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Workers Vanguard No. 1139
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7 September 2018
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Protesting Hellish Conditions
Support Prisoners Strike!
SEPTEMBER 2—For the last two weeks, prisoners across
the country have courageously carried out work stoppages, hunger strikes
and commissary boycotts to protest their unspeakable
conditions—brutalization by prison guards, massive overcrowding and
exploitation as virtual slave labor. Protests have occurred in at least
eleven states, and organizers report that prisoners in six more states
have pledged to join. At the federal immigrant detention center in
Tacoma, Washington, some 200 detainees went on hunger strike to demand
the closure of I.C.E. detention centers and to show solidarity with the
prison protests. The British Guardian (31 August) reported that
prison strike organizers have been met with “swift and vicious
reprisals,” thrown into solitary, stripped of communication privileges
and transferred to distant prisons.
The strike began on August 21 and is due to continue
until September 9. August 21 marks the anniversary of both the 1831
slave revolt led by Nat Turner and the 1971 assassination of Black
Panther Party activist George Jackson by guards in California’s San
Quentin prison. Jackson was targeted for his role in organizing black,
Latino and white prisoners and breaking down hostility between them.
September 9 commemorates the beginning of the 1971 Attica prison
uprising, which was drowned in blood on orders of New York governor
Nelson Rockefeller. The Attica prisoners—black, Puerto Rican and
white—defiantly declared, “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not
intend to be beaten or driven as such” (see “Remember Attica,” WV No. 1103, 13 January 2017).
In his powerful prison letters, George Jackson wrote:
“Black men born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of
eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison” (Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
[1970]). Since that time, the prison population has grown sixfold to
more than two million people, one-third of them black. The mass
incarceration over the last few decades is largely a product of the
racist “war on drugs” carried out by both Democratic and Republican
administrations. Having condemned the mass of black and Latino youth to
desperate poverty, the U.S. rulers whipped up hysteria over ghetto
“superpredators”—to be gunned down by trigger-happy cops or be packed
off to prison by the courts, with no sentence too lengthy. Spending for
prison libraries has been slashed and access to education axed. Solitary
confinement, a form of torture, has grown explosively, particularly for
those tagged as “gang members.”
The U.S. prison system is the concentrated expression of
the depravity of this racist capitalist society, based on the brutal
exploitation of labor and founded on black chattel slavery. Addressing
their dehumanizing conditions, the prisoners demand an end to the
massive racial discrimination in legal charges, sentencing and granting
of parole; an immediate end to laws stiffening sentences because of
alleged gang membership; access to rehabilitation programs and
restoration of Pell grants, which make attaining a college degree
possible; voting rights for all confined citizens and released felons.
Some six million people, disproportionately minorities,
have lost the right to vote due to felony convictions, which also
disqualify many from access to public housing, food stamps and other
benefits. A prior felony also makes finding a job virtually impossible.
We call to abolish all laws preventing felons from getting jobs or
licenses. Strike down criminal background checks for job applications!
Full access to all public services, including public housing! Full
voting rights for prisoners and convicted felons!
Against the hated system of coerced prison labor,
strikers call for “an immediate end to prison slavery,” demanding they
be paid the prevailing wage in their states. The use of prison labor has
a long history. After the end of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment to
the Constitution that codified emancipation from slavery also contained
an exception with which to forge new chains: “Neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States.” Across the South, primarily the black poor were rounded up for
concocted “crimes” such as vagrancy or loitering and were “leased out”
to pay off exorbitant fines by picking cotton, mining coal, building
railroads.
In today’s era of mass incarceration, prisons and
detention centers have become sources of ultra-cheap or free labor,
generating huge profits for private companies and also filling
government coffers. Half of those fighting wildfires in California are
prisoners paid a paltry $2 per day plus $1 per hour for this
life-threatening work. A Department of Justice brochure touts its
“cost-effective labor pool.” Meanwhile, prisoners are forced to pay for
personal necessities like toiletries and extortionately priced telephone
calls, only to have as much as half their pittance withheld, in some
cases to pay “restitution” for the crimes they were convicted of.
The Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee,
a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization
associated with the SL, have signed a petition endorsing the strikers’
demands and the PDC has donated to their fund. We urge others to do so
as well (see below for details). That the strikers have put it all on
the line testifies to their courage, but also to their desperation.
Isolated and with no social power, the strikers need the support of
those outside prison walls—publicity for their demands, financial
support and defense against the inevitable crackdown by prison
authorities. Fighters for the rights of labor and minorities must demand
amnesty for all prison strikers. No reprisals!
It is in the workers’ class interest that the labor
movement’s social weight be brought to bear on behalf of the prisoners.
Not a few union members have their sons, daughters, mothers or fathers
locked up in those dungeons. Together with white, Latino and immigrant
workers, black workers, a large component of the unions, have the social
power to fight against the capitalist class enemy and its barbaric
prison system.
A good start would be to expel prison guards, cops and
security guards from the unions. There is hardly a more damning
indictment of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats than their
recruitment of the capitalists’ armed thugs into unions like AFSCME and
the Teamsters. The job of the cops and prison guards is to violently
suppress the working class and the ghetto and barrio poor. Yet the
craven reformists of Socialist Alternative call in an August 29 article
for prison guards to “strike in solidarity with prisoners” to get better
working conditions! Better conditions for prison guards means more
firepower and a freer hand to brutalize and subjugate prisoners—just
what the strikers are protesting! As part of the fight for a new,
class-struggle labor leadership, we demand: Cops and prison guards out
of the unions!
Along with the military, cops and courts, prisons are a
mainstay of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to defend the rule
and profits of the bourgeoisie. Abolition of the prison system can only be
achieved when the capitalist order with all its machinery of repression
is shattered by proletarian socialist revolution. Under the leadership
of a revolutionary workers party, the social power of the working class
will be mobilized in the fight for a workers America, where the
capitalists’ tremendous wealth would be ripped out of their hands and
placed at the disposal of the many. Workers rule internationally will
begin to lay the material basis for an egalitarian communist society,
where there will be no need for prisons or for any other apparatus of
state repression.
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