ABOLISH PRISON
Hondurans see little hope for nation's prisons as details of cold-blooded massacre emerge
 

MARLON GONZÁLEZ
Wed, June 21, 2023
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Authorities in Honduras began to hand over to relatives the hacked, burned corpses of 46 women killed in the worst riot at a women’s prison in recent memory.

Some of the bodies were so badly burned they need genetic testing or dental studies to identify, said Yuri Mora, the spokesman for Honduras’ national police investigation agency.

The picture that began to emerge of Tuesday's violence at the women's prison in Tamara, Honduras was one of a carefully planned massacre of supposed rival gang members by inmates belonging to the notorious Barrio 18 street gang.

The carnage has led to calls for change to the country's prison system and even talk of whether Honduras should emulate the drastic zero-tolerance, no-privileges prisons set up in neighboring El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele.

While El Salvador’s crackdown on gangs has given rise to rights violations, it has also proved immensely popular in a country long terrorized by street gangs.

“One of the gave dangers is the Bukele-ization of security problem in this country, with everything that would imply,” said Honduran human rights expert Joaquin Mejia.

Nobody debates that Honduras’ prisons are in a shameful state. In Tuesday’s riot, incarcerated members of the notorious Barrio 18 gang slaughtered 46 other women inmates by spraying them with gunfire, hacking them with machetes and then locking survivors in their cells and dousing them with flammable liquid.

Chillingly, the gang members were able to arm themselves with pistols and machetes, brush past guards and attack. They even carried locks to shut their victims inside, apparently to burn them to death.

Jessica Sánchez, an activist with the Civil Society Group, a human rights organization, said “we believe that this massacre was carried out on orders from a criminal network, and I am sure it was known beforehand, and nothing was done.”

Miguel Martínez, a security ministry spokesman, said the attack was taped by security cameras up to the moment the gang members destroyed them in what he called a planned attack.

“You can see the moment in which the women overcome the guards, leaving them helpless, and take their keys,” Martínez said.

President Xiomara Castro said the riot at the prison in Tamara northwest of Tegucigalpa was “planned by maras (street gangs) with the knowledge and acquiescence of security authorities.”

Castro fired Security Minister Ramón Sabillón, and replaced him with Gustavo Sánchez, who had been serving as head of the National Police.

She ordered that all of the country's 21 prisons be placed for one year under the control of the military police, who will be asked to train 2,000 new guards.

But she didn't announce any immediate plan to improve the conditions in prison, which are characterized by overcrowding, crumbling facilities and poorly trained guards. Security is so lax that inmates often run their own cellblocks, selling prohibited goods and extorting money from other inmates.

Many doubted the answer lies in adopting the kind of brutally regimented prisons that El Salvador has built.

“Building more prisons in Honduras isn’t necessary. Why? Why build more prisons that turn into slaughterhouses for people, when the government has no control over them?” said Roberto Cruz, 54, who runs a small retail outlet in the capital.

“What is needed are professional people to run the prisons,” Cruz said, acknowledging that “it is a big, complex problem that needs an urgent solution.”

Most don’t trust the government to get it right.

“We demand an international investigation that can really look at the issue of prisons and women” in prison, said Sánchez.

For now, the cold facts of Tuesday’s massacre are emerging: 18 pistols, an assault rifle, two machine pistols and two grenades were found in the prison after the riot. All were smuggled into the facility.

Then there was the shocking fact that — as in many Latin American jails — some of the inmates' children were living with their mothers in the prison at the time of the attack.

“Some of the women were living with their children in detention. These children are now left behind and highly vulnerable. I am deeply concerned about their well-being and safety," said Garry Conille, the regional director for UNICEF, the U.N. children's fund.

It was not known whether any children witnessed the attack.

The riot’s death toll surpassed that of a fire at a female detention center in Guatemala in 2017, when girls at a shelter for troubled youths set fire to mattresses to protest rapes and other mistreatment. The smoke and fire killed 41 girls.

The worst prison disaster in a century also occurred in Honduras, in 2012, at the Comayagua men’s penitentiary, where 361 male inmates died in a fire possibly caused by a match, cigarette or some other open flame.

Honduras Prison Riot Police guard the entrance to the women's prison in Tamara, on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Tuesday, June 20, 2023. A riot at the women's prison northwest of the Honduran capital has left at least 41 inmates dead, most of them burned to death, a Honduran police official said. 

(AP Photo/Elmer Martinez)

How Would Prison Abolition Actually Work?

As the idea of prison abolition increasingly enters the mainstream discourse, GQ interviews an organizer within the movement.

GQ
June 11, 2020

Marion Correctional Institution, April 27, 2020.Megan Jelinger / Getty Images

As protests continue to spread in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, one seemingly radical, decades-old idea has been thrust to the forefront of mainstream discourse: prison abolition.

