prison labor
August 11, 2022 -
As climate change-fueled heat waves become more frequent and intense, many incarcerated people endure dangerous triple-digit temperatures for long periods. Efforts are underway in some states to bring relief from the heat — and to challenge the underlying constitutional provisions that allow prisoners to be treated as subhuman.
January 11, 2018 -
In Florida state prisons, where a $4 can of soup costs $17 in the canteen, inmates risked their lives performing cleanup duties after Hurricane Irma but were paid nothing in return. This MLK Day, they plan to carry on the tradition of nonviolent resistance by withholding their labor.
August 17, 2017 -
Law professor Angela A. Allen-Bell of Southern University discusses the connections between slavery and mass incarceration in the context of the planned Aug. 19 march in Washington, D.C. The gathering is calling for the 13th Amendment's enslavement clause to be amended to abolish legalized slavery in prisons.
September 16, 2016 -
Forty-five years to the day after the Attica uprising in New York, inmates across the United States organized a strike that spread to dozens of states. Prisoners in Alabama played a key role in planning the groundbreaking action against low-paid and unpaid labor and poor conditions.
August 17, 2016 -
Incarcerated people across the South and nation are planning to strike next month to protest forced work for little or no pay — part of a long history of labor organizing in U.S. prisons.
December 17, 2013 -
The private prison industry is fueling high incarceration rates in Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States. It's a way to keep an indentured class in a state and nation built on slavery.
June 18, 2012 -
As a Senate panel prepares to hold a hearing on prolonged solitary confinement in U.S. prisons on June 19, a law professor at Southern University in Baton Rouge discusses the troubling case of Louisiana's Angola 3 and its human rights implications.
