The ultimate expression of law is not order—it is prison.

George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (1971)

There was a time in the United States when it was not only common knowledge, but commonly reported, legislated, and adjudicated that crime is a function of poverty. This went out sometime during the Carter Administration, its demise heralded by the appearance in 1975 of James Q. Wilson’s Thinking About Crime, where he first aired the broken-windows theory,[ ] which holds that punishment has to be harsh for minor violations of public order to incentivize criminals against larger violations. It’s all about economics, really, and rising crime rates, busted budgets, city bankruptcies, stagflation, wildcat strikes, and outrageous youth were all that Johnson’s Great Society had to show for itself.

The liberals were disarmed, which should have been a good thing, considering their war record. But it was a double-edged sword (pun intended): all that remained of their decades-old reform portfolio was Moynihan’s “tangle of pathologies,” which, when combined with the punitiveness of the Reagan Administration’s rejuvenated war on drugs, left no room for social critique of the old 1960s–early 1970s style. The dregs of this already disgusting mixture has by now fermented into a toxic eugenicist mead of evolutionary psychology, epigenetics, and behavioral economics, with a reform brief of its own:

the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 after four years of unconstitutionality [ ] ;

; New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s innovation of mandatory-minimum sentences for drug possession in 1973, [ ] which were the model for the 1986 us Anti–Drug Abuse Act and its infamous 100:1 crack–powder cocaine ratio;

which were the model for the 1986 Anti–Drug Abuse Act and its infamous 100:1 crack–powder cocaine ratio; Bill Clinton’s 1994 omnibus crime bill, which contributed a great deal to the near-doubling of the us prison population since 1992; [ ]

prison population since 1992; Bill Clinton’s term limits on public assistance via Temporary Assistance to Needy Families; [ ]

Reagan’s, Bush’s and Clinton’s harsh conditions for obtaining and keeping public housing; [ ]

prison-like charter schools for the children of poor blacks and Latinos; [ ]

nonprofit, nonunion, charity-oriented teacher militias, fresh out of college and ready to “give back to the community” by undermining teacher’s unions and public employees generally; [ ]

the brutal policing created by the war on drugs;

tank-driving and grenade-launcher and M16–wielding police officers in public schools.[ ]

There has been a fight over the last item: Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District found out that their school district’s police force, the Los Angeles School Police Department, had received those weapons from the Pentagon, and have recently forced the laspd to give it all back to the Department of Defense, and to formally disenroll from the dod’s “Excess Military Equipment” program 1033![ ]

Someone once said that prison is the most important and least understood subculture in the United States. It may have been George Jackson, who ended up with a life sentence for robbing a gas station of $70, but I don’t remember. It comes to mind because back in the days before rehabilitation was taken off the agenda, prisoners had more opportunities to educate themselves in order to be able to write and speak for themselves, and people listened to what they had to say. For instance, in June 1971 convicts at Attica State Prison in upstate New York started a peer-led sociology class, and this led to the creation of a political group called the Attica Liberation Faction. One month later, in July 1971, this group was making demands of Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the New York Department of Corrections. They did this in the spirit of a similar list of demands presented by Folsom State Penitentiary convicts in 1970. The warden responded by increasing harassment, cutting privileges, and refusing to meet with the convicts.[ ] The famous Stanford Prison Experiment, dramatized in the 2001 Moritz Bleibtreu film Das Experiment, was completed on August 20, 1971, and one day later, on August 21, George Jackson was killed by San Quentin prison guards in an escape attempt. There were work stoppages in prisons across the country, and there was also a daylong hunger strike and an interracial silent demonstration at Attica on August 22. Because of their newfound solidarity in demonstrating over Jackson’s death, the convicts at Attica were ready to go on the offensive against the warden’s refusal to address their demands. They occupied the hospital wing of the prison, and after attempts by guards to repress them, they extended their occupation to a full-scale five-day seizure of the entire facility. Rockefeller sent the National Guard to take the prison back by force, and to kill 10 guard-hostages and 29 convicts.

