Organisers say prisoners across the country are expected to refuse to work, hold sit-ins and even stage hunger strikes

The first part of the prisons likely to be hit will be the kitchens, where stoves will remain unlit, ready-meals unheated and thousands of breakfasts uncooked.

From there the impact will fan out. The laundry will be left unwashed, prison corridors un-mopped, and the lawns on the external grounds ring-fenced with barbed wire will go uncut.

On Tuesday, America’s vast army of incarcerated men and women – at 2.3m of them they form by far the largest imprisoned population in the world – will brace itself for what has the potential to be the largest prison strike in US history.

Nineteen days of peaceful protest are planned across the nation, organised largely by prisoners themselves.

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The strike is being spearheaded by incarcerated members of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group of prisoners providing mutual help and legal training to other inmates. A few days ago they released an anonymous statement setting out their reasons for calling a protest that carries the risk of substantial penal retaliation.

“Fundamentally, it’s a human rights issue,” the statement said. “Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. Prisons in America are a warzone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it’s as if we are already dead, so what do we have to lose?”

Organizers have put together a list of 10 national demands. They include improved prison conditions, an end to life without parole sentences or “death by incarceration” as the authors call them, increased funding for rehabilitation services and an end to the disenfranchisement of some 6 million Americans with felony convictions who are barred from voting.

One of the most passionately held demands is an immediate end to imposed labor in return for paltry wages, a widespread practice in US prisons that the strike organisers call a modern form of slavery. More than 800,000 prisoners are daily put to work, in some states compulsorily, in roles such as cleaning, cooking and lawn mowing.

The remuneration can be as woeful in states such as Louisiana as 4 cents an hour.

The idea that such lowly-paid work in a $2bn industry is equivalent to slavery is leant weight by the 13th amendment of the US constitution. It banned slavery and involuntary servitude, with one vital exception: “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”.

Prisoners, in other words, have no constitutional rights and can be blatantly exploited.

Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. Prisons in America are a warzone

In addition to a refusal to work, inmates engaging with the strike plan to go on hunger strikes, hold sit-in protests and stage a boycott of commissaries, collect phone calls and other payment streams where private and state-owned companies make money out of them. The boycott was the brainchild of Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun of the Free Alabama Movement under the rubric Redistribute the Pain.

He called on fellow prisoners to stop channeling either their own or their relatives’ money to what he called the “prison industrialized complex”. He urged participants to spend 25% of what they saved from the boycott on books such as Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration.

Inmates who join the action know that they face potentially serious consequences. Participants face being placed individually into isolation cells, while past prison strikes have been met with lockdowns of entire institutions.

Communications too are certain to be blocked, leading potentially to a blackout of news on the protest.

According to prison reform activists engaged in planning the strike, retaliatory measures have already started. Karen Smith, who runs the Gainesville, Florida chapter of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee that is backing the strike, said that prison authorities have moved most of the local strike organisers into solitary confinement wings where they will be unable to communicate with others.

“Other inmates have been warned that if they continue to contact advocacy groups they will be moved to the most brutal camps.”

The strike comes two years after the last major nationwide prison strike in September 2016 that saw more than 20,000 inmates refuse to show up for work across 12 states. That strike was co-ordinated out of Holman prison in Alabama, a state notorious for its overcrowded and dilapidated penal institutions, by a group of inmates styling themselves the “Free Alabama Movement”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina was the scene of a deadly prison riot earlier this year. Photograph: Sean Rayford/AP

This year’s strike was triggered by the riot at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina in April in which seven inmates died in what was the most deadly prison unrest in a quarter of a century. The bloody melee, fueled by gang rivalry over contraband, lasted for seven hours while prison guards did next to nothing to stop it.

Within days of the South Carolina carnage, and the renewed spotlight it put on the gross overcrowding, understaffing and inhumane living conditions in American prisons, the idea of a nationwide strike began to form.

