Posted on 04/21/2014 8:34:06 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Melvin Ray
Inmates at an Alabama prison plan to stage a work stoppage this weekend and hope to spur an escalating strike wave, a leader of the effort told Salon in a Thursday phone call from his jail cell.
“We decided that the only weapon or strategy … that we have is our labor, because that’s the only reason that we’re here,” said Melvin Ray, an inmate at the St. Clair correctional facility and founder of the prison-based group Free Alabama Movement. “They’re incarcerating people for the free labor.” Spokespeople for Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and his Department of Corrections did not respond to midday inquiries Thursday. Jobs done by inmates include kitchen and laundry work, chemical and license plate production, and furniture-making. In 2011, Alabama’s Department of Agriculture reportedly discussed using inmates to replace immigrants for agricultural work; in 2012, the state Senate passed a bill to let private businesses employ prison labor.
Inmates at St. Clair and two other prisons, Holman and Elmore, previously refused to work for several days in January. A Department of Corrections spokesperson told the Associated Press at the time that those protests were peaceful, and told AL.com that some of the inmates’ demands were outside the authority of the department to address. The state told the AP that a handful of inmates refused work, and others were prevented from working by safety or weather issues. In contrast, Ray told Salon the January effort drew the participation of all of St. Clair’s roughly 1,300 inmates and nearly all of Holman’s roughly 1,100. He predicted this weekend’s work stoppage would spread further and grow larger than that one, but also accused prison officials of hampering F.A.M.’s organizing by wielding threats and sending him and other leaders to solitary confinement. “It’s a hellhole,”(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Corporations pay off politicians all the time to get laws that are favourable to them?
You don’t think that they can’t get politicians to pass laws that get people jailed for crimes that we used to handle differently?
It used to be that people, who were caught drunk sleeping in their cars, would be thrown in the drunk tank and let go in the morning. Now, they can spend months in prison for the same offense.
One of the jobs that prisoners do is food preparation & running the chow hall. Don’t wanna work? fine. No work, no sammich. figure out your own way how you’re gonna eat. If it comes down to food this “stoppage” will be over quickly.
Trust me, from what I’ve seen of prison “hunger strikes” this will be short lived. You’re not talking about inherent self- discipline when you talk about convicts.
CC
Hunger strikes end when canteen draw runs out
LOL, yes it does tend to!
CC
The only way they would spend months in jail, is if they have already have been convicted several times of DUI.
Not in Montana. First time caught can mean jail time.
http://www.edgarsnyder.com/drunk-driving/driving-alcohol-laws/montana-drunk-driving-laws.html
My point was that laws do get changed and what used to be handled informally now can often mean jailtime.
Certainly not months for a first-time offense.
That depends on the state. Go to that website and see the penalties. Montana is one of the states where the judge can sentence you to prison for months for a first time offense.
However, quibbling with drunk driving laws is not my point. My point was that, when there is a profit motive to jailing people, politicians can be influenced to pass laws that help get people jailed and that shouldn’t be allowed.
“Working for a private company for close to no wages, so that they can profit off your behind, is not paying your debt to society, because society doesn’t see that money.”
Sure it does. The local economy sees the benefits. Those companies who make the money can hire other workers. Workers who could have very well been the victims of these animals.
“Would you rather see them growing weed, sitting on their ass giggling, or out in the streets shooting up the town Al Capone style, while the poison junkies rob grannies to get a fix?”
Problem is, you don’t get one or the other, you get both!
He no longer needs food and air then..
What we have here is “failure” to communicate./S
The chain gangs of old south need to be brought back. Hard manual labor.
No ac, no easy time.
Bread and beans and water. Make the experience so dreadful that they do not want to be there, much less return.
Al Capone lives. Prohibition gives him power.
We didn't have these problems before prohibition. People actually were FREE to choose what medications they wanted to be treated with. And we have the audacity to complain about the left imposing their medical will upon us, when we have been doing it for 100 years now.
Either we are FREE or we are property of the state. There is no middle ground. Do as we tell you, or be enslaved. Is this sinking in yet?
If you think half the citizens should be rounded up and put in jail/concentration camps, you might be a ?????
Making license plates in all the states I know of is done by the correctional facilities. The rest of the jobs were all pertinent to the running of the prison. Just because there was TALK of using inmates for ag labor did not make it happen.
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I know the Texas state prisons years ago used prison inmates to farm on their properties. The food produced was used in feeding the staff and inmates. In bounty yield years, the surplus vegetables would be sold to local markets at a nominal price. ....Don’t know if they still do that.
At any rate, the prisoners preferred being outside and being productive rather than being cooped up in a 8x10 all day; and they ate well.
“I don’t know about other states, but I am pretty sure that is not true in California.”
They make wiring harnesses for the F-16 at the Lom Poc facility, competing against private industry.
They make signs for the Federal government, competing against private industry.
State and federal prisons are not to bad but the ton of private prisons popping up are a definite threat to private industry.
Prison is a disaster for our people - it’s a factory for creating true sociopaths out of bad boys, and it should be so greatly reduced in size and scope as to be effectively abolished.
I favor capital punishment for all violent offenses where a stranger is the victim, physical punishments for most non-violent offenses, and indentured servitude for restitution.
But it would seem to me that anybody who believes that prisoners should be subjected to Dante’s seven levels of hell probably aren’t fit for society in general.
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Prisoners in US prisons are probably more coddeled than those in other countries. Weight rooms, TV, a/c and heating, meals, showers, clean clothes, medical care, religious services, etc. ...A portion of recidivism in the US is due to released criminals committing another crime so they can return to prison where all their needs to survive are met.
I’m guessing that you are opposed to enhanced interrogation of terriorists, too, since you seem to think that incarceration in a US prison is akin to Dante’s Inferno.
They should get standard wages and then get the fifty thousand plus that it costs to keep them deducted.
——don’t think I can support private enterprise taking advantage of those in captivity ——
Though I don’t necessarily disagree with the premise of your post, what caught my eye was the work “captivity”....
These imates are not “captives” that implies something entirely different....
Most if not all of these “Inmates” are there because of their criminal activity, they were not captured...
I like Louisiana’s Angola prison model.
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