INSTITUTE INDEX: A strike at the heart of the prison-industrial complex

Date on which prisoners across the U.S. are planning to strike over being forced to work for little or no pay, describing the protest as a "call to action against slavery in America": 9/9/2016

Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that banned slavery but included a loophole allowing it "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted": 13th

Number of states where prisoner actions will be taking place as part of the strike, including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia: at least 20

Anniversary of the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York, a watershed moment in the prisoners' rights movement, that the strike's start date marks: 45th

Date on which organizers with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union and other groups held a demonstration outside the jail in Durham, North Carolina, to draw attention to the planned prison strike: 8/10/2016

Number of members of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, the IWW's prison organizing group: about 800

Year in which prisoners at the N.C. Correctional Institute for Women staged a sit-in strike at what was then the state's only prison laundry facility and were consequently assaulted by guards: 1975

Year in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, held that prison inmates do not have a First Amendment right to join a union: 1977

Year in which inmates in at least six prisons across Georgia went on strike to demand better pay and conditions: 2010

Month in which strikes took place at at least seven prisons in Texas: 4/2016

Month in which strikes took place in prisons across Alabama, organized by the Free Alabama Movement: 5/2016

Year in which Melvin Ray and Robert Council, the founders of the Free Alabama Movement, first organized strikes at two of the state's prisons: 2014

While employers pay the minimum wage for prisoner labor in Alabama, percent of a prisoner's income the state Department of Corrections is authorized to take to offset the costs of incarceration: 80

Minimum hourly wage for prisoners in Georgia and Texas: $0

Estimated annual value of goods and services produced by inmates in state and federal prisons nationwide for companies ranging from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods: $9 billion

Rank of the U.S. among nations with the highest incarceration rates: 2

Factor by which the South's incarceration rate exceeds the Northeast's: almost 2

While African Americans and Hispanics make up about 25 percent of the U.S. population, percent of the prison population they represent: 58

(Click on figure to go to source.)