As inspiration for what promises to be a tough 20 days ahead, strike organizers are leaning on history. The nationwide action begins on Tuesday on the 47th anniversary of the death of the prominent Black Panther member, George Jackson, who was shot as he tried to escape in the prison yard of San Quentin in California.

The strike is then scheduled to close on 9 September, the 47th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion in upstate New York. In an echo of today’s protest, the 1971 Attica riot was also framed by inmates as a push for humane conditions and basic political rights.

But after four days of negotiations it ended in a bloodbath when New York’s then governor, Nelson Rockefeller, sent in state police armed with shotguns and tear gas. Twenty-nine inmates and 10 of their hostages were killed.

Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, said that it was symbolically important that Attica was being invoked. “Attica drew a line in the sand – it was a recognition that people have a right to rebel, and will rebel, when they forced into unbelievably horrific conditions.”</s>Organizers are calling for the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States to go on strike. Inmates and their advocates planned the national prison strike to push for better conditions in prisons around the country, and they're planning sit-ins, hunger strikes and work stoppages through September 9 in order to make their point. NPR's Cheryl Corley joins us now to talk about the latest. And, Cheryl, organizers say they're expecting this to be the country's largest prison strike. It's not the first. Tell us how it's being organized and how we know how many people might participate.

CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE: Well, Audie, prisoners have been planning this strike for a while, and they were spurred in part by a prison strike that occurred a couple of years ago in 2016 and by a prison riot that occurred in South Carolina earlier this year. That riot left about seven people dead and several more injured. Prison officials said that was due to gangs, but prisoners said it happened because of the poor prison conditions. And that's one of the reasons for this strike.

Organizers with a group called Jailhouse Lawyers say inmates in more than 17 states are participating. People outside the country, too. And they tell me they get word out about the strike in a variety of ways - through prison newspapers, by word of mouth, or even by radio, if inmates have access to that. And I talked to Nia Beech (ph), who works at Kateline (ph) Radio. That's a prison radio show that acts as an avenue for people in prison and the formerly incarcerated.

NIA BEECH: We definitely know that prisoners in Canada have already launched their strikes, and we have confirmation about South Carolina and Louisiana. We do have striking prisoners at the high-correctional facility in North Carolina.

CORLEY: And organizers say they expect those numbers to spread, but they really won't have any idea about how many people participated for months, if they get those numbers at all.

CORNISH: The prisoners do have a list of demands. They're calling for more rehabilitation programs, improved conditions. What else are they asking for?

CORLEY: Well, they want sentencing reform. For example, they want to get rid of sentences of life without parole. They want an end to the practice in some states of not allowing people with felony convictions to vote. But one of the biggest issues is prison labor. The inmates say they want to be paid the prevailing wage because they do all sorts of jobs, most often for the prison itself, like working in the kitchen or doing laundry. But they also do work for private companies.

And University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson just says it's really a mixed bag when it comes to prison labor. She wrote a book about the Attica Prison riot, and she says we often don't know much about prison labor because prisons aren't required to report that activity. What we do know is that prisoners are saying it's modern-day slave labor. And Thompson says they do typically make very little money, on average about 4 cents to 20 cents on the dollar, if at all.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Folks are not making enough money even to be able to pay their commissary charges, to be able to send money back home to their children. So it really is an exploitative situation no matter what the labor is that's being done.

CORLEY: And Thompson and other folks say, yes, work in prison does have value, but they say what's going on inside prisons is exploitive and can hurt workers outside, as well, depending on what type of work those prison inmates are actually doing.

CORNISH: Given how much we know about this already, how are prison authorities responding?

CORLEY: Well, just a couple of responses today. The Federal Bureau of Prisons said earlier there haven't been any reports of inmate work strikes in any of its facilities. And the head of the North American Association of Wardens really didn't address any concerns directly but said if there is a major action by inmates, either violent or nonviolent, that there are policies and procedures to address it.

