We’re less than a week away from the beginning of the strike and the more interviews I do with the media the more that I realize that the audience that I’m speaking to is growing wider and wider. This is why it’s important for me to me to address those that fit under one of these three groups:
- People that never really consider the harsh reality of prisons or their existence. This could be because they don’t know anyone in prison or they honestly don’t care. When they hear the term prison strike they wonder what’s that about or what’s the point.
- People that are aware that prisons aren’t the ‘best’ situation but see it as a necessary evil, the only place to put people who offend and have nowhere else to go. This way of thinking can be pretty broad and could even apply to children. For example, this could include runaways or young people suffering from homelessness.
- People that are aware that prisons exist and feel like prisons have a proper place in our society and that there are people that belong in prison and should stay there regardless of the circumstances. They may feel that oppression, rape, abuse and the other evils are all issues that are irrelevant do to the fact that the victims are criminals. They may feel inmates deserve this type of abuse.
In all cases these people believe the lie that there are no alternatives to prisons. All three of these groups of people may be uncomfortable with the existence of prison however they found different ways to cope with their existence whether that be submitting to a lack of interest, submitting to the idea that there are no alternatives or submitting to the belief that inmates deserve their mistreatment. For all of these groups want to address some common questions because I don’t want you all to be the people asking them and they’re questions that I’ve been responding to repeatantly over the past couple of months in preparation for the strike.
Why are prisoners striking? It’s not like prison is supposed to be a vacation:
I want to begin answering this question because prisoners aren’t striking simply because the circumstances that their living in are mildly uncomfortable. They’re striking because the circumstances that they’re forced to live in are unbearably and innately abusive and no human being should live in a state of constant repression or abuse:
- no human should be confined to a cage
- no human should work for wages for which they can’t support themselves
- no human should be confined to a situation where they could be killed due to lack of medical attention
- no human should be served food that is questionably digestible due to its being spoiled or laced with dangerous materials like chemicals or glass
- no human should be forced to live in a place where they don’t feel safe, protected or advocated
No individual on this planet should be placed into an environment that’s violent, deadly, abusive or oppressive regardless of the behaviors that they engaged in in the past. Prisoners are striking because this is their daily reality and it has been for centuries and they want to see this change for the better of, not only themselves, for the benefit all the communities that they belong to. Inmates are striking because not only are the environments that their forced to live in are innately oppressive and violent but because their conditions repress rehabilitation and evoke violence. They want to be in an environment that praises their social, educational and emotional development and we should support them out of love.
What is prison slavery? Don’t prisoners choose to get a job? Isn’t working in prison better than doing nothing?
Prison slavery is the act of forcing someone to work for little to nothing. Arguably any job that I prisoner does within the prison system is forced labor. There’s absolutely no way that an inmate can make a fully informed decision about what they want to do with their time in an oppressive and abusive environment. Even when prisoners do make a “choice” about the job that they like to perform it’s really not a choice because in states like Michigan prisoners must select a job assignment. If they don’t select a job assignment then they’re privileged status can change from a level 2 for example to a level 5 which changes the course of their entire life in the prison. If they want to work in a job assignment and its unavailable they cannot just choose not to work. They’re placed on another assignment while on the waiting list, working 8hrs+ a day in an area that they did not choose. There’s no winning, there’s no saying no, there’s no making any suggestions and when you’re assigned to a job you don’t have a choice.
Most prisoners don’t have the financial freedom to choose not to work. Prisoners have to spend money in prison. There is absolutely no way to survive inside of a prison without spending money each month. Whether that be on phone calls, Dental Care, Health Care, emails, Music, Television, clothing, underwear, hygiene products, cosmetic products, canteen and yes food. Although prisoners are served three meals each day some of the food is not edible and we’ve learned this to be factual and a lot of the food isn’t nutritionally sufficient. Therefore prisoners are forced to buy other sources of nutrition to sustain themselves. This along with the fact that prisoners, like all humans, can get hungry outside of three scheduled meal times. Yes some of the things that prisoners buy that could be considered ‘optional’ but when you’re served an indeterminate sentence of 20 to 60 years there’s going to come a point within that span of time where you would want a radio or television, a heaver jacket, some beauty products or some new shoes. Sadly, when you come from a family that’s already struggling and you were one of the main sources of income that has been removed, then you can’t expect a lot of financial support from family and you feel guilty asking for it. As a result your only “choice” is to submit to working a remedial job for a wage that barely pays for 10 minutes on the phone at the end of an 8 hour day. If you don’t think that’s a form of modern-day slavery then your completely bullsh*ting.
Prisoners should have multiple opportunities to do work that they’re proud of, that they can learn from, that requires a developing skillset, that has transferrable experience and that most importantly earns a wage that is sustainable so that they can support themselves and their families for those that have spouses, children and loved ones on the outside. However all the companies are interested in doing is exploiting prisoners for their time and including their completely innocent families. Companies exploit not only financially but also emotionally and mentally and this is a gross Injustice that is happening rampantly in our criminal justice system.
Okay so even if I were to agree with you that prisons are terrible, where would we put criminals?
