The Largest Prison Strike In American History Goes Ignored By US Media

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/41235/the-largest-prison-strike-in-american-history-goes-ignored-by-us-media/

by gnubardt • 16 years ago

236 103 16 years ago

sage_joch2• 16 years ago

"... prisoners in Georgia are forced to work without pay for their labor--seemingly a violation of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude."

I hadn't thought about that before, but that's a very interesting point. The fact that such a high percentage of the prison population is black makes it hit home a little harder.

anon11• 16 years ago

"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

sage_joch2• 16 years ago

Ouch, I stand corrected. I should know by now not to take quotes from articles at face value, especially when it is so easy to look up the source directly. :-)

fleitz3• 16 years ago

There are many ways to interpret that statement. One interpretation would go towards that a judge may specify involuntary servitude (eg. community service) as punishment, and another would say that involuntary servitude is implied by the prison sentence.

I'm sure the prisoners take the former interpretation that involuntary servitude was not specified as punishment and thus is unconstitutional.

Also, the 13th amendment absolutely bans slavery, so if you can construe characteristics of ownership then you could make it unconstitutional. Georgia also has a history of abusing the law to keep slavery in all but name going which would negatively impact the states' case in a non-southern court, and would make a good case as to the intent of Georgian legislation being to revive slavery. I mean when they're trying to put the Confederate flag back on their flag it gives a person pause as to the intent of not paying their labor. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,85078,00.html

This is why most states pay their employees in prison a pittance rather than absolutely nothing. It avoids the issue entirely and makes it one of labor law.

Re-education through labor, not just for communists anymore!

barrkel• 16 years ago

Which just shows you a flaw in the US constitution.

joe_the_user5• 16 years ago

The prisoners are indeed incorrect concerning the 13th Amendment.

If only they'd paid attention in their classes on the constitution... wait, all education for prisoners has been abolished, another thing they're protesting.

cma• 16 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385722702/

bugsy7• 16 years ago

Wow, the "except as punishment for a crime" was used to reimplement slavery throughout the south from 1866 to 1941, with widespread arrests of black people on bogus charges, and then selling them to Corporations to be worked to death and beaten as a free labor source that can work 16 hours a day 365 days a year. And all well documented. I had not heard that before and I thank you for linking to a book that documents it.

adrianbg• 16 years ago

Who cares about amendments? Is it moral or not?

JulianMorrison• 16 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindn...

"Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama's political success and Oprah Winfrey's financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that [w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control (More African Americans are under correctional control today... than were enslaved in 1850). Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the war on drugs. She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: most Americans know and don't know the truth about mass incarceration—but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that."

bugsy7• 16 years ago

I agree with that book, however I see that the underlying dynamic behind it is profit mongering by the for-profit prison and for-profit bail bonding industries, both of which spend huge parts of their profits on political lobbying that increases their profits. Racism and fundamentalist religion notions about punishment are the tools they use to advance their agenda. Just pointing out that we have racist outcomes in the justice system won't change the dynamic of what is going on. Prisons are profit centers. For some.

pmorici2• 16 years ago

To be fair they are being fed and housed so it isn't like they are going totally uncompensated.

elliottcarlson• 16 years ago

Not sure why the parent was down voted - this is a legitimate statement - while they are not compensated, they are given free room and board which is at times more than what low income poverty stricken families can guarantee themselves.

They are incarcerated for a reason (yes there are cases of innocence - but realistically, the majority of offenders are in there for a reason). Whether it was a crime out of necessity, passion or simply because the perpetrator was downright crazy - they committed a crime, and their legal rights should be minimized to a minimum without making it a case of human rights violations.

If a work or education program can be offered to help people possibly correct their lives, excellent - if rehabilitation is possible - great. But they should not have the same rights as regular law abiding citizens.

joe_the_user5• 16 years ago

As has been noted, the 13th amendment prohibit's involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.

Involuntary servitude means you have no choice, not that you aren't fed in the process. Indeed, even slaves are usually fed and housed since they constitute an investment on their owners' part (usually not well fed or housed, of course). The camps where you were forced to work without eating were known as death camps, which fortunately would fall under the cruel and unusual punishment clause here.

jasonkester• 16 years ago

One could make the case that they are in fact volunteering for their servitude.