CORNISH: That's NPR's Cheryl Corley. Cheryl, thank you.</s>U.S. Prison Inmates To Strike Over Poor Living Conditions

Prisoners in 17 states will strike Tuesday in an effort to draw attention to conditions and what they say are exploitative labor practices. David Greene talks to German Lopez, senior reporter at Vox.</s>Prison inmates in at least 17 states plan to go on strike today. They will refuse to work or eat, in protest of the low wages and inhumane conditions that they say prevail through the U.S. prison system.

Details on how many prisoners are participating are extremely difficult to confirm, since prisons, by design, are not transparent institutions. But activists both inside and outside the institutions have been working to organize the strike for months.

"Fundamentally, it's a human rights issue," Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, an anonymous collective of incarcerated organizers, say in a statement. "Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. Prisons in America are a warzone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it's as if we are already dead, so what do we have to lose?"

The strike was sparked by an April riot at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina that left seven inmates dead. Prison guards reportedly stood by and did nothing to stop the violence.

"Seven comrades lost their lives during a senseless uprising that could have been avoided had the prison not been so overcrowded from the greed wrought by mass incarceration, and a lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation's penal ideology," the organizers write in their list of 10 demands. "These men and women are demanding humane living conditions, access to rehabilitation, sentencing reform and the end of modern day slavery."

The demands include "immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women," as well as "an immediate end to prison slavery." The 13th Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery except, notably, "as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." That provision led to "convict leasing" programs throughout the South after the Civil War, where convicts, the majority of them black, were subjected to brutal unpaid labor for the benefit of private companies.

The convict leasing system was eventually abolished, but the use of prison labor is commonplace today. For example, as Reason's Eric Boehm has reported, California inmates are currently volunteering to fight the biggest wildfires in state history, but they're being paid only $2 an hour. In Alabama inmates are paid 25 to 75 cents an hour to make license plates and other items. In Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas, they make nothing at all for mandatory labor.

Other prison strike demands are fairly specific, such as the restoring felon voting rights and rescinding the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a bill passed in the 1990s that made it much more difficult for inmates to file federal civil rights lawsuits challenging their conditions and treatment.

"These are conditions that the American public has neglected—malignly—for years," Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, says in an emailed statement. "Different from other elements of justice reform where people can see evidence that undermines the flawed assumptions that the system is working—videos of police brutality, imposition of bail in public courtrooms—most people are blind when it comes to prison conditions. What happens behind those grey walls is obscured from public view."

Organizers chose to begin and end the strike on August 21 and Septembe 9, two significant dates in U.S. prison history. On August 21, 1971, San Quentin guards shot and killed the influential Black Panther activist George Jackson. Jackson had smuggled a gun into prison and freed other inmates, who murdered several guards and two other inmates, before attempting to escape. (Jackson's supporters have never believed the official story of his death.)

On September 9 of the same year, inmates at New York's Attica prison took over the facility and held 42 officers and civilians hostage. The inmates demanded better conditions and access to uncensored newspapers and political material, among other things, but they also wanted legal immunity for the takeover, which New York officials adamantly refused to promise.

The Attica rebellion ended four days later when New York State Troopers retook the prison by force, unleashing a hail of bullets that killed 39 people, including 10 hostages. Officials initially lied to the press and public, claiming inmates had slit hostages' throats. The state of New York then went to extraordinary lengths—including intimidation and destruction of evidence—to cover up retaliation, torture, and outright murder during and following the retaking.

Today's protest follows a similar large-scale strike in 2016, which reportedly involved 24,000 inmates in 29 different prisons. In 2013, about 30,000 California inmates went on hunger strike to protest the state's draconian use of solitary confinement.

