Last April, a seven-hour prison riot at South Carolina’s Lee Correctional institution left seven inmates dead and dozens injured. State Corrections Department Director Bryan Stirling cited the source of the riot as “likely gang-related,” but inmates say that it was provoked by overly punitive prison guards who subsequently made no effort to intervene or offer medical aid for hours. It was the deadliest incident in a U.S. prison in 25 years.

Many incarcerated people and prisoner advocates attributed the riot to the structural brutality of the prison system itself. In response, prison rights advocacy groups and incarcerated organizers have called for a nationwide prison strike to last from August 21 — the 47th anniversary of revolutionary George Jackson’s death in San Quentin State Prison — to September 9, the anniversary of the Attica Prison riot.

“For the past three years, prisoners have held demonstrations during Black August, but after the catalyzing Lee Correctional atrocity, prisoners knew that they had to do something targeted and focused,” Amani Sawari, a Seattle-based organizer assisting with strike coordination from outside prison walls, told me.

According to organizers, incarcerated people in 17 states will be taking part in strike actions, including work stoppages, spending boycotts, sit-ins, and hunger strikes. By participating, they risk retaliation from guards, who can put them in solitary confinement or withhold their mail and phone calls.

“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,” read a statement from Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a national collective of incarcerated people who provide legal assistance behind bars. “These men and women are demanding humane living conditions, access to rehabilitation and the end of modern day slavery.”

The strikers have put forward a list of 10 demands, including “immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons,” an end to life-without-parole sentencing, an end to racial over-charging and over-sentencing, voting rights for all imprisoned and formerly imprisoned individuals, the reinstatement of Pell Grants, and that incarcerated people be paid the prevailing wage for their labor. Just this month, 2,000 incarcerated people, including 58 imprisoned youths, were paid just $1 an hour to battle California’s wildfires — a dangerous job which ordinarily pays six figures, and for which former prisoners are often ineligible upon release.

According to one incarcerated member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak in South Carolina, the demands were compiled through discussions between prisoners around the country “from all walks of life and different situations.” The 36-year-old organizer, who goes by the initial “D” to avoid possible retaliation, told me: “These demands are not the solution, but they are what we consider the key solutions to a lot of problems we’re facing.” Despite asking for no more than basic rights and recognition as members of society, D is skeptical that they’ll be fully met anytime soon, noting that “these demands will stand after September 8, and we’ll need to keep pushing for them.”

The history of prison strikes in the U.S. is one of Sisyphean struggle and mixed success. In 2010, thousands of incarcerated workers in Georgia participated in a work stoppage and refused to leave their cells for six days, demanding that they receive pay for their labor. Despite being one of largest prison strikes in U.S. history, as the Marshall Project reported, “Prisoners in Georgia are still not paid for their labor.”

A 2016 nationwide prison strike, which involved over 24,000 participants, led to few material gains and, as The Intercept reported at the time, “the coordinated strike remain[ed] largely ignored on the outside.” By contrast, a 2013 California prison hunger strike, which involved over 29,000 inmates and lasted for more than two months, succeeded in ending indefinite solitary confinement in the state’s prisons.