Prison Strike

Because it's not getting enough national news coverage, for today I'm reprinting a Twitter thread on the three-day-old national prisoners' strike, by Robyn Pennachia, a freelance journalist.

So we're three days into the largest prison strike in U.S. history. Now, the prisoners are asking for a lot of very important things, having to do with shitty conditions and institutional racism. But their primary focus is LABOR and how little they get paid.

Partly because it's modern-day slavery, but also because it affects everything else.

You see, back in the ’90s, a conservative lobbyist group *representing business interests,* the American Legislative Exchange Council, took a real big interest in criminal justice legislation and started pushing for a number of changes to the system.

The first two they pushed for were Three Strikes laws and Truth in Sentencing laws (aka no parole). Both of these laws, as we know, lead to the U.S. having the largest prison population in the United States.

But why was this lobbied for by an organization representing BUSINESSES?

Because they were also pushing for another law — a law that would allow private businesses to use prison labor. Previously, this was not allowed. Prison labor was relegated to labor for the state, only — thus, printing license plates.

They were also required to be paid the prevailing wage in the state for their labor, minus room and board in states that charge inmates room and board.

Because of ALEC's Prison Industries Act, this is no longer the case.

It's now set up so that rather than going to room and board, prisons are allowed to garnish wages and put that money into "private sector prison industry expansion accounts." That $$$ is then used to attract more businesses and reimburse prisons for the "cost" of prison labor.

So basically, what ALEC did was...

STEP ONE: Increase the amount of prisoners in the system
STEP TWO: Make it harder to get out of prison
STEP THREE: PROFIT!!!

Were we to eliminate the ability of private prisons and businesses to profit off of what is essentially free labor, the "demand" for more prisoners would go down. The "need" for shitty policies that send and keep people in prison, would go down.

THAT is why it is important.

While we're on it, here are some big companies that currently use prison labor: Whole Foods, AT&T, McDonalds, Victoria's Secret, BP, Aramark, and Walmart.

 Here are a few news stories about the strike:

• The Guardian
• Democracy Now!
• NewsOne