There are strict criteria, which you have to go out of your way to meet, that determine whether you're eligible to get in to a prison. It's easy to make the argument that everybody there is there by choice.

jgershen• 16 years ago

Not true; it is possible to be convicted of a crime of which you are innocent.

derefr• 16 years ago

Just for a single counterexample: anyone who has ever been falsely accused of rape. You can literally spend your entire life sitting at home watching TV, and end up in a prison.

astrodust• 16 years ago

There are a lot of people that are railroaded into prison for simply being in the wrong place, looking like the wrong guy, or simply having a bad attitude. In some states it's extremely arbitrary, where they will brand you an accomplice simply because you picked up a hitch-hiker who happened to have drugs on them.

It's insane.

axod2• 16 years ago

Slavery wasn't abolished. It was just reinvented.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

At the very least, it seems like it'd be a good idea to respond to this positively if only to encourage non-violent, instead of violent, prison protests in the future.

j_baker2• 16 years ago

"We have the Crips and the Bloods, we have the Muslims, we have the head Mexicans, and we have the Aryans all with a peaceful understanding, all on common ground."

Whatever's happening, they must have done something terrible to cause that.

raganwald2• 16 years ago

HN is about interesting new phenomena, and these factions working together seems to qualify. Good call.

Also of interest to Hackers, of course, is the suggestion that Old Media has ignored the strike. Why? It seems like terrific news fodder for the traditional Left and the traditional Right. This is very curious to me.

Everything else about the actual prison conditions and so on... Seems like "politics" to me unless there's an interesting new angle to it.

j_baker2• 16 years ago

Fair enough. I've edited my previous post.

ams6110• 16 years ago

I found it surprising that the strike was apparently coordinated across many state prisons by use of cell phones. I thought possession of cell phones was generally banned in prisons.

marcusbooster• 16 years ago

Yes cell phones are considered contraband, and yes they are available.

shepting• 16 years ago

Many times guards will bring in cell phones and sell them to inmates for upwards of $1000/each.

It helps to supplement the (relatively) poor wages most guards receive.

blrgeek• 16 years ago

That someone thought and made possible this kind of peaceful protest uniting these specific gangs is in itself incredible!

The story of the people behind this strike must be fascinating.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

> That someone thought and made possible this kind of peaceful protest uniting these specific gangs is in itself incredible!

It seems, surprising as it may appear, possible the correctional system is actually correcting something.

lhnn• 16 years ago

I believe prisoners do have minimal rights, and to the extent feasible, should get a decent meal and perhaps reading material. Weights and playgrounds? Not so much. They should be busting rocks or chopping wood, or something else that is not fun.

Make prison too cozy and beneficial, and you give an incentive for crime.

Also, an alternative cost-cutter to triple bunking prisoners is to incarcerate fewer people, by decriminalizing victim-less acts (cough cough).

tomjen3• 16 years ago

I kinda agree with you on the first part, but if they should be allowed to read books, which are presumably fun or at least interesting to read, why not let them do "fun" exercises? It seems terribly inconsistent.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

And yet, study after study has shown that harsher punishments do little to deter crime, and that despite the poor state that prisons are in, and the conditions one experiences there, recidivism is still ridiculously high.

I've heard the same argument for homelessness and their support structures - make homelessness too easy, who wants to work? I've always asked people who spout this nonsense to go take a look at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen line - I regularly volunteer at both - and then come back and tell me with a straight face that anyone sane will deliberately put themselves in that situation.

I'd tell you do so for prison, but that's not really plausible short of actually ending up in the big house. So instead, I'll urge you to go talk to some people who have been in prison, and figure out a little bit of what happens there. It is not "fun", nor is it any place a sane person would willingly and deliberately put themselves.

randallsquared• 16 years ago

You appear to be using "sane person" to mean "person who shares my values and goals".

gyardley2• 16 years ago

But are prisons primarily for rehabilitation or deterrence?

If someone were to hurt or kill someone close to me, I would want him to go to prison for punishment, if we couldn't just kill him and be done with it.

When I think about this hypothetical person getting, say, programming lessons with my tax dollars, that only makes me angry.

I assume prisons are how they are in part because my attitude is fairly common.

None of the above diminishes the problems of wrongful convictions, cruel and unusual punishments, prison rape, victimless crimes, and so on.

iwwr2• 16 years ago

I don't understand the downvotes.

