Slavery by Another Name

A prison strike has ended in seven Georgia prisons, but organizing is still ongoing.
All 54,000 Georgia inmates work for “Prison Industries” – not a private corporation but the wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Corrections. In effect, PI employs more workers than Delta Airlines, Coca Cola, Home Depot or any of the largest corporate employers in the state. Prison inmates are the largest single workforce in Georgia. They are paid no wages - the 13th Amendment permits “involuntary servitude” of those convicted of crimes.

This action by the inmates was a strike, not a riot or a protest. It was an action by workers to with-hold their labour by refusing to leave their cells. The risks they have taken are enormous. Refusal to work gets you a “Disciplinary Report,” which can affect parole and your “privileges” in prison.State officials claimed they knew about the strike action well in advance and said they locked the institutions down as a preemptive measure. They declared they’d confiscated more than a hundred cell phones, mostly in public places, and identified dozens of inmates whom they believed were leaders of the strike. They admitted confining these inmates to isolation and in some cases transferring them to other institutions. In retaliation for organizing the Georgia prison strike, Miguel Jackson was pepper sprayed, handcuffed and beaten with hammers, resulting in a fractured nose and 50 stitches to his face, and guards tried to throw him over the railing from the second floor, his wife said.

The demands they presented were for wages and working conditions , which in their case of course includes living conditions. Since the work stoppage involved thousands of prisoners, it is probably the largest strike or labor action in Georgia in decades. Moreover, the inmates have firmly taken a stand of interracial solidarity, particularly crucial in Georgia where more than one third of the inmates are white.

At a forum on the Abu Ghraib abuses held in Atlanta, someone who then worked for the Southern Conference on Human Rights remarked that the methods of Abu Ghraib had their origins in practices common in Southern prisons, the “stress positions” very similar to those in the photos from Iraq.

The inmate demands recall those of Black Reconstruction: education, wages, decent food and medical care, the right to be in touch with their families, and a chance at a decent life once they are released by learning employable skills. In this struggle may lie “the kernel and meaning of the labor movement,” to use the phrase W.E.B. DuBois used to characterize Black Reconstruction
“The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States” (W.E.B. DuBois “Black Reconstruction” Ch. IX “The Price of Disaster”).

Theodore William Allen, author of “The Invention of the White Race,” points out that where racial inequality has been most extreme, in the South, whites are the worst off. The greater the gap between the white and black worker, the less able white workers are to defend themselves as workers. The role racial privilege plays in the social control of white working people, as well as black, suggests why incarceration rates of whites are highest in the Deep South. Working class interracial solidarity anywhere anytime is of historic significance, and according to reports, it is being realized in this movement of inmates. The prison population is of course quintessentially working class, and these workers have launched a strike for wages and improvement of “working conditions.” They have established interracial solidarity. Thus the strike deserves solidarity from every corner.

The U.S. has 4 1/2 percent of the world’s population and nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. In 2007 blacks accounted for 900,000 of the 2.2 million people incarcerated in state prisons, six times the incarceration rate of whites. One in six Black men is in the system at any time.Georgia leads the nation with an astounding one in 13 of its adult citizens in prisons and jails or under court and correctional supervision. Advocating ever-longer sentences has become a standard campaign tactic for ambitious politicians and prisons have become growth industries with their own lobbyists.

" Long tired of being forced to work without compensation and under the threat of disciplinary action – bad conduct reports to the Parole Board, for example – Georgia prisoners decided it was time to sit down, rest, recuperate and reconcile themselves with their rights, human and civil...Georgia state prisoners stuck together and learned what their togetherness could do. They learned that they could get more accomplished being unified than they ever could being separated. For this day, Black, White, Brown, Red and Yellow came together. This day saw the coming together of Muslim and Christian, Protestant and Catholic, Crip and Blood, Gangster Disciple and Vice Lord, Nationalist and Socialist. All came together. All were together. The only antagonistic forces were the Oppressors and the Oppressed. So, in Georgia, we’ve finally learned – or rather, been reminded – that with just a little unity and a lot of determination, we can change some of the longstanding exploitative practices of the state of Georgia’s Department of Corrections." Eugene Thomas, a prisoner in Georgia