It’s not over. And it’s not only about “crime” and cultures of pathology. It’s all about economics, really, and always has been. Consider nafta, another of Bill Clinton’s noxious legacies, which flooded Latin America with cheap agricultural products, incentivizing former farmers to seek economic opportunity in El Norte, or in the cultivation of more lucrative and less legal crops. Those tired, poor, huddled masses who manage to cross the border find not only construction, meatpacking, landscaping, janitorial and all other manner of work, but also La Migra: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sometimes La Migra shows up just when workers start demanding better treatment and higher wages, as has occured more than once in meatpacking, for instance.[ ]

In many states, Texas and Arizona among them, these workers find that ice has deputized local law-enforcement agencies, from sheriff’s departments to city police, in the enforcement of immigration laws.[ ] Arizona took this to another level in its own legislature.[ ] When caught, these workers are thrown into special prisons where they are treated like common criminals; not unlike how common criminals were treated as unskilled labor on the chain gangs of yore, or the way they are still treated as agricultural labor on Parchman Farm in Mississippi and Angola in Louisiana, or as service workers in various industrial jobs where they take airline reservations and do other call-center work, or make textiles and license plates, or clean and administer state buildings like penitentiaries, or corporate facilities like private prisons.

Not only is it not over, but a new chapter is beginning. The ongoing struggle of us convicts to preserve and enhance their humanity has been taking on an explicit labor aspect, connected to and conscious of such struggles outside the prison walls, and it appears to be intensifying hand in hand with the convicts’ traditional struggles for human dignity. A short chronology[ ] follows.

1. The “Motin” Insurrection, December 2008

The first of the recent wave of prison strikes and prison riots began in December 2008 in the town of Pecos, Texas, 60 miles from the Chihuahua border, at the Reeves County Detention Center, a federal immigrant-labor prison operated by a company called the geo Group. An epileptic detainee named Jesus Manuel Galindo died from a seizure while in solitary confinement, after he and friends had pled for him to be taken out of solitary, and after having been refused medical attention. Detainees rioted and burned down a small part of the facility after he died. geo blamed its medical subcontractor for the death. Detainees rioted again for five days in January 2009, causing $20 million in damage.[ ]

2. Georgia and the United Nations Against the Machine, December 2010

An interracial coalition of Crips, Bloods, Muslims, Aryan Nation, and Latino convicts staged the largest prison strike in us history, refusing to leave their cells or work, with ten of Georgia’s 78 (!) prisons participating. Their grievance was that their forced labor was unpaid. Not poorly paid, but unpaid. They demanded wages for their work and among the other demands was an end to solitary confinement.[ ] The unam was a result of the strike.

3. Jackson State Hunger Strike, June 2012

Some unam leaders were punished by reassignment to Georgia’s Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, known as Jackson State, the prison at which Troy Davis was executed. Some of them held a hunger strike there to protest their solitary confinement, family restrictions, attorney restrictions, and lack of medical attention, many having been injured after the statewide strike.[ ] The hunger strikers called it quits after 44 days, but a telephone denial-of-service attack, a march on the state Department of Corrections, and a demonstration at the doc commissioner’s office showed the strikers they were not alone.

4. Pelican Bay shu, June 2011

Pelican Bay, opened in 1989, is California’s only super-maximum prison, and it makes heavy use of its Solitary Housing Unit (shu), which means 23-hour cell time and corraled, individual yard activity. California has had people in the shu for decades at a time. Hugo Pinelli, one of the original San Quentin Six accused of actions in the furtherance of George Jackson’s escape attempt, served the longest, with 23 years in the shu. Convicts were assigned to the shu on the basis of mere suspicion or allegation of gang affiliation, and could be held there until they informed on other convicts. After almost three decades of this, there were more than 1,100 convicts in the Pelican Bay shu, and more in other California shus. Half had been in the shu for more than a decade, and 78 had been in the shu for two decades or more.[ ] So the Pelican Bay “Short Corridor Collective,” an interracial group of convicts, undertook a three-week-long hunger strike in June 2011. The strike grew to more than 6,000 convicts across California. Their demands were to end group punishment, abolish the snitching requirement to leave the shu, change the gang-affiliation criteria, follow federal solitary-confinement guidelines,[ ] better food, and better programming for long-term shu convicts.[ ] This drew international attention, and the state legislature held hearings in August. They didn’t do anything, so convicts went on hunger strike again in September. In 2011, the California doc undertook a study of its policies. The upshot of this study is that with virtually any standards for shu assignment at all, the state could not justify its sentences to solitary confinment. A wardens’ group announced the creation of a step-down program to transition convicts back into general population in March 2012, and set actual behavioral standards for shu assignment.[ ] The step-down program provided a path out of solitary other than snitching on fellow convicts. The step-down program required case-by-case review of all shu assignments, which were interrupted by a third hunger strike in July 2013: “At the outset on 8 July, more than 30,000 inmates in two-thirds of the state’s jails joined the strike, the biggest in California history, to protest extended solitary confinement.”[ ] Among the accomplishments of this series of hunger strikes and the class-action lawsuit accompanying them[ ] are the release into general population of the vast majority of reviewed shu cases (910 out of 1,274 in June 2015[ ]), a ban on indeterminate shu sentences, behavior-only sentencing, and a 5-year maximum Pelican Bay shu sentence.[ ]