"Also, an alternative cost-cutter to triple bunking prisoners is to incarcerate fewer people, by decriminalizing victim-less acts (cough cough)."

That's what most of the prisoners are guilty of anyway.

"I believe prisoners do have minimal rights, and to the extent feasible, should get a decent meal and perhaps reading material. Weights and playgrounds? Not so much. They should be busting rocks or chopping wood, or something else that is not fun."

The prison system is too much geared toward either punishment or rehabilitation. The prime concern should be restitution toward the victims, to the fullest extent possible. Then, if possible, prisoners should work to offset the cost of their own incarceration (excluding victimless offenders). So, if the prisoner is able to perform valuable work for that purpose, he should be allowed to, if possible from the confines of the prison.

That said, punishment for punishment's sake is pure sadism. It only breeds hardier criminals. While it gives a victim some temporary relief, it creates future problems and future victims.

gnubardt• 16 years ago

There's also a good interview about the strikes on Democracy Now with prisoner advocate Elaine Brown.

“Repression Breeds Resistance”

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/14/prisoner_advocate_ela...

smokeyj• 16 years ago

I think it's important to note that breaking the law isn't necessarily unethical, therefore we should carefully consider our treatment towards "criminals". The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with Georgia leading the US. It isn't pretty.

aberkowitz2• 16 years ago

The United States government creates a hypocrisy when they do not follow laws put in place by their own institutions.

fleitz3• 16 years ago

The law being ethical is what lawyers would call a 'legal fiction'.

This is why the first juries established jury nullification.

kelnos• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, it seems recently most of the time juries are not informed of their nullification abilities (and the defense is often prohibited from mentioning it). Sadly this line of reasoning has been upheld in court.

Dove• 16 years ago

Their demands seem entirely reasonable to me. I'm ashamed to belong to a society in which such demands must be made, more so that they would be ignored.

ars• 16 years ago

I'm not inclined to believe things prisoners say about their conditions.

So while I agree the demands are reasonable, I'm not (yet) convinced that they needed to be made or that they are ignored.

(Except for the fruits/vegetables, because realistically while they may ask for it, they aren't going to eat it.)

gruseom2• 16 years ago

I'm not inclined to believe things prisoners say about their conditions.

I am. There's evidence that things are far worse than we complacently imagine. For example, a year or so ago there was a shocking multipart series on NPR about what's going on inside California's prisons. Mostly we just don't want to know.

salemh2• 16 years ago

I'll make this quick, and monitor to see if interest demands me go into more detail (personal experience).

We do not rehabilitate prisoners. We have a ridiculous recidivism rate (60%+ depending on your data, demographic, etc).

We have the highest amount of citizens in prison then any Western country.

If the Mandatory Minimum Federal laws for drugs were flipped with actual State Violent crimes, we would have a much better society.

I would love to see inmates having the ability to pursue a trade, learn programming, learn a skill which Trumps their felony..which is incredibly difficult. Felon's are obligated by law to note if they have been Charged with a Felony (depending on the wording, for example: "convicted in the last 7 years" you may mark NO if, it has in fact, been 8).

Something that may be of interest.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/02/getting_out_life_after...

Symmetry• 16 years ago

We live in a society where its ok to joke approvingly about prisoner's suffering violent rape. Of course our prisons are horrible to be in.

weavejester• 16 years ago

I don't think we should be moderating the parent comment down, just because we disagree with what he or she says. If nothing else, it makes the subsequent conversation difficult to follow.

tptacek• 16 years ago

Somebody connect this to Hacker News for me. If this is Hacker News, what human rights story isn't?

Roboprog• 16 years ago

It's a media issue. It's seemingly an important issue, but it isn't covered much. Admittedly, "media" is on the fringes of programming and business.

