Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee | |
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| Founded | July 31, 2014 [1] |
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| Location |
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| Publication | Incarcerated Worker |
| Website | incarceratedworkers |
TheIncarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) is a prison-led section of the Industrial Workers of the World. Its purpose is 'a union for the incarcerated,' with the goal of abolishing prison slavery, as well as fighting to end the exploitation of working-class people around the world.
The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee was founded as a labor union for prisoners. [2] Among those who helped to found the IWOC was Brianna Peril. [3] [4] Peril is a veteran organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a group founded in 1905. [5] She was previously imprisoned in the 1980s. [4] The IWOC is a committee of the IWW. [6]
On September 9, 2016, the IWOC helped organize a U.S. prison strike on the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising. [7] [8] The strike involved an estimated 24,000 prisoners in 24 states, the largest prison strike in U.S. history. [9] The IWOC coordinated the strike alongside the Free Alabama Movement. [10]
This was followed through with another prison strike on August 21, 2018 which was organized by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and supported by the Committee. [11] The strikers protested against a system they describe as "prison slavery", making 10 demands. [12] Two notable demands, for example, were that the Prison Litigation Reform Act be rescinded, and that inmates serving their sentences get their voting rights back, alongside pre-trial detainees and ex-convicts. [13] This strike lasted until September 9, the same day the first prison strike started, and was supported by the ACLU. [14] Prisoner participation occurred in at least 17 states. [12]
Despite the strike ending on September 9, 2018, some prisoners continued to strike. [15]
In 2019, the Committee successfully lobbied for the local government of Gainesville, Florida to stop using prison labor in collaboration with Florida's Department of Corrections. [16] The same year, the IWOC was among the groups that lobbied for the Florida Democrats to return a donation from G4S, a private prison contractor. [6] In Wisconsin, the group lobbied to end solitary confinement. [17]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Committee has advocated on behalf of prisoners who had been affected in some way, such as those who had been infected or were affected by prison lockdowns. [18] [19] [20] This has included advocating for those who had a health condition or a minor sentence to receive an early conditional release from incarceration during the pandemic, due to risk of infection. [21]
On July 31, 2014, IWOC released their official Statement of Purpose, which includes five key tenets:
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), nicknamed "Wobblies", is an international labor union founded in Chicago in 1905. The nickname's origin is uncertain. Its ideology combines general unionism with industrial unionism, as it is a general union, subdivided between the various industries which employ its members. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism", with ties to socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements.
Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which an incarcerated person lives in a single cell with little or no contact with other people. It is a punitive tool used within the prison system to discipline or separate incarcerated individuals who are considered to be security risks to other incarcerated individuals or prison staff, as well as those who violate facility rules or are deemed disruptive. However, it is also used as protective custody on incarcerated individuals whose safety is threatened by others in order to separate them from the general prison population.
The prison-industrial complex (PIC) is a term, coined after the "military-industrial complex" of the 1950s, used by scholars and activists to describe the many relationships between institutions of imprisonment and the various businesses that benefit from them.
Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) is a supermax prison facility in Crescent City, California. The 275-acre (111 ha) prison takes its name from a shallow bay on the Pacific coast, about 2 mi (3.2 km) to the west.
Incarceration in the United States is one of the primary means of punishment, penal labor and rehabilitation, for the commission of crimes or other offenses. Prison terms are typically reserved for those found guilty of more serious crimes, defined as felonies by state and federal legislatures. Over five million people are under supervision by the criminal legal system. Nearly two million people are incarcerated in state or federal prisons and local jails, 2.9 million people are on probation, and over 800,000 people are on parole. At year-end 2021, 1,000,000 people were incarcerated in state prisons; 157,000 people were incarcerated in federal prisons; and, 636,000 people were incarcerated in local jails. By year-end 2021, the U.S. prison population had declined 25% since reaching its peak in 2009. The nearly 1.2 million people imprisoned in 2021 were nearly six times the prison population 50 years ago, before the prison population began its dramatic growth.
The rights of civilian and military prisoners are governed by both national and international law. International conventions include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the United Nations' Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour which prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
Contemporary slavery, also sometimes known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 49.6 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of enslaved people is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, lock-up, hoosegow or remand center, is a facility in which convicted criminals are confined involuntarily and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state as punishment for various crimes. Authorities most commonly use prisons within a criminal-justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those who have pled or been found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment.
