By C1 Staff
LIVINGSTON, Texas — Spanning across seven Texas prisons, inmates orchestrated a worker’s strike on Monday.
According to RT, inmates are refusing to leave their cells for work assigned by Texas Corrections Industries, protesting a lack of access to quality food and water, low wages, overcrowding, and poor working conditions.
A five-page letter announcing the strike said that “Texas’s prisoners are the slaves of today, and that slavery affects our society economically, morally, and politically. Beginning on April 4, 2016, all inmates around Texas will stop all labor in order to get the attention from politicians and Texas’s community alike.”
Since 1963, Texas prisoners working under TCI have made products ranging from soap, bedsheets, and iron toilets to portable buildings. Prisoners do not receive profits from these products.
Jim Del Ducca, a member of the Incarcerated Worker’s Organizing Committee, told RT that,”People are making a profit off the inmates. Yes, the taxpayers do, ostensibly, fund prisons, but the fact of the matter is that private corporations use prison labor to manufacture goods, which then make profits. And these profits don’t go back to prisoners, they don’t go back to the prison system to lower the burden on the taxpayers.”
Del Ducca said that inmates earn next to nothing for their labor. The assumption that prisoners don’t need money because their housing and food are provided for by taxpayers is, to Del Ducca, an incorrect one. He cited phone calls home priced at “exorbitant rates” and costly medical bills as some examples of inmate expenses.
According to Erica Gammill, director of the Prison Justice League, an organization that works with inmates in Texas, Texas prisons don’t require inmates to be paid at all.
Gammill told The Intercept that “over the long term, we’ll probably see more work stoppages. In prison, you’d think it’d be difficult to spread information, but it actually spreads like wildfire.”
According to the Austin Chronicle, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed on Thursday that seven state prisons had enforced lockdown restrictions. The seven prisons were reported to be on lockdown Monday night.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice Spokesperson Robert Hurst wrote in a statement to The Intercept that the department “is aware of the situation and is closely monitoring it.”