A lot of us already know that prisons suck but we resign ourselves to allowing them to exist because we feel like there are no other alternatives. Prior to getting into the countless alternatives to caging human beings for offenses I want to address the term ‘Criminal’. The phrase was created after the word slave became taboo to use. Slave catchers which eventually evolved into police officers needed a new way to classify the individuals that they were after and that’s when the term criminal was born. There are several different documentaries that go over the history of this including Ava Duvernay 13th. Classifying someone has a criminal has become a tool for dehumanizing an individual, placing them in a sub-human status at which point we can treat them in ways that wouldn’t normally be acceptable. When someone is branded with that label we are more easily able to disassociate them from certain rights that we have as humans like the privilege to live with ones family, to make a living, to communicate regularly with loved ones, to choose how one would like to dress, to choose when to eat or shower or use the bathroom.
Once we assign someone with this ‘criminal’ label we strip them of their humanity and many of their basic human privileges, just as the slave was stripped of their humanity on the auction bloc due to their subhuman status. This label places a blanket over whatever other oppressions they’re forced to suffer throughout the rest of their lives as they carry that label. However not everyone who offends is assigned a criminal status. We’ve seen this in countless court cases where young white women are placed into rehabilitation programs rather than sent to jails for their crimes. We see that lack of branding in cases where teenage white boys are given the opportunity to do community service rather than spend time in a penitentiary. We see abusive and drug addicted white parents dodge the horrors of this label as they’re sent to treatment centers rather than detention centers. When judges are selective in the direction that they throw the gavel we can see that the alternatives to even the most horrendous of offenses exist.
A crime is simply a pattern of behavior that society has labeled as being an unacceptable. When society labels a specific behavior or a trend of behaviors as unacceptable then society is responsible for correcting those behaviors in the individual mainly because we believe that individuals aren’t always fully responsible for the choices that they make. This is especially true when people are placed in situations of extreme poverty, lack of sufficient education, lack of positive male & female influences, degraded parental roles, or lack of stable housing. All of these environmental circumstances that are completely out of one’s control (especially for young people) contribute to bad behaviors and when we see individuals act out in this way that suffer from these environmental injustices is it’s our collective responsibility to correct the environment that they’re in rather than to punish the individual that suffered from the negative environmental trends. A lot of us refuse to correct those environmental trends especially those who are responsible for creating those trends because they either haven’t identified them or it’s profitable to allow those trends to persist. There are agencies who make predictions on how many young people will be incarcerated and our Public School Systems. They can make these predictions because public schools are being defunded and the environmental impacts of that create the behaviors that contribute to students’ subsequent incarceration, in black and brown students especially. Our society needs to be committed to addressing the environmental trends that contribute to the behaviors that lead to incarceration. We also need to be committed to identifying sufficient rehabilitative alternatives to caging human beings that suffer from the environmental trends that led to their incarceration. These alternatives exist and we have to be committed to identifying them and providing them to our entire population of prisoners. No human should be caged.
Why the heck should prisoners have the right to vote?
This leads me into the next point, which is the privilege of being a part of the political sphere by contributing to the decisions that are made locally and nationally, decisions that have huge effects on one’s citizenship and there well being.
Prisoners should have the right to vote in the same way that every other person who engages in any other activity that I might not find acceptable or that you might not find acceptable has the right to vote. No matter who someone is or how they live their life or if I respect their lifestyle because they are my neighbor and they are effected by the policies put in place then they should have the opportunity to respond to those policies. When an individual is a resident within our society that is being affected by the decisions being made by our legislature then they should have the right to contribute to the outcome of those decisions. Prisoners are heavily effected by political decisions, arguably more than anyone else. In addition to this fact, they should be able to vote because they contribute substantially to our economic sphere, arguably more than any other group. They’re workforce effects every single area of business in our country including but definitely not limited to: apparel, food, transportation, oil, customer service, insurance, fast food, banks, energy producers, utilities, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, telecommunication and even air transport. The work that prisoners do as slaves is making nearly every well established US based mega-company that you can think of billions of dollars every year. At the very least if they’re not being paid the prevailing wage, and even when they are being paid the prevailing wage, they should be able to contribute politically by being able to cast their vote. The ballot boxes should be set up at the prisons during every election season. Prisoners want to be able to have ownership over the changes that need to be made in their environment. There are no proper grievance procedures for when a prisoner is abused or unjustly handled by officials their voices are being completely drowned out and if we have any real value in representation or democracy then it’s absolutely necessary that we give this huge segment of our population a voice in our political system, especially if we’re committed to seeing a transformative change in our criminal justice system. These men and women are the ones whose lives depend on these changes and they should have ownership over the changes that are made.
We are less than a week away from the strike and I want to answer these questions because I don’t want you to be the ignorant person that walks up onto one of the events in support of the strike and asks. I want you to be the type of person that can commit to a discussion about transformative change in our criminal justice system. I want you to be the type of person that thought about each of the prisoners demands in depth. I desperately want you to be the person who has brainstormed solutions that address the social traumas that contribute to criminal behavior, the problems of targeted over policing and subsequent incarceration in communities of color. I want you to be the type of person that can be open-minded and that won’t shut down because something is uncomfortable or because a problem seems too big. There is no problem to big for the masses to solve and we all need to be the type of people that can imagine a reality without prisons.I want to live in a world that caters to every single individuals’ well-being and that doesn’t submit to a one-size-fits-all overcrowded cage that grossly contributes to a mass incarceration problem that companies choose to profit from causing critical environmental and social consequences. It’s time for us to rectify one of America’s greatest sins, slavery.
