"There are various industries that are run by inmates, and we intend to sit down and refuse to work—have an economic protest, if you would—to bring about change," says one of the nearly 100,000 inmates in the Florida prison system. His words, conveyed through anonymized audio recording, refer to "Operation PUSH," the latest in a series of recent prison strikes challenging the corrections system in the United States. According to the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a prison labor union, the Florida-based strike has reached at least 17 correctional facilities across the state. But according to the Florida Department of Corrections, there is no strike.
This Orwellian contradiction—intended to deter the spread of a movement by denying its very existence—is just one aspect of the difficulties that inmates face as they organize to demand improvements to prison conditions, labor practices, and criminal justice legislation. Even so, organizing among the incarcerated has been growing, aided by outside support and fueled by ingenuity.
The first thing to know about prison strikes is that they are not legally protected. "Inmates are not allowed to organize, due to a threat to the security and good order of institutions," a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson says. Crackdowns on prison labor organizing were challenged as unconstitutional infringements on inmates' rights in a 1977 Supreme Court case Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, but the court overturned a previous judgment in favor of the union, arguing that First and Fourteenth Amendment protections do not extend to prison labor unions.
[For more on this story by ARVIND DILAWAR, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...nize-a-prison-strike]
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