Still, the strikers’ strategy, designed for the current media moment, has proved extraordinarily successful by the measures set by the strikers themselves. Following initial pieces in publications like Shadowproof and the Bay View, mainstream outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR started covering the protest. Social-media posts from the strike organizers and their supporters have gone viral. People are talking about the strike and, by extension, about poor prison conditions across the U.S. and prisoners’ demands to see them changed. In an era in which most people experience public events by reading, hearing, and watching videos about them online, the inability to get an inside look at the current prison protest doesn’t seem to have hampered its reach.

“Just as the men in Attica knew that it was important to reach out to the media when they protested inhumane prison conditions in 1971, so too do the folks inside today,” Heather Ann Thompson, a historian and the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, told me in an email. “Prisons are allowed to be the terrible places they are because, despite being public institutions that we fund and are run in our name, we are allowed no look at what goes on inside.”

For all the public attention, Terpstra pointed out that mainstream lawmakers and political organizations, including labor unions, haven’t said much. A day after the strike began, Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman representing Silicon Valley, tweeted his support. “Instead of focusing on rehabilitation, inmates are exploited for cheap labor,” he wrote, noting that prisoners working for a dollar an hour are fighting wildfires in his home state. “That is simply inexcusable.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congressional candidate from New York, wrote, “I don’t believe slavery should exist anywhere in the United States. Including in our prison system.” But many higher-profile politicians have remained silent.

Terpstra says that this is to be expected. He argues that typical political processes tend to defang, and eventually kill, movements such as this one. Still, barring successful legal action on the part of prisoners, conditions aren’t likely to change much without politicians’ involvement. As Christie Thompson has written at The Marshall Project, several of the most prominent work stoppages of recent decades have ended with mixed results, and any gains have typically been achieved as the result of policy changes or legal action.

At the same time, if strikers are indeed generating considerable awareness of their issues among the voting public, that may be more valuable than any single politician’s tweets. And in an age of declining union membership in the U.S., they may be onto something that other labor groups can learn from: If strikers can use the internet to spread their message, such that the online propagation of that message overtakes the fact of the strike itself, perhaps it doesn’t matter how many people are actually carrying picket signs.

* This article originally suggested that solidarity protests outside prison gates had not yet taken place.