Morgen begint een grote gevangenenstaking in de VS

America’s prisoners are going on strike. The demonstrations are planned to take place from August 21 to September 9, which marks the anniversary of the bloody uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York. During this time, inmates across the US plan to refuse to work and, in some cases, refuse to eat to draw attention to poor prison conditions and what many view as exploitative labor practices in American correctional facilities. “Prisoners want to be valued as contributors to our society”, Amani Sawari, a spokesperson for the protests, told me. “Every single field and industry is affected on some level by prisons, from our license plates to the fast food that we eat to the stores that we shop at. So we really need to recognize how we are supporting the prison industrial complex through the dollars that we spend.” Prison labor issues recently received attention in California, where inmates have been voluntarily recruited to fight the state’s record wildfires — for the paltry pay of just $1 an hour plus $2 per day. But the practice of using prison inmates for cheap or free labor is fairly widespread in the US, due to an exemption in the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery but allows involuntary servitude as part of a punishment for a crime. For Sawari and the inmates participating in the protests, the sometimes forced labor and poor pay is effectively “modern slavery”. That, along with poor prison conditions that inmates blame for a deadly South Carolina prison riot earlier this year, have led to protests.

German Lopez in America’s prisoners are going on strike in at least 17 states (Vox)