An April 24 uprising in an Indiana prison brought national attention to the conditions faced by prisoners across the country.
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Guards attack protesting prisoners at the New Castle prison in Indiana, April 24.
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The action began as a peaceful protest when a group of inmates at the New Castle Correctional Facility near Indianapolis took off their shirts in the recreation area, refusing orders from the staff to keep them on. The protest soon grew to include some 500 inmates, who set fire to mattresses and paper in the courtyard and broke furniture and windows in an act of defiance.
Among other grievances, the inmates protested the prison’s ban on smoking and restriction on the possession of other items.
Since mid-March, 630 inmates had been transferred from Arizona to Indiana without any advance notice. Prison officials justified these transfers as an attempt to lessen the overcrowding of Arizona prisons. Although the New Castle Correctional Facility is state-owned, it is operated by the Geo Group, the second largest private prison operator in the United States.
As if the isolation of prison life was not enough, the transfer put thousands of miles between most of the inmates and their families. Katie Decker, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Corrections, explained that at $64 a day, it was more cost-effective to move prisoners across the country than to transfer them to private facilities in the state.
The distance amounts to virtual loss of the prisoners’ visitation rights—something that does not factor into this equation.
Decker also said that the medium-custody inmates were put under lengthy lockdowns reserved for serious offenders, and were receiving their dinners as late as 10 p.m. “They were only given minimal time out on the yard, and it wasn’t until midnight or one o’clock in the morning,” added Decker.
Sixty-one Arizona prisoners and 151 Indiana inmates were transferred out of New Castle the very day after the uprising.
The Indiana events came just over a week after five of the eight Connecticut death row inmates began a hunger strike to protest living standards at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers. Spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement with one hour of solitary recreation, the inmates demanded contact visits, use of the gym and recreation time with one another. A statement written by one of the death row inmates stated, “Death row convicts are suffering from high stress and depression caused by our environment and current living conditions.”
The “investigations” that invariably follow events such as the Indiana uprising are a complete sham. They imply that such rebellions are the products of exceptional irregularities in the system, when the hunger strike in Connecticut shows that such appalling circumstances are found throughout the prison system and are well known to its keepers.
Inhumane conditions are routine
Prison officials need not investigate what drove inmates to rise up—they are quite familiar with the cruel and inhumane conditions of prison life. The maintenance of such atrocious facilities is part of the daily work of prison guards, wardens and high-level officials. The suggestion that they could somehow be unaware of the daily suffering of inmates is about as credible as the suggestion that a baker might not know what ingredients go into his bread.
The legal system provides no avenue for addressing the grievances of prisoners. Although prisoners are legally allowed to sue correctional officials over unconstitutional conditions of confinement, a verdict in favor of the prisoners is highly unlikely. A report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics entitled “Challenging the Conditions of Prisons and Jails” shows that out of more than 2,700 cases disposed of in 1992 in nine states, 95 percent of cases resulted in dismissals, 4 percent resulted in stipulated dismissals or settlements, and 2 percent resulted in trial verdicts. Out of those, less than half of 1 percent were favorable to the prisoners.
Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that prisoners should rise up and fight back.
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The 1971 Attica prison uprising showed solidarity with revolutionary struggles across the country and around the world.
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Perhaps the best known prisoners’ uprising in the United States came on Sept. 9, 1971, when nearly 1,500 inmates took over the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, N.Y. The 2,300 inmates well exceeded the prison’s 1,600-person capacity. Prisoners were allowed one shower per week and given a single roll of toilet paper per month.
The Attica Uprising, as it became known, was a heroic attempt to draw national attention to the inhumane treatment of inmates in U.S. prisons. Attica prisoners expressed solidarity with the revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements then sweeping the country and world. They displayed a degree of multinational unity forged in shared struggle—a unity that shocked the prison officials who routinely pit prisoners of different races and nationalities against each other.
Over 200,000 prisoners across the country participated in solidarity actions after New York State governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the retaking of the prison, which resulted in the massacre of 29 inmates and wounding of another 85.
In ruling-class propaganda, working people are not supposed to show solidarity with prisoners. Newspapers blare news of a few particularly gruesome crimes. But with more and more people in prison, the reality of inhumane prison conditions is harder to hide—and millions of people with family members behind bars are less likely to believe the ruling-class propaganda.
A U.S. Justice Department report released last November 30 showed that a record 7 million people—or one in every 32 American adults—were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of 2005. Out of those, 2.2 million were incarcerated. At 737 per 100,000 people, the U.S. incarceration rate is the highest in the world.
Boom and bust
The capitalist system is characterized by boom and bust cycles that inevitably throw millions of working people into poverty and despair when an economic crisis hits. Making an argument for investing in prisons, fund manager Jamie Cuellar made this point to SmartMoney: “When times are bad, more people tend to go to jail.” Even in the absence of crises, the flight of capital to countries with cheaper labor and lower safety and environmental standards also plays a role in the loss of jobs at home, particularly in manufacturing.
The jobless masses are useful to the capitalists as a reserve army of labor that helps keep wages down, but they are also potentially troublesome for the stability of capitalism once they inevitably decide to fight back. The Black and Latino populations, some of the worst hit by the crises of capitalism, have a long history of militancy and struggle. The prison system provides a mechanism for disposing of this surplus population—a mechanism that must be inherently racist if it is to be effective.
The prison-industrial complex also brings new profit opportunities for the capitalist class. The Geo Group, operator of the New Castle prison, stands as the second-largest prison operator in the country, surpassed only by Corrections Corporation of America. In a Feb. 26 article titled “Prison Demographics Bode Well for Geo Group’s Stock,” SmartMoney points out that the company more than tripled in value over the previous year, thanks to a severe shortage of prison space in the country.
Profiting on prisons
Furthermore, the opportunity for the super-exploitation of prisoners as slave labor is not lost on the capitalist class. The prisoners in Attica, for instance, made shoes, mattresses and license plates for about 40 cents a day. Experiencing a shortage of farm laborers due to the crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the Colorado State Legislature and the Colorado Department of Corrections launched a pilot program this year to provide large farms with prisoners to work in the fields earning 60 cents a day. This form of neo-slavery, of course, drives wages down for the entire working class.
Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group have also reaped succulent profits from the racist attacks against undocumented immigrants. Running around 50 percent of all federal immigration detention centers, the two corporations pocketed $125.8 million in revenues in 2005 from contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With the backlash that followed last years’ immigrant rights movement sparked by the reactionary Sensenbrenner bill, their revenues have soared even higher as hundreds of thousands of immigrants—including young children—have been swept up in raids and thrown into detention centers.
The growth of prisons in the United States and the harsh treatment of prisoners are a calculated and racist attack against the most oppressed sectors of the working class. For that reason, prisons have been described as concentration camps for the poor.
Prisoners are workers. Their labor in prison is super-exploited. When these workers behind bars try to go on strike to protest inhumane conditions, they are immediately confronted by an armed force of prison guards and police.
Every inmate-worker strike in prison thus takes the form of an open rebellion, since these workers have no rights. The media then demonizes the workers.
The labor movement should recognize and support prisoners in their struggles for fair treatment. The old adage of the labor movement, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” applies just as much to workers behind bars as those outside the prison walls.
