Sep 03, 2018 TD originals
The Slaves Rebel
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The only way to end slavery is to stop being a slave. Hundreds of men and
women in prisons in some 17 states are refusing to carry out prison labor,
conducting hunger strikes or boycotting for-profit commissaries in an effort
to abolish the last redoubt of legalized slavery in America. The strikers
are demanding to be paid the minimum wage, the right to vote, decent living
conditions, educational and vocational training and an end to the death
penalty and life imprisonment.
These men and women know that the courts will not help them. They know the
politicians, bought by the corporations that make billions in profits from
the prison system, will not help them. And they know that the mainstream
press, unwilling to offend major advertisers, will ignore them.
But they also know that no prison can function without the forced labor of
many among America's 2.3 million prisoners. Prisoners do nearly all the jobs
in the prisons, including laundry, maintenance, cleaning and food
preparation. Some prisoners earn as little as a dollar for a full day of
work; in states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina and
Texas, the figure drops to zero.
Corporations, at the same time, exploit a million prisoners who work in
prison sweatshops where they staff call centers or make office furniture,
shoes or clothing or who run slaughterhouses or fish farms.
If prisoners earned the minimum wage set by federal, state or local laws,
the costs of the world's largest prison system would be unsustainable. The
prison population would have to be dramatically reduced. Work stoppages are
the only prison reform method that has any chance of success. Demonstrations
of public support, especially near prisons where strikes are underway, along
with supporting the prisoners who have formed Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, which
began the nationwide protest, are vital. Prison authorities seek to mute the
voices of these incarcerated protesters. They seek to hide the horrific
conditions inside prisons from public view. We must amplify these voices and
build a popular movement to end mass incarceration.
The strike began Aug. 21, the 47th anniversary of the 1971 killing of the
Black Panther prison writer and organizer George Jackson in California's San
Quentin. It will end Sept. 9, the 47th anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison
uprising. It is an immensely courageous act of civil disobedience. Prison
authorities have innumerable ways to exact retribution, including placing
strikers in solitary confinement and severing communication with the outside
world. They can take away the few privileges and freedoms, including the
limited freedom of movement, yard time, phone privileges and educational
programs, that prisoners have. This makes the defiance all the more heroic.
These men and women cannot go elsewhere. They cannot remain anonymous.
Retribution is certain. Yet they have risen up anyway.
In addition to making demands about wages, the prisoners are calling for an
end to the endemic violence that plagues many prisons. During a riot in
April at Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in South
Carolina, seven prisoners were killed and 17 were injured as prison guards
waited four hours to intervene.
Prisons in America are a huge and lucrative business. The private prison
contractors Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group have annual
revenues of $1.6 billion and more than $2 billion, respectively. They spent
a combined $8.7 million on lobbying from 2010 through 2015, according to
OpenSecrets.org. Global Tel Link, which runs the privatized phone services
in many prisons, is valued at $1.2 billion. The food service corporation
Aramark, a $8.65 billion company, has contracts in 500 prisons across the
country although it has been accused of serving contaminated and spoiled
food that has led to food poisoning. The money transfer corporation JPay
Inc. is a subsidiary of the telecommunications firm Securus Technologies,
which is owned by the private equity firm Abry Partners. JPay made $53
million in 2014 on transfers of $525 million, through an average charge of
10 percent to those sending money to prisoners. Corizon Health has a
contract to provide health care to more than 300,000 prisoners nationwide.
It earns about $1.4 billion a year. And there are many other corporations
with equally large revenues and profit margins within the prisons.
Private corporations exploit prison labor in at least 40 states. In some
cases these workers are paid next to nothing. They have no benefits,
including Social Security participation, and cannot form unions or organize.
They are not paid for sick days. And if they complain or are seen as
troublesome they are placed in solitary confinement, often for months.
Some of the country's biggest corporations have moved into prisons to take
advantage of this bonded labor force. They include Abbott Laboratories,
AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill,
Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John
Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO,
GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper,
JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald's,
Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats,
Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United
Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria's Secret, Walmart and Wendy's.
