GQ: What makes this particular prison protest unique? Why is it getting so much national attention?

I’m not sure anyone knows the answer. There are routinely prison protests that happen on a regular basis, but my sense of it is that two years ago when folks were protesting the terrible conditions on the inside, there was bipartisan criminal justice reform discussion in the air. And maybe for that reason, the media was loathe to really listen to the prisoners. After all, it seemed like all of this would be solved at the federal and state level by politicians. And then two years later we now understand how fleeting that moment of potential criminal justice reform was, and yet conditions inside remain terrible, arguably worse than they were two years ago. So when prisoners have spoken up in an even more deliberately public manner, I think folks are paying attention. Because there’s no illusion right now that things are going to be handled or bettered through the ballot box.

How have conditions inside prisons gotten worse?

When we think about prisons of the olden days, we imagine these very barbaric institutions that are dungeon-like and people are treated terribly inside of them. And somehow with modern prisons we have improved, and prisoners have some basic human rights and they have the ability to file lawsuits—and for all of those reasons, prisons, how bad can they be? In fact, in the wake of Attica, as we became the world’s largest prison nation and had more people behind bars than at any point in our history and more than any other country on the globe, what that has meant is that we have severe overcrowding. I mean, so badly that we have a problem with disease, sanitation, we have a problem with sufficient nutrition in prisons, we have a real problem with folks getting basic and adequate medical care, and in addition to all of that, we have a serious problem with too many people serving too much time in solitary confinement. We have more time in solitary than any physician would deem humane, and more than any other country, and we also have younger and younger people in these institutions serving life sentences. We have not only made our system so much larger but also so much more inhumane.

"Neither folks on the outside nor on the inside are getting living wages, and that’s exploitative."

Prisoners cannot just go to the courts like they could in the 1960s because we have pretty much barred their ability to do that through something called the Prison Litigation Reform Act. And so their ability to tell us what’s happening and do anything about it is also clamped down, and thus [we have] these moments of periodic explosion.

Can you talk about the difficulties with organizing a prison strike like this? I imagine the logistics are hard but that it also invites some serious retribution?

It’s sort of ironic. On the one hand because of social media and because of really important prison publications like Prison Legal News and the Bay View, there is a lot of communication between prisoners—also because of cell phones that prison officials will assure you are a problem because they’re contraband. In fact, they’re a problem because they can’t profit off them, and because it is via these cell phones that folks communicate to people on the outside the terrible conditions on the inside. And so communication between prisoners is actually pretty good, but the costs of rebelling are so high, the retaliation is so severe—and that is everything from having your visitation revoked so you can’t see your children anymore, to having time added on to your sentence to literally physical abuse to solitary confinement to lockdowns.

Do you have a sense of what the public perception is toward prison strikes in general?