"The courageous people who are bringing focused attention to America's system of mass incarceration through the Nationwide Prison Strike deserve our admiration," Udi Ofer, director of the ACLU's Campaign for Smart Justice, says in an emailed statement. "The ACLU supports the demands of the Nationwide Prison Strike, including the demand for a right to vote. Our country is stronger when people most marginalized and directly impacted by unjust policies raise their voices in protest and demand a different future."</s>On Tuesday, the 47th anniversary of Black Panther George Jackson’s death, inmates nationwide began to stage a prison labor strike over what they call “modern slavery.”

Jackson was killed as he tried to escape the prison yard of San Quentin, California. But this year’s mobilization was first triggered by the deaths of seven inmates in South Carolina, who were the victims of the most deadly prison unrest in America in a quarter of century.

After gang fight erupted over contraband, prison guards reportedly sat on their hands, doing nothing to stop the blood bath.

During the next few days until the scheduled end of the strike on Sept. 9, the 47th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion in upstate New York, prisoners will not work and will even go on hunger strikes.

But as prison kitchens remain unused for 19 days of peaceful protest, laundry is left unwashed, lawns uncut, and prison corridors un-mopped, the over 2 million incarcerated men and women across the country also brace for potentially negative consequences as they enter what could be the largest prison strike in the whole history of the United States.

Planned and led by the group of prisoners Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, the strike is meant to pressure the government to improve their conditions and bring the practice of putting inmates to work for as low as 4 cents an hour to an end.

“Fundamentally, it’s a human rights issue,” a statement released by the group reads. “Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. Prisons in America are a warzone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it’s as if we are already dead, so what do we have to lose?”

Their demands include end to life without parole sentences, the end to the disenfranchisement of millions of individuals with felony convictions who lost their voting rights, more government funding for rehabilitation services, improved prison conditions, and an end to imposed and sometimes compulsory labor in exchange for miserable wages.

Additionally, prisoners will also stage a boycott against services such as collect phone calls and others that require inmates to pay, either by using money they earned from prison labor or by sending the bill to their families.

This practice, which is known as the “prison industrialized complex,” according to Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun of the Free Alabama Movement, should die out if inmates stop taking part in them. With that in mind, Ra-Sun came up with the idea of the boycott under the title Redistribute the Pain.

Instead of spending on the services that are making others rich, he urges inmates to save their money to by books such as “Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration.”

Unfortunately for the inmates trying to engage in peaceful calls for change, the retaliation has already started.

The head of the Gainesville, Florida, chapter of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, Karen Smith, told reporters that before the strike began, most of the local strike organizers had been thrown in solitary confinement. Prison authorities then warned inmates that if “they continue to contact advocacy groups they will be moved to the most brutal camps,” she added.

Unfortunately, because communications will certainly be blocked, there might be a blackout of news coming from prisons and the outside world may not have access to information on how they are doing.

In the past, strikes were met with lockdowns of entire institutions, but other retaliatory practices such as throwing participants in isolation cells could be put in action.

After the 1971 Attica riot broke, which started by inmates seeking basic political rights as well as better prison conditions, then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent in armed police state only four days later, killing 29 inmates and 10 of their hostages.

According to author Heather Ann Thompson, the writer of “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971,” the fact this strike is scheduled to end on the anniversary of Attica is symbolically important.

“Attica drew a line in the sand — it was a recognition that people have a right to rebel, and will rebel, when they forced into unbelievably horrific conditions.”

While nobody is expecting this strike to end as the Attica uprising, especially because an oppressive and deadly response to a peaceful strike would certainly be met with a great deal of protest from everyday Americans, it’s painful to think that to this day, prisoners still have to fight for basic human rights. And what’s worse, that unlike free Americans, they do not have the protection of the U.S. Constitution when it comes to forced and slave labor. The 13th amendment of the U.S. constitution banned slavery and involuntary servitude unless it is used “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

This is a reality that should bring every single American to feel ashamed and, therefore, compelled to look further into the inmates’ demands as a means to help understand their plight.</s>Thousands of prisoners around the country are launching a 19-day strike on Tuesday to protest ultra-low pay, forced labor, and otherwise poor conditions in prisons across the U.S.