With over two million people locked up in prisons and jails, the United States’ incarceration rate is the highest in the world, to the point where the country constitutes about five percent of the world’s population and yet houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Black and brown people are disproportionately imprisoned, sexual abuse is rampant, labor is exploited, and prolonged solitary confinement—denounced as a form of torture by the United Nations—is commonplace. The brutality of these conditions becomes all the more salient when compared to other developed Western nations, where even life sentences for murder rarely involve being condemned to spend the remainder of one’s days behind bars.

Prison abolitionists argue that it is not enough to simply reform our current criminal justice system—that it must be completely dismantled and, in its place, society must invest in communities and address harm in other ways. The two foremost leaders of the contemporary prison-abolition movement are famed activist Angela Davis and the scholar and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In 1997, they cofounded the organization Critical Resistance with the mission to “build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.” (You may have encountered the organization’s graphic chart breaking down the effectiveness of reform vs. abolition circulating on social media as of late.)

With the concept of prison abolition gaining increased visibility and unprecedented momentum, GQ spoke to Woods Ervin, an organizer with Critical Resistance who has been involved in the movement for a decade, about its basic tenets, goals, and visions for a prison-free future.


GQ: Prison abolition is an idea, when first encountered, that can feel incredibly radical and infeasible. How did you first encounter it, and was there a particular moment where you felt like the switch had been flipped for you?

Woods Ervin: The theory clicked for me around 2008. I was working at the time with queer and trans young people of color in Chicago. Part of the daily work was trying to support, engage, and help develop young people who are being constantly targeted by the prison-industrial complex [PIC]. I had a firsthand understanding of how the PIC comes into people's lives and shrinks their life chances.

These were young people who were 13, 14, 15, getting kicked out of their homes for being queer and trans, and who, out of survival, were constantly coming into contact with the prison-industrial complex. For me, that put it in really stark relief. Because they couldn't figure out how to get out of the systemic nature of it, there was nothing for those young people. They were just falling through the cracks.

It clarified for me that the prison-industrial complex needed to be pulled apart. I think it was then that the politics crystallized, and it was in the practice of organizing with Critical Resistance that the work of how to do it crystallized.

As an organizer, when you're giving someone the elevator pitch for prison abolition, what do you tell them?

I say that abolition is a political vision with a goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. That it's not just about getting rid of building cages, it's about actually undoing the society that continues to feed on and maintain the oppression of masses of people through punishment, violence, and control. Because the prison-industrial complex isn't an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. And so we have to be building models today that develop and represent how we want to live in the future. It's both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

“The prison-industrial complex isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it's meant to do.”

Compared to other countries, the U.S. has a particularly cruel prison system. You can look to, say, some of the Scandinavian countries and see more humane prison systems and life sentences that only last 10 years. To prison abolitionists, why is criminal justice reform based on a system like that insufficient?

The prison-industrial complex isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it's meant to do. By calling for any of these reforms, you immediately re-entrench the logic that is underpinning its systemic nature. The prison-industrial complex—both prisons, policing, surveillance—they feed off of reform. With each iteration, they've gotten bigger, more deeply entrenched into our communities, and more powerful.

Can you give an example of a reform that ended up further entrenching the system?

First of all, prison itself is a reform. Before, there was a use of corporal punishment, and the developing of the prison system is itself a move from that practice into what was initially seen as something that was more humane and has escalated from there. I think the reform of more trainings specifically—I'm thinking about police, which I think is on a lot of people's minds right now—results in something like Urban Shield, which was the crown jewel of police trainings in the Bay Area. And it essentially was a war-games training that brought together police departments from around the Bay Area and some departments from around the world, some from countries with known human-rights abuses, to develop their practices of coordination.

I'm sure you get this question constantly, but I think that the immediate concern that comes to a lot of people’s minds is: "Well, what if there's a serial killer on the loose? Or what about the case of a violent rapist?" What is done in those situations if you’ve abolished the police and you abolish prison?

This is a question that we frequently get. There are multiple ways to answer this question. First of all, it's going to depend on each scenario, right? These extreme moments of violence and harm are often located in specific communities. When we're thinking about abolishing the prison-industrial complex, we're thinking about abolition as a presence, but what does it mean to build up infrastructures in communities that can help with a variety of interpersonal issues as prevention measures, but also practice accountability for community members who do harm in a way that actually not just addresses the specific harm, but transforms the community as well?

But in addition to thinking about what we do in communities, we have to think about the rate at which the prison-industrial complex is able to actually address rape and murder. We've spent astronomical amounts of our budgets at the municipal level, at the federal level, on policing and caging people. And yet I don't think that people feel any safer from the threat of sexual assault or the threat of murder. What is the prison-industrial complex doing to actually solve those problems in our society?

And then there are the ways in which the prison-industrial complex itself is a perpetuator of some things, whether the police officers who are allowed to sexually assault women and girls who are part of investigations, guards who physically and sexually assault people who are incarcerated, or the issue we're seeing now, where police are murdering people. I know that’s a question that rises to the top for people, because of the ways in which the prison-industrial complex tells us that that's the service that it provides.

