Prison Labor Agitation: Which Side Are You On?
If you stand in solidarity with Amazon and Starbucks workers, you should also support some of the most oppressed workers in America: prisoners.
January 6, 2023 marks the beginning of a prison strike in Pennsylvania Department of Corrections facilities. Inspired by the Alabama prisoners strike across all 14 major facilities last November - one of the largest prison strikes in American history - the Subaltern Peoples Abolitionist Revolutionary Collective (SPARC), a prisoner-led collective, compiled a list of demands from PA prisoners including ending sexual harassment in women’s facilities, ending racism, and ending abuse in solitary confinement. According to their communique:
The prisoners of Alabama DOC launched a statewide labor strike earlier this year and called for the rest of the nation’s prison population to stand in solidarity and “LET THE CROPS ROT IN THE FIELD!”
On Friday January 6, 2023 the prisoners held captive in the Pennsylvania DOC will answer the call for solidarity.
2022 represented a landmark year for a revitalized labor movement in America. The first Amazon warehouse was unionized; the largest academic strike in history ensued (a strike that barely received any attention at all from mainstream media); multiple Starbucks locations unionized, as well as other service industry locations such as Trader Joes and Target; and, as mentioned above, one of the largest prison strikes in American history kicked off in Alabama.
Going forward the labor movement must make room for, and recognize the importance of, prisoners if the movement is to be incisive as well as inclusive. The criminal justice system is a site of punitive dispossession where the most marginalized among us, especially those who’re LGBTQ, black, and increasingly women, are disappeared as inequality intensifies.
It also represents a society that disparages disadvantaged youth (who’re becoming rapidly more disadvantaged as time goes on) by criminalizing their existence instead of offering any sort of economic or social aid that doesn’t involve demarcating their world behind barriers of brutalization. Those at the opposite end of the age spectrum, the elderly, also represent an emergent trend in incarceration to criminalize those who’re particularly vulnerable or unable to provide for themselves as neoliberal austerity proliferates.
All of this stark cruelty and violent discrimination inevitably feeds into fascist politics, especially in police where county sheriffs under the “constitutionalist” sheriffs embody the vanguard of a fledgling neo-fascist, Christian nationalist, country-wide reactionary movement. The needless brutality also contributes to, and is reflected in, broader fascist attacks on livelihood outside the prison-industrial-complex. To quote William C. Anderson in his brilliant article on Prism about the interconnective nature of activity inside and outside the prison:
The capitalist hoarding and strategic mishandling of resources kills conveniently, making insidious executions a preordained circumstance. Every aspect of life can be destroyed in this way. As sweeping fascistic book bans and censorship cover the country, the imprisoned know maybe better than anyone how hard it is to freely access education and literature. While attacks on voting rights and election restraints grow, the imprisoned are the easiest population to punish with civil death… So much of what we know as the terror that indicates deeper descent into fascism in the U.S. first appears in prisons.
Black and trans people, some of the most over-represented groups in prisons, are also over-represented in
Ultimately, prisons are oppressive structures used to disappear humans beings who aren’t sufficiently productive or conducive to the acquisitive and exclusionary systems of capitalism. Prisons also serve as hubs of slave labor and profiteering through contracting prison services to corporations so the capitalist class can profit off of its own modes of oppression.