5. Free Alabama Movement, January 2014

Inspired by the United Nations Against the Machine movement in Georgia, the Free Alabama Movement started in St. Clair Prison and spread to Holman as well. The main spokesman for this first wave of the fam was Melvin Ray, who was explicit and adamant about the strike as a labor action against economic exploitation per se.[ ] The economic impact of the strike is the weapon convicts need, not only to achieve the human dignity under constant attack in prison, but to end mass incarceration itself. Demands were an end to free labor; better living conditions; the abolition of capital punishment and life-without-parole; an end to price-gouging in prison services like J-Pay, commissary, phone companies, and medical co-payments; and sentencing reform to end racial discrimination.[ ] fam established a relationship with the iww[ ] after a second, abortive strike attempt in April,[ ] and has since established links to unam, the Free Mississippi Movement United, the New Underground Movement (in California), Kansas state prisoners, and the Lucasville 5 in Ohio.

6. Stewart Detention Center, Lumpkin, Georgia, June 2014

Detainees at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, began their hunger strike on June 12, 2014. Among their demands were…better food. “The same water used to boil eggs was reportedly being used to make coffee and maggots were found in the food. Immigrants working in the kitchen have stated that food preparation facilities were unsanitary and had a roach infestation. Two or three-day-old food was often served, even though it had gone bad.”[ ] Demands also included due process before lockdown and solitary confinement, hot water, air conditioning (imagine a Georgia summer with no air conditioning), Spanish-speaking staff, and better medical care. Please remember that these are detainees held for violating immigration law.

7. Northwest Detention Center, Tacoma, Washington, March 2014

About 750 out of 1,300 detainees waged both a hunger strike and a work stoppage at geo Group’s Tacoma, Washington, facility on March 7, 2014. Items on their list of complaints were the $1 per day wages, the lack of adequate food, and Obama’s immigration policies more broadly, i.e., the mandatory detention without bail of immigration-law violators, and the perverse incentive structure of immigration enforcement: the Department of Homeland Security must detain a certain number of undocumented immigrants every year in order to get its full budget![ ] Hunger strikers were punished with solitary confinement.[ ]

8. Joe Corley Detention Center, Conroe, Texas, March 2014

Word of the Northwest struggles reached the Gulf Coast quickly, and detainees at another geo Group facility about 40 miles north of Houston went on hunger strike themselves. Their demands were an end to deportation and detention altogether![ ] Seventy-five to 100 supporters, in a National Day of Action to defend the Tacoma hunger strikers, stormed the Harris County (Houston metro area) sheriff’s offices in April, demanding the end of 287(g), the law deputizing local law enforcement for ice, requiring them to check the immigration status of arrestees. Meanwhile, the geo Group increased solitary confinements and the ice sped up deportations to quash the action. There was a single stab at a labor strike in the last days of the Corley hunger strike, but it was not sustained.[ ]

9. Willacy County Detention Center, Raymondville, Texas, February 2015

Detainees at this border-town immigration prison got fed up with the medical care, rotten food, and inadequate plumbing and toilets. They armed themselves with broomsticks and kitchen knives, and took control of the facility. After the FBI arrived to put down the rebellion, they burned down half the tents, and damaged all the others, totally destroying the facility. It no longer exists. Four hundred of the town’s inhabitants (21,921 total inhabitants) lost their jobs, and the county’s debt was reduced to junk, prison revenues having dried up.[ ]

