There are widespread strikes in this country and across the world, and rightly so, as the living conditions of the ordinary people are savagely decimated in the name of profit and growth. Organising a strike is always difficult, but organising a strike in a prison is fraught with a multitude of problems and dangers. You're enmeshed in the state's incarceration system, under constant surveillance. So we owe it to the prisoners in Alabama's draconian prison system to give them all the support and solidarity that we can muster. The have achieved a massive success in organising a state wide prisoners' strike across the state of Alabama. We need to keep this in the public domain as the authorities will do their utmost to break the strike with the usual savage brutality that is all to common in prisons. We must not let this happen shielded from public view, to appear in the press as the authorities putting down riotous prisoners. This is a legitimate strike to improve conditions that even by a judicial review said they were breaking the law. Since that review, things have deteriorated.
The following extract from It's Going Down.
Thousands of prisoners have launched a historic work strike across what even the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) is admitting is “most major male facilities,” throwing the system into a form of modified lockdown, as prison authorities attempt to break the strike by bringing in prisoners from other facilities. “This is a huge thing, this is a statewide initiative,” said abolitionist organizer, journalist, and podcast co-host of Millennials are Killing Capitalism, Jared Ware, who sat down with It’s Going Down to talk about the strike.
The strikes, which kicked off on Monday, took place alongside protests on the other side of the prison walls in Montgomery, Alabama, which delivered a set of the prisoners’ demands, centered around “broad criminal justice reforms and changes to the state’s prison conditions.” Also central to the prisoners’ demands is the issue of parole. As WAFF-48 reported:
More than four years ago, Alabama prisons were overcrowded to the point of being unconstitutional, according to federal court judges. Now, new data shows fewer paroles may be compounding that problem. In just four years, parole denials in Alabama nearly doubled.
That’s according to data from the Alabama Bureau of Pardons & Paroles compiled by the ACLU. That data shows the parole board denied 46% of applications in 2017. In 2021, 84% of parole applications were denied.
This crisis also has a racial dynamic, as the ACLU argued in a recent report:
The rate of parole denial is even more severe for black people in Alabama prisons. The current parole board has granted relief to white candidates at more than double the rate of black candidates. So far in FY 2022, 93 percent of black parole candidates have been denied, while 84 percent of white candidates have been denied. Black candidates saw a grant rate of just 7 percent compared to white candidates at 16 percent. The board has provided no explanation for this disparity.
For years, prisoners have been arguing that incarcerated workers could make changes by bringing the prison system to its knees through coordinated strikes. In the text, Let the Crops Rot in the Field, the Free Alabama Movement wrote:
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