Inmates across the United States announced they are ready to go on strike, the largest action in the history of America undertaken by prisoners.
Starting Tuesday, the strike will last until September 9, marking the anniversary of Attica Prison uprising in 1971. The strike is a call for the “end to prison slavery” as well as prison reforms.
Prisoners in at least 17 states have announced their plan to halt work for some 19 days, some even claim to go on hunger strike in a move to put the bad conditions and exploitative labor practices in the prison system in the spotlight.
The rights group Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS) said in a statement that this strike was set up as a comeback to the deadly riots back in April in South Carolina.
“Seven comrades lost their lives during a senseless uprising that could have been avoided had the prison not been so overcrowded from the greed wrought by mass incarceration and a lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology,” JLS said.
A spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons told Newsweek on Tuesday afternoon that there had “been no reports of inmate work strikes in any Bureau of Prisons facilities.”
However, the JLS group said inmates would be rallying to demand sweeping prison reforms, including an end to what inmates and advocates say, amounted to “prison slavery.”
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