A Primer on the Nationwide Prisoners’ Strike | The Marshall Project

13.10.16

A Primer on the Nationwide Prisoners’ Strike | The Marshall Project: The strike was organized at Holman prison in Alabama, with a group of inmates who call themselves the Free Alabama Movement. Alabama’s prisons are consistently the most overcrowded and understaffed in the nation, according to a sweeping lawsuit filed this summer by the Southern Poverty Law Center. One expert witness
in the suit told of “dangerous conditions, systemic mistreatment…as
well as a crass disregard for their basic human dignity.” Members of the
prisoner group have organized strikes before,
and said that earlier this year they began building a network of other
prison groups with similar aims, like one in Georgia that held a strike in 2010.
Using a system of contraband cell phones, and with help from family
members and organizers on the outside, “we decided we would use our
labor as our leverage,” said Robert Earl Council, an inmate at Holman.
“These systems are only here because of the money they’re making. The
money we produce.”produce.”