Prison Strike.
For over a week now, more than 6 Georgia prisons have been shut down by the prisoners (the wardens have since gone into lockdown). The prisoners are refusing to leave their cells. They are demanding healthier and better qaulity food, reasonable compensation for labor, improved medical treatments, and better educational opportunities. The strike was organized completely by the prisoners with little to no outside assistance. It crosses racial lines and even has brought people from separate gangs together with a common goal.
For a long time in the USA, prisoners have been force into labor with little to no pay. These prisoners are demonstrating reasonable demands and a refusal to work until the demands are met. They work dangerous jobs, most are not making license plates. They are doing de-forestation, road work, and even employed as customer service agents for major US companies.
I fully support the prisoners. Prison labor is the new slave labor. This story has been scarcely covered but I have found a few news articles. The links are below.
New York Times
Atlanta Constitution Journal
8 comments:
You are right. Prison should be a place where you learn to improve yourself, and hopefully get an education. Most people who ends up in prison here in NZ can barely read, this is why the end up inside.
Bad food, harsh living conditions and no chance to come out a better person are horrible thins enough without adding the hard labour.
Where is civilization?
I agree with you and with Alessandra.
Thanks for the info.
really impressive, getting together like that. thats hard in ANY group!
i like what Alessandra wrote.
i know what you mean about keeping things off the blog, sometimes i will go back and erase what ive written(or parts of) because it got to opinionated or personal. thanks for going out on a limb:)its good since now you know there are like minded people on here!
I'm so glad you posted about this. I heard about it on the radio recently and was so amazed and impressed.
Alessandra has it right.
Thank you for posting this and it is incredible what sort of conditions these prisoners have to endure. Alessandra has it right, and I hope that a more civilized and humane approach is adopted. Bravo to the courageous prisoners who manage to overcome all their individual differences to unite for the good of all!
"it got to opinionated"
i meant too*
ugh
sorry you got neg comments, they must have been pretty bad to have gotten erased. if they were that bad then they are usually from people that just like to spout off.
yayy dirtyduck corrected her grammar! :D i sense a fellow English-preserver :)
Thank you for writing about this. I read both news articles, but was surprised to see nothing about the cost of keeping prisoners vs. the money their labor would be earning them outside... I understand it is quite expensive to house inmates... Though I don't say this to doubt that conditions need improving...
o_o :(
ame
i didn't mean to neglect praise of the prisoner's efforts. It's great that they have been able to unify different gangs and races over this cause and organize it.
It seems like a problem that requires big changes, some program redesign... i wish there were obvious solutions.
in one article you posted, i saw that "Ms. Brown, who lives in Oakland, Calif., said she planned to gather legal and advocacy groups on Monday to help coordinate a strategy for the inmates."
i stuck that in google to see if there were updates on strategies or something... some interesting links are coming up but i haven't had time to properly search them yet.
you may be interested in this blog: http://prisonmovement.wordpress.com/page/2/
ame
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