TIL about the 2018 US Prison Strike, an attempt by prisoners to end US Prison Slavery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_U.S._prison_strike

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39418731

Strike participants, their families, and advocacy groups reported that the leaders and organizers of the strike were punished with solitary confinement, loss of communication privileges, and prison transfers.[4][5][6]

Solitary Confinement

Critics of solitary confinement regard the practice as a form of psychological torture with measurable physiological effects, particularly when the period of confinement is longer than a few weeks or is continued indefinitely.[92][93][94][75]

The United Nations Committee Against Torture cited use of solitary confinement in the United States as excessive and a violation of the Convention Against Torture in 2014.[95]

It followed the little-reported 2016 US Prison Strike

234 points · 7 comments · view on lemmy.world

7 Comments

danc4498@lemmy.world · 61 pts · 297d (5 replies)

Prison population is ridiculously high in America too.

big_slap@lemmy.world · 50 pts · 297d (2 replies)

slavery in America never ended, it just got a rebrand

Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 32 pts · 297d

It didn't even rebrand. The 13th amendment may have abolished chattel slavery, but it specifically retained carceral slavery (“except as punishment for a crime“). Becau$e.

BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 282d

We are already enslaved, literally, just in a slightly different form.

Back when they owned actual slaves, they didn't pay them, but they provided food, clothing, and housing, as poor as it was. Today, they don't have to provide any of that stuff, so they give us a pittance in compensation, barely enough to live slightly better than those slaves of old.

Sociopathic Oligarchs, with literally unlimited money, would look on someone making $50k a year as the same as paying them virtually nothing.

In their eyes, we are already slaves, and they want to give us even LESS.

Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 18 pts · 297d

Primarily because slavery is so damn lucrative and the prison industrial complex regulatory capture makes the corn lobby look quaint.

Cybersteel@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 297d
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olafurp@lemmy.world · 40 pts · 297d

Prisoner's rights are human rights.

morgan_423@lemmy.world · 34 pts · 297d

Remember that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where it establishes that the corrupt warden was ruining local businesses because he had no labor overhead costs when deploying prisoners all over town to do project work? And then the local businesses started bribing him to stay away from their livelihoods so that they wouldn't go bankrupt?

Same as modern times: except, it's 10,000 times larger in scale now, and the smaller businesses can no longer afford the bribes. But that's okay, because the government stepped in to pay instead.