Prisoners and their families say strike ‘leaders were picked off, one by one’ and sent to solitary confinement or suddenly transferred

As a multi-state prison strike continues through a second week, many participants have been hit by prison officials with swift and vicious reprisals, advocates, prisoners and their families said.

It is claimed that inmates – especially those seen as organizers – have been subject to solitary confinement, revocation of communication privileges and long-distance transfers, in attempts to weaken the effects of work stoppages and to chill dissent.

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Inmates organized the strike, which began on 21 August, to call attention to both virtually unpaid prisoner labor, which they liken to “modern slavery”, and overcrowded conditions.

“The retaliation and repression was instantaneous and constant,” said Brooke Terpstra, spokesperson for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, one of the groups helping publicize the strike. “Leaders were picked off, one by one, and thrown into solitary in anticipation of the strike that was coming.”

Family members said that was what happened to Ronald Brooks, a Louisiana inmate who has spent the past 20 years at the infamous Angola prison. After appearing in a video supporting the strike, they said, he was transferred hundreds of miles, suddenly. Like some other organizers, Brooks has used a contraband cellphone to relay his grievances to the world.

“We are anti-slavery and are organizing to … turn our jails and prisons into places of human redemption, healing and higher learning,” Brooks said in a video, his face obscured by cloth.

Brooks’s mother, Margarette Peppers Ray, told the Guardian she spoke to the warden at Angola, who told her officials were “spooked” by the strike and that “he immediately had Ronald transferred out as a punishment and a deterrent”, to David Wade correctional facility, some 250 miles away. Angola is reasonably in reach of Brooks’s New Orleans-based family but David Wade – a six-hour drive – is not.

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Peppers Ray said Brooks’s visitation privileges had been suspended anyway and his outside communication curtailed to one 10-minute phone call a month. She was proud but a little frustrated to report that on their first call since the transfer, her son spent most of his time talking about his concern for other inmates.

“He’s not as worried about himself as he should be, he’s only worried about the situation that’s going on there,” she said.

Brooks told her that in the muggy late-summer heat, inmates were being forced to wear thick jumpsuits.

“To get any kind of coolness they’re having to lay on the concrete floor, and they’re having to place their feet into the toilet bowl just to get cooled off,” she said.

The Louisiana department of public safety and corrections declined to address Brooks’s case specifically, telling the Guardian in an email: “Any offender … may be transferred at any time to any appropriate facility. Transfers are not punitive in nature and are not part of the disciplinary process.”

Kevin Rashid Johnson is another strike leader who has claimed official retribution. In an editorial published in the Guardian last week, he described being held in a cell on death row, despite not being sentenced to death.

“There can be only one reason they have put me here,” he wrote, “to shut me up and prevent me fraternising with other prisoners as they fear I will radicalise them and encourage them to resist their oppression.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Lee correctional institution in South Carolina was the site of a strike in April where seven prisoners died. Photograph: Sean Rayford/AP

The strike was spurred by unrest in a South Carolina facility in April, in which seven prisoners died. In a list of 10 demands released through the inmate law group Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS), strike organizers demanded improved conditions; an end to life-without-parole sentences, or “death by incarceration”; increased funding for rehabilitation services; and an end to the disenfranchisement of some 6 million Americans with felony convictions.

The chief aim of the strike, however, is an end to imposed labor in return for paltry wages, a widespread practice in US prisons. Organizers cite the 13th amendment to the constitution, which abolished the institution in wider society.

More than 800,000 prisoners are put to work each day cleaning, cooking, farming and mowing, in some states compulsorily. In states like Louisiana compensation is as low as 4¢ an hour, even though prisons are entirely reliant on such labor. Despite this, the total control prison officials have over inmates puts strike organizers at a profound disadvantage.

“It’s much harder for prisoners to attempt to defend their rights as workers because of the basic privileges like showers, edible food, clean clothes and [even] toilet paper can be taken away in retaliation,” said Amani Sawari, a JLS spokesperson.

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In Louisiana, inmates who have not had communication privileges curtailed are not permitted to speak with the media by telephone or other electronic communication.

It remains unclear how successful the strike has been. Organizers expressed optimism that inmates in as many as 17 states would participate in some form of action, but only a handful of efforts have been confirmed. According to the Marshall Project, prisons officials in several states where organizers say strike actions have taken place have denied that is the case.

“Prisoners know their conditions will not change without their leadership,” said Sawari. “The threat of retaliation does not dissuade them, it fuels their participation.”

Peppers Ray said her son would not fold under pressure.

“People have given their lives over their beliefs and causes,” she said. “And my son is definitely one who is that way.”