It is unclear how widespread a national strike by prisoners has become, but activists said they had shown a new ability to reach inmates across state lines, the New York Times reports. “Prisoners aren’t oblivious to their reality,” said Paul Wright of the Human Rights Defense Center, a longtime critic of prison conditions. “They see people dying around them. They see the financial exploitation. They see the injustice.” It is only in the last few years that inmate protest organizers have had success coordinating from penitentiary to penitentiary and state to state. Much of the recent activism has focused on inmate pay, which can range from nothing to a few dollars for a day of hard labor in other places. Prisoners call it “slave labor.” Organizers of this year’s strike want inmates to be paid the prevailing wage for the cleaning, cooking and other work they perform.
“People are starting to realize how disgusting it is how human beings can be paid pennies,” said Amani Sawari of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group organizing the strike. Even after years of hard work inside, inmates frequently have little or nothing saved to help with rent or other necessities when they are released. “If they were being paid — even something less than minimum wage, but some reasonable amount of money — they could get out and have at least a little bit of money to get started again,” said Michele Deitch of the University of Texas at Austin, who has served as a court-appointed monitor of that state’s prisons. Sawari’s group suggesed that inmates could stop reporting for work, stop eating or perform subtler protests, such as no longer buying supplies from the prison commissary. “We know that this is widespread. We just don’t know what specific actions and what specific prisoners,” she said.