When the summer sun in Florida pushes temperatures past 100 degrees, state prisoners — the vast majority of whom are stuck in jail without air-conditioning on drug charges — feel it. When those inmates work (they were forced, for example, to clean up after Hurricane Irma), they typically don't get a dime in return. When their mostly poor families send them money for food and necessities, a $4 case of soup costs $17.

So next Monday — the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday — a large number of prisoners say they will lay down their tools, sit, and refuse to work for 30 days to demand, in the short term, better living conditions, actual wages, an end to the death penalty and prison-guard brutality, increased access to parole, and restored voting rights for former felons. In the long term, the strikers are demanding an end to a criminal justice system that virtually enslaves poor, mostly black people.

"It’s time we reverse the psychology and STAND together," the prisoners wrote in an online statement. "The way to strike back is not with violence as this is what they want! If we show them violence they will have a legitimate excuse to use brute force against us and explain to the public that they had to use brute force in order to contain the situation. However, their weakness is their wallet."

The strikers, calling their rally "Operation PUSH" (perhaps for Jesse Jackson's group that transformed American politics in the 1970s), hope to persuade every worker in the Florida Department of Corrections to lay down on the job for a full month. They're asking nonprisoners to help by donating to the cause and attending solidarity rallies across the state from 1 to 3 p.m. Monday, January 15. Miami's demonstration will be held outside the state office building at 401 NW 2nd Ave. (The Miami Herald also wrote about the strike at the end of December.)

Since the prisoners announced their plans, they've received organizing help from numerous left-leaning and labor organizations in Florida, including the Miami-Dade and Broward County Chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, Supporting Prisoners and Real Change (SPARC), and the national Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), which is run by the International Workers of the World, informally known as the "Wobblies."

Bean Blackett, a Miami DSA member, told New Times yesterday that prisoners and volunteers hope the size of this year's protest eclipses that of 2016's massive, IWOC-organized strike September 9, 2016, which commemorated the anniversary of the infamous 1971 Attica Prison riots in New York.



"We expect it to be even bigger this year," Blackett said.

According to the prisoners, many people living in the Florida corrections system say Americans have become numb to the concerns of the nation's prison population and aren't aware the state is forcing inmates to work for no money, overcharging them (and the families that fill their prison accounts with donated money) for basic items, and subjecting them to regular rape and abuse at the hands of prison guards.

In a separate statement provided to labor activists, a group of Haitian prisoners in the Florida correctional system accused the prison-industrial complex of profiting unfairly from prison labor and said they want to hit prison owners and managers in their wallets to force change:

Prisons in America are nothing but a different form of slavery plantations and the citizens of the country are walking zombie banks. There are so many Haitians, Jamaican, and Latinos in the FDOC serving sentences that exceeds life expectancy and or life sentences who are not being deported. They use all immigrants, for free Labor and then deport them. Why flood the system with immigrants waiting to be deported after serving their entire sentence? Because of the benefit. The undeniable truth is Florida prisoners are slaves who work and do not get paid. New age slaves within the prisons system!!! [sic]

In their statement and in an interview with the anarchist news website It's Going Down, Operation PUSH organizers have demanded that prisoners in Florida reject violence and rioting for the 30-day stretch. Instead, the inmates say they'll be more effective if they can hit prison profiteers in their checkbooks.

"Our goal is to make the Governor realize that it will cost the state of Florida millions of dollars daily to contract outside companies to come and cook, clean, and handle the maintenance," the organizers write. "This will cause a total BREAK DOWN."

Here's the full statement: