We should all be paying attention to the national prison strike going on right now, with actions reported in multiple states.
While it’s hard to get information out of prisons to find out what actions prisoners are taking, they have shared the demands of the national strike. And there is further information about the prisoners’ demands available in draft legislation from the Free Alabama Movement, as well as information about the last prisoners’ strike, in 2016, in summary from the Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee.
It’s important to emphasize that these strikes are nonviolent actions taken at great personal risk by prisoners demanding basic needs: humane conditions of confinement, a fair wage for labor undertaken in prison, an end to very long sentences that are effectively a sentence of “death by incarceration.”
Immigrants in detention are also getting involved, even risking losing access to their children, according to recent reports.
For us abolitionists on the outside, this strike is also an important opportunity to think about who we consider to have authority in talking about prisons, where we get our information, and how far we’re comfortable going. For those of us who come from a “prison reform” or “prison ministry” model (especially if we’re rich and white), the language of strikes and anarchism can be uncomfortable. But prison abolition is a movement that’s always been led by those who are or have been incarcerated. Our job as allies is to listen to their voices, looking first to those who are most marginalized, even if what they have to say makes us uncomfortable. After all, as Christian abolitionists, we follow Jesus who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). Those who are least privileged according to the world should be our leaders (“for God chose the lowly and despised things of the world to shame the great” (1 Corinthians 1:27)). To change our minds to follow the guidance of incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated people and respect their priority as leaders of the movement is an important practice of abolition.