Penal labor in the United States is explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "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." Unconvicted detainees awaiting trial cannot be forced to participate in labor programs in prison as this would violate the Thirteenth Amendment.
In the United States penal system, upwards of 20 percent of state and federal prison inmates and 18 percent of local jail inmates are kept in solitary confinement or another form of restrictive housing at some point during their imprisonment. Solitary confinement (sometimes euphemistically called protective custody, punitive segregation (PSEG) or room restriction) generally comes in one of two forms: "disciplinary segregation," in which inmates are temporarily placed in solitary confinement as punishment for rule-breaking; and "administrative segregation," in which prisoners deemed to be a risk to the safety of other inmates, prison staff, or to themselves are placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, often months or years.
The Free Alabama Movement (FAM) is an inmates rights group based in the United States. With the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, the Free Alabama Movement has organized the 2016 U.S. prison strike that involved an estimated 24,000 prisoners in 24 states, the largest prison strike in U.S. history. The strike began on September 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising.
The 2016 U.S. prison strike was a prison work stoppage that began on September 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising. The strike occurred in 24 states, and over 24,000 prisoners took part in the strike. The involvement of 24,000 prisoners made this strike the largest ever recorded in the U.S. Within a week, inmates from approximately 20 prisons participated. Organizations involved in coordinating the strike included the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee and the Free Alabama Movement.
The August Rebellion was an uprising on August 28, 1974, at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a New York State prison in Bedford Hills in the Town of Bedford, Westchester County, New York, United States. In August 1974, about 200 women imprisoned at Bedford Hills rebelled, taking over parts of the prison, in protest of the inhumane treatment of Carol Crooks. A subsequent civil-action lawsuit, ruled in the inmates' favor, led to greater protections of Fourth Amendment rights for incarcerated people.
The 2018 U.S. prison strike was a series of work stoppages and hunger strikes in prisons across the United States that began on August 21 and ended on September 9. The strike was conducted at least in part in response to the April 2018 prison riot at Lee Correctional Institution, which killed seven inmates and was the deadliest prison riot in the U.S. in the past 25 years.
Kevin "Rashid" Johnson is a revolutionary, writer, artist, social activist, founding member of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, founding member of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, member of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, and prisoner in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted prisons globally. There have been outbreaks of COVID-19 reported in prisons and jails around the world, with the housing density and population turnover of many prisons contributing to an increased risk of contracting the virus compared to the general population. Prison crowding and lack of sanitation measures contribute to the risk of contracting diseases in prisons and jails. As a mitigation measure, several jurisdictions have released prisoners to reduce density and attempt to reduce the spread of the illness. There have also been protests among prisoners, riots and prison breaks in multiple countries in response to prisoner anger over their risk of contracting illness in prison conditions. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, health services within prisons had issues providing adequate care for incarcerated people, and this has only been exacerbated by the impacts of COVID-19. Minority groups within the prison system have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Strikes occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic due to many factors including: hazard pay or low pay, unsafe working conditions, inability to pay rent. These strikes are separate from the various protests that occurred over responses to the pandemic.
Prisoners' Justice Day is a solidarity movement that takes place annually on August 10. The movement began in Canada in 1974 in support of prisoners’ rights and to remember all the people who have died of unnatural deaths while incarcerated. The first Prisoners' Justice Day was held at the Millhaven Institution on August 10, 1975, on the first anniversary of Edward Nalon's death. In addition to a day of mourning, six prisoners took part in an eighteen-day hunger strike. In 1976, August 10 was recognized as a memorial day where prisoners would strike in opposition to the use of solitary confinement and to protest inmate conditions within the Prison System by going on a one-day hunger strike and refusing to work.
The 2010 Georgia prison strike was a prison strike involving prisoners at 7 prisons in the U.S. state of Georgia. The strike, organized by the prisoners using contraband cell phones, began on December 9 and ended on December 15. It was reported at the time to be the largest prison strike in United States history and was followed by similar strikes in several other states, as well as nationwide strikes several years later, in 2016 and 2018.