The strike, which was organized by a group of incarcerated prisoner rights advocates, is planned to conclude on the 47th anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison riot in upstate New York that ended with the deaths of 29 inmates and 10 hostages. Inmates plan to refuse to work, and a smaller number plan to go on hunger strikes and conduct sit-ins. Organizers expect prisoners in at least 17 states will participate, according to Vox.

The prisoner rights advocates speaking out against what they see as exploitative labor practices have gained attention in recent weeks as thousands of California inmates were sent off to fight what has become the largest wildfire in the state’s history for just $1 an hour. These firefighters, who volunteered for a vocational training program offered by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, are often disqualified from the work after release because a required credential is denied to anyone with a criminal record.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners are also employed in jobs outside and inside the prisons, most commonly doing work to maintain the prisons. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the average prison worker makes around 85 cents an hour. In 2017, inmates in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas were not paid for most of their work. Proponents of these low-paying jobs have argued that inmates benefit from the work experience and that prisons, which are already often cash-strapped, cannot afford to pay more; opponents have argued that prisoners do need real wages to be able to buy basic necessities other than food in the prisons.

The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bans slavery and involuntary servitude, except “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This explicit reference to forced labor for prisoners in an amendment banning slavery has led advocates to feel justified in arguing much of the billion-dollar prison industry is reliant on slave labor. The strike is calling for a public boycott of companies, such as Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, Microsoft, and JC Penney, that have benefited from prison labor

On top of their labor complaints, prisoners are also protesting what they describe as poor prison conditions, often arising from overcrowding and underfunding. Earlier this year, a prison riot in South Carolina that caused seven inmate deaths sparked protests by those who partially blamed understaffing for the violence.

The group organizing the protests has released a set of 10 demands, including improvements to prison conditions, an end to unpaid or underpaid labor, and an increase in rehabilitation programs. “Fundamentally, it’s a human rights issue,” the group said in a statement. “Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it’s as if we are already dead. So what do we have to lose?”</s>"This is not an old film from the . . . 1800s, 1700s. This is 2013 inside the Alabama Department of Corrections," the narrator announces. "We don't know what his circumstances and conditions are - why he has to work this job. All we know is that he's not being compensated for his labor."

The prisoner, according to the narrator, is not required to attend GED classes or job training courses - but he is required to work, or he will be punished.

Inmates across the United States planned to start a nearly three-weeklong strike Tuesday to protest what they are calling "modern-day slavery." Tuesday marks the day that George Jackson, a well-known black activist, was killed in 1971 at San Quentin State Prison - and Sept. 9, the day that the strike is scheduled to end, is the day that prisoners took over Attica Correctional Facility in New York that same year, according to USA Today.

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a nationwide collective of prisoners leading the strike, said it is in response to a riot this year at the Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina, where seven inmates died and many others were injured. One expert said it could have a notable impact on prison operations across the United States.

Inmates are calling for better living conditions, fair wages and government funding for education.

"Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals," Jailhouse Lawyers Speak said in a statement this month. "Prisons in America are a war zone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement."

The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a prisoner-led trade group supporting the nationwide strike, said in a news release that inmates across the United States are expected to stage "peaceful sit-ins, hunger strikes, work strikes and boycotts" outlined by the Free Alabama Movement's "Campaign to Redistribute the Pain 2018." It's unclear exactly how many of the nation's 2.3 million prison inmates plan to take part in the strike.

Ann Jacobs, director of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said there are many ways in which the strike may be problematic for prison systems.

Jacobs said because prisons rely on prisoners for labor - to cook and serve meals, wash laundry and maintain grounds, among other things - "all of that could be affected and the prisons would have a very real kind of crisis in terms of how they operate." She added that in some states, inmates also provide products and services for the outside world, such as in California, where they help fight raging wildfires.

Jacobs said although the notion of inmates making demands may seem off-putting to some people, the things that the inmates are requesting are "insightful."