Besides, many programmers have a libertarian bent, and locking people up, often for questionable stuff, and treating them like dirt rankles. Not that many of them don't deserve to be worked to pay back societal debt. But don't abuse them and feed them junk.

tmsh• 16 years ago

Sort of what I was going to say too. There's something about the raw truth of people doing good things, uncovered by the media -- that seems correlated with Hacker News. But it's an interesting question.

natrius• 16 years ago

It's an article that appeals to us and I'm glad I saw it, but I don't think it's hacker news.

jessriedel• 16 years ago

> It's a media issue

Then why are all the comments about the politics?

aberkowitz2• 16 years ago

It will be interesting to see how the strike dissipates, or fails to dissipate, based on the effectiveness of prisoner's communication networks.

anonymoushn• 16 years ago

Easy fix to crowding due to budget cuts: Release all prisoners who are held only on drug charges.

nolok• 16 years ago

Private prison lobbies won't let that happen

aheilbut• 16 years ago

Based on the accuracy of the headline, I'm not sure how much trust I have in the source. Doesn't seem as if this news is being ignored by the MSM:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/12prison.html Prisoners Strike in Georgia

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/us/16prison.html Some Georgia Inmates Return to Work

nodata• 16 years ago

Poor conditions and substandard medical care are also on the inmates’ list of demands.

Somehow I doubt that..

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

Tsk tsk, HN. As written, the quoted sentence suggests the inmates are demanding poor conditions, the opposite of what was intended.

iwwr2• 16 years ago

Non-violent, therefore not newsworthy.

J3L24043• 16 years ago

"Today marks the end of a seven-day strike where tens of thousands of inmates in Georgia refused to work or leave their cells until their demands had been met. The odd thing is, that until today, no one had ever heard about this strike."

FALSE

I posted this NYT article 4 days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996994

Goladus4• 16 years ago

Seriously.

That death+taxes site set off all kinds of propaganda alarms in my head, and a 5-second google search debunked the initial assertion.

I'm very disappointed with Hacker News.

J3L24043• 16 years ago

In the 1830s de Tocqueville reported on a reformatory in Massachusetts where the prisoners had a voting system in order to make decisions about mealtimes and exercise etc. The interesting thing was the way in which the voting worked. All prisoners had a vote regardless of disciplinary actions but if you stayed out of trouble you had two votes and this system worked very well according to Alexis. Tocqueville in America was quite a good read, although long, and has many insights into early America.

Goladus4• 16 years ago

The article is wrong.

This was covered in the NY Times. The articles were published on the same day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/us/16prison.html

Edit-- Actually, this was covered in the NYT 4 days ago, and the article was submitted to Hacker News and ignored:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996994

Plus, the issue of it being "ignored by US media" is not covered by the article in anything resembling an intellectual way, and merely serves as a sensational hook to get people reading a story already covered by other sources.

http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/12/georgia-prisoner-stri...

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=georgia_prison_strike_in...

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

You'll see the "ignored by the MSM!" angle a lot on these kind of political stories. It's on reddit all the time. Look for headlines like "WTF?! Prisoners on strike and Fox News refuses to report on it! FUCK YOU FOX!!"

It's an easy angle to drum up interest in the story and pander to your readers by making them think they're getting the "real" story.

jackolas• 16 years ago

Well it was being ignored for the first few days, it only just started to get picked up by NYT etc.

joe_the_user5• 16 years ago

The (fairly short) NY Times article was two days after the initial event. As far as I know, it made it to neither the Times front page nor Google news front page nor did it receive any other wider coverage despite being a fairly significant event (in my opinion, obviously).

Also, what would constitute mentioning this lack of coverage in a fashion "resembling an intellectual way"? News stories have hooks and further reading. The problem is...?

Goladus4• 16 years ago

The problem is that the hook is has nothing to do with the subject matter. The story is about a prison strike, the hook is "this story is being suppressed," which is essentially a lie. It's not a bait and reward, it's a bait and switch. It's like putting boobs in a youtube thumbnail despite there not being so much as a single woman in your video.

The first step to an intellectual approach is to actually approach the issue, which this article doesn't.

You would start with a more accurate description of the actual press coverage received, establishing some empirical expectation and an explanation of why this expectation was not met. The author leaves it to the reader to imagine what coverage actually means. What would have constituted adequate coverage? How does this coverage compare to coverage of other major stories? Many articles will have poor and vague answers to these questions. This article doesn't even attempt them.

The next basic question to address is "why was the coverage expectation not met." The author provides only once sentence in the entire article that is even remotely related to this question ("Perhaps there was..."), and it's merely speculation that encourages the reader to imagine all sorts of nefarious possibilities. One possibility is that people just don't care that much. As I mentioned, the article was submitted to hacker news and ignored until some ridiculous bait was added to the headline.

In intellectual article would have done some sort of investigation of those questions as an absolute minimum.

The Largest Prison Strike In American History Goes Ignored By US Media

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