10. Karnes City, Texas, April 2015

A group of 10 mothers, confined with their children in this geo Group detention facility, refused both to eat and to perform their $3 per day labors. They did this twice that month. The Obama administration had helpfully increased the number of family-detention centers after the “unaccompanied minors” immigration crisis in 2014. Prison officials threatened to take their children away, and punished some strikers with solitary confinement.[ ]

11. Tecumseh State Prison, Tecumseh, Nebraska, May 2015

In May 2015, an interracial group of around 400 convicts wanted to tell the warden that they were planning to strike to protest arbitrary solitary confinement and the yearslong (since 2012) “managed-yards model,” which restricted their access to physical exercise and yard time, and a list of other indignities.[ ] A prison guard refused to physically accept the demands, written on a piece of paper for transmission to the warden, and instead started macing the convicts. At this point, the situation turned into what the media call a riot, but which was actually an occupation of two of the three housing units. They held these units for about 10 hours, injuring only 2 of 20 guards in all that time.[ ] A Wobbly was there, incarcerated, and wrote the story up.[ ]

12. Eloy Detention Center, Eloy, Arizona, June 2015

In June 2015, around 200 detainees organized a hunger strike at this Corrections Corporation of America–owned immigrant prison outside Phoenix after guards beat a detainee and then threw him in solitary, where he died. This was the catalyst. Of course, among their grievances were the $1 per day wages at forced labor, and the lack of medical treatment.[ ] They also demanded an end to detention and deportation per se: “no more criminalization, detention and deportations.”[ ]

13. Holman Prison, Atmore, Alabama, March 2016

At the same Holman prison activated in the 2014 fam strike, two convicts had a fight. First a guard tried to intervene and got stabbed, and then the much-hated warden, a cruel man who had increased levels of violence (both staff and convict) and cut back on popular programs, tried to break up the fight himself, and he also got stabbed.[ ] Convicts occupied that wing of the prison and tried to burn it down.[ ] fam began talking statewide strike, and sent a list of demands to the state department of corrections calling for federal intervention and repeal of repeat-offender laws.[ ]

14. fam and the Statewide Alabama Prison Strike, May 2016

fam continues to wield the strike weapon. The fam led a labor stoppage, started on May 1, which was scheduled to last 30 days. The strike activated St. Clair, Holman, and Staton, the same prisons involved in the 2014 fam strike.[ ] When they got wind of this, officials started “bird-feeding” the convicts and restricting their commissary purchases. All striking Alabama prisons were put on lockdown, which means confinement to cells for 23 hours a day. Convicts refused to work both unpaid prison jobs and waged industry jobs: the industry jobs at Holman, for instance, are license plates, sheetmaking, canning, recycling, vehicle restoration, and chemicals manufacturing. Alabama prisoners have to pay, out of their own pockets, for such things as prison identification cards and armbands, drug tests, and court petitions to file complaints of any kind. Demands include the abolition of unpaid labor, based on 13th Amendment considerations, better sanitation and water, and the creation of a grievance procedure. The emergency-call buttons in the solitary confinement units have never worked.[ ]

15. Incarcerated Wobblies and the Nationwide General Prison Strike, Texas, April 2016

Beginning on April 4, 2016, back in Texas, some incarcerated Wobblies (part of the union’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee) organized a strike that spread to 7 Texas prisons: Lynaugh in Fort Stockton, Mountain View in Gatesville, Polunksy in Livingston, Roach in Childress, Robertson in Abilene, Torres in Hondo, and Wynne in Hunstville. Authorities at the first unit to strike, Robertson, placed the facility on lockdown the night before, in an attempt to quash the strike, but the next morning, the only people to go to work were the trustees, a tiny minority of convicts. Among the demands are an end to unpaid labor, parole at the earliest possible date, a repeal of $100 medical co-payments, an impartial grievance procedure, and air conditioning. Again, no air conditioning in Texas prisons![ ] If you’ve ever been to Texas, you know this is a serious problem. Authorities kept Robertson on lockdown for three weeks.

Like I said, a new chapter is beginning. The fam, the Free Virginia Movement, and the iwoc, which has members in prisons all over the country, are planning for a September 9, 2016, nationwide general prisoner strike to commemmorate the Attica rebellion, 45 years ago that day.[ ]