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that "the degree of civilization in a society can be
judged by entering its prisons." Prisons expose how far a state will go to
exploit and abuse its most vulnerable. Life in the American prison system is
a window into the corporate tyranny that will be inflicted on all of us once
we are stripped of the power to resist. The poorest families in the country
are forced to pay an array of predatory fees to sustain incarcerated
relatives. This is especially cruel to those children whose only contact
with an incarcerated parent is through phone service that costs four or five
times what it does on the outside. Prison life is one of daily humiliation
and abuse. It entails beatings, torture, rape-especially for female
prisoners who are preyed upon by prison staff-prolonged isolation, rancid
food, inadequate heating and ventilation, substandard or nonexistent health
care and being locked in a cage for days at a time, especially in supermax
prisons.
Slavery within the prison system is permitted by the 13th Amendment of the
U.S. Constitution, passed in 1865 at the end of the Civil War to create a
new form of slave labor. It reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. ." Plantations in the
South and industries such as Florida's vast turpentine farm operations,
which survived into the early 20th century, used the 13th Amendment to force
black convicts to do the same uncompensated work that many had done as
slaves.
"Imprisoned in stockades or cells, chained together at night or held under
armed guards on horseback, the turpentine farms were bleak outposts miles
from any chance of comfort or contact with the outside world," Douglas A.
Blackmon writes in "Slavery by Another Name," a description of convict life
for tens of thousands of African-Americans that is eerily similar to today's
prison conditions. "Workers were forced to buy their own food and clothes
from a camp commissary and charged usurious interest rates on the salary
advances used to pay for the goods-typically at least 100 percent."
Prisons, which contain mostly poor people of color, over half of whom have
never physically harmed anyone, are part of the continuum of slavery, Black
Codes, Jim and Jane Crow, convict leasing, lynching and the lethal,
indiscriminate force used by police on city streets. Prisons are not
primarily about crime. They are about social control. They are about
profiting off black and brown bodies, bodies that in blighted,
deindustrialized neighborhoods do not produce money for corporations but
once locked away generate some $60,000 a year per prisoner for prison
contractors, police, parole agencies, corrections officers, phone companies,
private prisons, money transfer companies, medical companies, food venders,
commissaries and the industries that manufacture body armor, pepper spray
and the gruesome array of restraints and implements-four- and five-point
restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint beds, stun grenades,
stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods, body orifice security scanners (BOSS
chairs), tethers, and waist and leg chains-that look like a collection
amassed by the Marquis de Sade. Prisons are also where we warehouse the poor
who are mentally ill. It is estimated that 25 percent of the prison
population has severe mental illness. Those with crippling mental disorders
are given not therapy but cocktails of powerful psychotropic drugs that turn
them into zombies sleeping 20 hours a day.
Once corporations moved manufacturing overseas and denied those in poor
communities the possibility of a job that could sustain them and their
families, they began to extract billions in profit by putting bodies in
cages. Since 1970 our prison population has grown by about 700 percent. We
have invested $300 billion in prisons since 1980. The prison-industrial
complex mirrors the military-industrial complex. The money is public; the
profits are private. Those who enrich themselves off the incarcerated are
morally no different from those who enriched themselves from the slave
trade.
Prisoners, once released, often after decades, commonly suffer from severe
mental and physical trauma and other health problems including diabetes
(which is an epidemic in prisons because of the poor diet), hepatitis C,
tuberculosis, heart disease and HIV. They do not have money or insurance to
get treatment for their illnesses when they are released. They have often
become alienated from their families and are homeless. Stripped of the right
to public assistance, unable to vote, banned from living in public housing,
without skills or education and stigmatized by employers, they become
members of the vast criminal caste system. Many are burdened with debts
because of monetary charges in the criminal justice structure and a
predatory system of prison loans. Over 60 percent end up back in prison
within five years. This is by design. The lobbyists for the
prison-industrial complex make sure the laws and legislation keep the
prisons full and recidivism high. This is good for profit. And it is profit,
not justice, that is the primary force behind mass incarceration. This
system will end only when those profits are wrested from the hands of our
modern slaveholders. The only people who can do that are the slaves and the
abolitionists who fight alongside them.
The full list of national demands from "the men and women in federal,
immigration, and state prisons" reads:
1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies
that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.
2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place
of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing
wage in their state or territory for their labor.
3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned
humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their
rights.
4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be
rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and
parole. No human shall be sentenced to death by incarceration or serve any
sentence without the possibility of parole.
5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole
denials of black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied
parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular
problem in southern states.
6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting black and
brown humans.
7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at
their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.
8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation
services.
9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all U.S. states and territories.
10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences,
pretrial detainees, and so-called "ex-felons" must be counted.
Representation is demanded. All voices count!
