called a PIE Contract, under which that labor is performed, we don’t have any sense of what the impact of it is, and I can tell you that legislators who contact me are deeply bothered by this and have been pushing for some kind of accountability in prisons to have an answer to your question. So unless they’re very specific formal contracts, we don’t know what the impact of this is, and even if we did, what it would still not account for is that the very existence of this captive labor force for private industry itself undoubtedly causes what we call a wage dampening effect on outside labor, that is to say you wanna be paid ten dollars an hour but if the company could get that labor for two dollars an hour in a prison, that in itself dampens wages on the outside.

You mentioned public prisons just now. A lot of talk about criminal justice reform is focused on private, for-profit prisons, which is understandable. But are the conditions in public prisons any better?

It’s much more immediately interesting to people to talk about private prisons because it is so shocking—it really rubs us the wrong way that a company could profit off of human misery. The reality is, private prisons are about seven percent of all prisons, and the most serious problems are the federal prisons and particularly the state prisons. Those are the prisons that we are ostensibly in charge of—we do have a role to play in them and we can weigh in on how they function. And those prisons are run abysmally. All prisons are different, but many have serious, serious human rights violations in them. And everything in them has been privatized. As I’ve often said, everything from tampons to tasers to telephones, everything is privatized within the state institutions. So the problem is privatization of criminal justice functions, plural, and penal functions, and the state prisons are where the majority of Americans end up, and for that matter the county and local jails. So private prisons are an issue, but the real glaring injustice is in the public institutions over which we should have oversight.

What sort of human rights abuses are we talking about? And is there anyone that prisoners can go to for some kind of oversight?

It very much depends on the state, and some are better than others. Because of Attica, for example, there are some pretty extraordinary oversight organizations in the state of New York that come out of that period. But in many states there are virtually none. And I can tell you that it is appalling what is going on in South Carolina in the wake of the riot there—I know this because I hear from the folks inside, they send me videos and tell me what’s happening. These guys have been on lockdown since April, not able to leave their cells, fed when people feel like showing up, with food in these cold stryofoam containers twice a day, and there’s nobody there. Nobody monitoring them, nobody calling attention to it. Unfortunately we have a Justice Department now [that doesn't consider] prisoner rights of central importance. And without the Justice Department, without a civil rights case, without federal attention, at the state level the prison superintendents can run things basically however they want to.