Interview by Shawn Gude

When the national prison strike kicked off last month, it sparked something unusual: headlines in mainstream outlets. The New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Time magazine, USA Today — all devoted attention to the actions.

But the spotlight quickly dissipated amid the darkness of prison walls. A week after the strike’s official end date (September 9 — the anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising), we still don’t know how many prisoners participated, the scope of repression they faced, or how many prisons were affected.

What we do know is based on information from organizers. Prisoners in at least sixteen states (and one prison in Canada) engaged in actions like work stoppages, hunger strikes, and commissary boycotts to protest a prison system that fails to “recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.” Authorities responded to the nineteen-day strike by locking down prisons, throwing people in solitary confinement, and placing prisoners in “dry cells” (cells that lack water or working toilets). Some prisons remain on lockdown.

The trigger for the strike was a riot in April at South Carolina’s Lee Correctional Institution. According to authorities, the violence exploded amid a conflict over “territory, contraband, and cellphones” (which are illegal, but more common in South Carolina prisons than elsewhere).

But as historian Heather Ann Thompson notes in the following interview, that account, just like much of what we hear from prison officials, was bunk. Horrendous conditions and egregious mismanagement fueled the violence. And officials’ neglect proved lethal.

Jacobin associate editor Shawn Gude spoke with Thompson — the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy — shortly after the prison strike officially concluded. They discussed the significance of the strike, the opacity of prisons, and why the stigma of incarceration “is being whittled away.”