"There is nothing that is outrageous or radical or inappropriate," she said. She said they are things that "we should be taking seriously and trying to operationalize."

Amani Sawari, an apparent spokeswoman for the strike, said in a blog post over the weekend that Jailhouse Lawyers Speak released a list of 10 demands in April after the riot in South Carolina. As The Washington Post reported at the time, corrections officials said the cause of what has been called one of the deadliest prison brawls in recent history is unclear, but that word of it had spread through cellphones smuggled into Lee Correctional Institution.

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, which is leading the charge, previously posted the demands, stating inmates "must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor," must retain voting rights and must never be "sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole" or be denied parole "because the victim of the crime was white."

The inmates are also demanding Pell grants be reinstated to help pay for their college educations as well as unfettered access to rehabilitation services.

This article was written by Lindsey Bever and Lindsey Bever, reporters for The Washington Post.</s>Prisoners In Several Cities Plan To Strike For A Total Of 19 Days

It’s a new day as prisoners all over the United States have decided they will no longer be mistreated.

According to reports, inmates in at least 21 different cities will go on strike to fight against prison conditions they say amount to modern slavery. From today, August 21, until September 9, convicts plan to refuse to work and some won’t even eat, the NYPost reports. The aforementioned dates have significant meaning, as the strike begins on the day jailed African-American activist George Jackson was killed at the hands of a guard back in 1971. It then ends on the 47th anniversary of the Attica Correctional Facility uprising that reportedly left 40 people dead.

The site states: “Prisoners have outlined 10 national demands that include ‘immediate improvements’ to conditions and for inmates who are forced to work while incarcerated to be paid the ‘prevailing wage in their state.’ They’re also asking that the voting rights of ex-felons should be reinstated and an end to ‘over-sentencing and parole denials of Black and brown humans.’”

Amani Sawari, a spokesperson for the nationwide strike, reportedly told Vox, “The main leverage that an inmate has is their own body. If they choose not to go to work and just sit in the main area or the eating area, and all the prisoners choose to sit there and not go to the kitchen for lunchtime or dinnertime, if they choose not to clean or do the yardwork, this is the leverage that they have. Prisons cannot run without prisoners’ work.”

According to USA Today, these are the cities that are participating so far: Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento, California; San Jose, California; Corona, California; Los Angeles; Phoenix; Omaha, Nebraska; San Antonio, Texas; Asheville, North Carolina; Black Mountain, North Carolina; Atlanta; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Des Moines, Iowa; Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Boston; and Brooklyn, New York.</s>Aug. 21 marks the first day of planned nationwide prison strikes in over a dozen states. The strikes, which are slated to last over two weeks, are focused on protesting labor exploitation of prisoners, as well as poor living conditions. They are also calling on everyday Americans to pay attention to their consumer decisions, as your purchasing choices could perhaps be affecting prisoners' plight.

As The New Republic reported in 2014, in many states, prisoners often work for very minimal compensation (around a dollar a day), despite having a variety of expenses they must address while in prison. Many companies in the United States benefit from prison-produced products and services. This is why the upcoming strike is, among other things, asking people outside of prison to more carefully consider their consumer choices — and avoid companies that benefit from prison labor.

Amani Sawari, a spokesperson for the protests, which are being organized by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), echoed these sentiments to Vox, saying:

In addition to protesting labor exploitation, prisoners will also be striking against poor living conditions in prisons around the country and against sentencing disparities. The IWOC's website lists ten national demands for reform that address many of these issues.

As Vox noted, the strike is set to take place is set to take place in at least seventeen states, but it is not yet clear how many inmates will participate. The outlet noted that, among other tactics, prisoners will engage in hunger and work strikes throughout the protest period.

More to come ...</s>Inmates planned a series of strikes across prisons this week to protest conditions and work programs. Though legal, they compare the low-wage programs to "modern-day slavery."
In the United States, inmates in 17 states go on strike to protest prison labor conditions.