Even if an inmate's sentence is not oppressively long, their treatment while incarcerated can still constitute subhuman treatment. Prisons are not medical facilities, but they regularly are forced to deal with mental health problems and care for elderly and terminally ill inmates. Food, if it's even edible, usually lacks enough nutrition for inmates' health to not deteriorate. Plus, with a lack of opportunities to see family, read, or gain skill sets, inmates are placed in buildings which lack any resemblance of the civilized world.
“The national prison strike that swept headlines formally ended Sept. 9. Yet in many ways, advocates say, the work has just begun. Some prisoners are still engaging in protests, while others will face retaliation and need support. And the groups that helped organize the strike hope to use its momentum to push for lasting change.“
The Appeal
September 25, 2018
Read More“‘That’s because it was a peaceful strike,’ said Dr. Breea Willingham, a criminal justice professor at State University of New York at Plattsburgh. ‘If people were getting killed inside those prisons, people would have been all over it.’ The relative lack of attention to the strike underlined the continued indifference to widespread claims of abuse and inhumane conditions inside the nation’s prison system, observers and prison activists told The Crime Report.“
The Crime Report
September 11, 2018
Read More“Incarcerated people at Lee Correctional continued to be held in conditions of solitary confinement following the riot, allegedly for safety reasons. One man held at Lee claimed that the officials were actually using solitary confinement as a method to prevent participation in the widely publicized nationwide strike. “
Solitary Watch
September 10, 2018
Read More"Since the first day of the call to action, reports of protests and other occurrences behind bars have trickled out through videos recorded by inmates, accounts from family members, statements by prison reform activists and statements from prison officials. It’s not known how many incarcerated people took part in the boycott. The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a labor union for prisoners, said that reports of prisoner participation have come from at least 14 states thus far."
USA Today
September 8, 2018
Read More"Recasting mass incarceration as “prison slavery” — usually by way of the Thirteenth Amendment — is perhaps the growing movement’s most innovative intervention. This terminology speaks to the various deprivations experienced behind bars, the movement’s base in states throughout the former Confederacy, and its long-term objective of prison abolition."
Jacobin Magazine
September 2, 2018
Read More"Some prisoners in Ohio have come to expect retaliation. The Appeal spoke by phone with a man in a minimum-security Ohio prison who asked to be identified only by his nickname, “Fridge.” 'Intimidation, threats all of that is coming down the pipe, without a doubt, for even discussing [the strike],' he explained."
The Appeal
August 31, 2018
Read More"And from now until the end of the strike on September 9, everyone can lift the strikers up in prayer: that, as the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee puts it, "prisoners are safe, that they can have hopes and dreams for the future, that they can build towards redemption, rather than being condemned to a slow death inside a concrete box.""
National Catholic Review
August 30, 2018
Read More"Inmate protests have been happening for generations, but it is only in the last few years that organizers have had success coordinating from penitentiary to penitentiary and state to state."
New York Times
August 26, 2018
Read More"Until the mid-1990s, the Illinois Department of Corrections had a robust vocational training program and on- and off-site job opportunities for inmates. In more recent years, however, prison jobs, apprenticeships, and educational programs have all but disappeared. Most inmates in IDOC now spend more than 20 hours a day confined to their cells—even if they're not technically in solitary confinement or segregation"
Chicago Reader
August 25, 2018
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