September 12, 2016

Inmates strike over working conditions

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

You read the headline correctly - inmates strike - yep - over working conditions. For real.

I know what you're thinking. Why the hell would they strike? They're in prison - they don't work. Well, maybe not in your lovely liberal lefty weichei country, but the Prison-Industrial complex is big business around the globe. Even in the US - and when something is big business in the land of big business, then that thing is big, big business.

The incarcerated-labour nexus in the US has been described as the Prison-Industrial complex, a saving grace for doomed souls, and now, probably correctly, as slave labour. Those people aren't going anywhere, after all.

The statistics on incarcerated people on the US are fragmented and contradictory. Some studies don't include re-offenders, others do - and some results just don't include certain institutions as prisons. Sigh.

The Guardian reports:

"Inmates from several states, who had bound together with the help of activists and organizing groups, aimed the national strikes – which had been in the making for several months – against what they said amounted to slave labor conditions amid mass incarceration in the country."

Recent estimates suggest that up to 1% of the total adult population of the country is imprisoned. Private prisons therefore have a large labour force it can employ, or exploit, to produce goods which then enter the consumer market. The wages paid to prison workers are inconceivably low - no more than 60 cents per hour, if they are paid at all.

The planned strikes should take place this Friday - where prisoners participating in the strikes will down tools. It is a Gandhi-esque move in an increasingly hostile prison system - and prisoner death rates are very high. Let's hope it works!