In that vein, though, murder and rape have been around since the beginning of time. What does the restorative justice process look like for victims, or family members of victims, so that they feel as if justice has been served, but not in a way that goes on to perpetuate the violence?

There are people who, such as Mia Mingus, who works at the Bay Area Transformative Justice Center, or Mariame Kaba, who works at Survived and Punished, who have been doing lots of work around developing practices of transformative justice that can actually work to transform the harms of sexual assault. There’s a whole body of work, of tools, of practices that can help to engage the issue of sexual assault and to ideally transform and build more accountable communities, so that we're able to actually remove that harm from society more broadly.

Right now, we're actually not doing anything about it. We're not trying to change the systemic way in which sexual assault manifests in our society. At least with transformative justice practices and community accountability practices, there's an attempt to actually get to the root causes and transform society so that those things can't happen.

Can you quickly clarify the difference between restorative justice and transformative justice?

Restorative justice is to try and restore relationships to how they were prior to a harm being done. Transformative justice, the purpose is to try and transform communities so that the harm cannot happen again.

On a logistical level, how does the prison abolition movement work to get these aims accomplished? It’s hard to wrap your head around when you think about how big the prison system is, how vast the police forces are. Is it a matter of starting first by defunding the police, or does it start through additive community programs, or the two of those simultaneously?

It is simultaneous. One shorthand we use at Critical Resistance is “dismantle, change, build,” and it's not necessarily linear. They have to be happening simultaneously because they're happening in relationship with each other, and the processes inform each other so that what you are able to build is actually in direct relationship to the community that is building it.

In the case of George Floyd, it is unconscionable that someone can be killed for allegedly forging a $20 bill. If we were living in a society where prison had been abolished, where the Critical Resistance vision had been put in place, what would have happened from the time when he handed over the supposedly forged $20 bill?

Lots of things could have happened. One thing that could have happened was that if there was a policy within the store where people who have needs around access to food could get those needs met, either through some government-based or community-based program so that this is essentially a nonissue. The buck would literally stop there. And that's not impossible. We have things like food stamps. Why isn't that an immediate offering that could have been available? The expansion of policing and imprisonment is directly tied to the erosion of goods and services being provided by our government in order to support people in their everyday needs. Which I think is why it's so clear during this moment of increasing austerity, you see large swaths of people all across the world making the connection and mobilizing accordingly.

What is the most frustrating part of working in prison abolition work in the sense of, what does the general public seem to find the most inconceivable about all of this?

Abolition calls on you to really use your imagination in ways that have become counterintuitive for lots of people, because of what Mariame Kaba calls “the cop in our head and cop in our heart.” We've been indoctrinated by a society that's been [using] policing and prison to answer for every social and political problem that we have that we have very little practice with the muscle of imagining and solving systemic problems without prison sentences.

Related, a lot of people are used to calling 911 whenever they have a problem. So who would be called instead?

Depending on the scenario, if you have capacities within your neighborhood to solve a problem, you would call your neighbor. If there is an emergency that's beyond you or somebody who lives in proximity to you is not trained to be able to handle the emergency that you are experiencing, there are models from around the world of direct responders who are trained in a variety of kinds of response that are particular to the emergency that you are having. To be able to come and support you with the mental-health crisis that's happening.

What are your essential texts on prison abolition? The primary ones are, of course, Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis and Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, but is there anything else you would recommend that was transformative for you personally?

I think that Alex Vitale's The End of Policing is excellent. There’s another compilation, Policing the Planet, that’s fantastic. Invisible No More by Andrea Ritchie. Because the prison-industrial complex is so complex, depending on what aspect you want to learn about it, whether it be prison or policing, I think that the [books] that we just talked about really cover those really well. But if you want to know more about things like surveillance or you want to know about probation or parole or the ways in which pretrial interacts with prisons and policing, there's so much more reading to do.

Have you encountered any politicians who are sympathetic to the cause?

Our experience is that via our campaign, decision makers move accordingly and oftentimes move around the particular issue that we're working on. So, whether it be the fight against the San Francisco jail in the Bay Area or the fight against the jail in Los Angeles, that decision makers via the campaigns that Critical Resistance engages in move towards abolition around that particular fight. This is why we win.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The case for a prisoners’ union


A prisoner at Guelph Correctional Centre shows off his strength. He is prying apart jaws of steer skulls at work for Better Beef Ltd., a private company operating on prison grounds. He works alongside 47 prisoners and 120 other community members and earns $350 a week for his labour. Captured on September 9, 1982. 

Photo courtesy of Pat Brennan/Toronto Star via Getty images.


by Jordan House and Asaf Rashid 
BRIARPATCH MAGAZINE

Feb 27, 2023 

Prisons don’t work. But prisoners, for the most part, do. Prison labour is controversial because of its coercive character and the racial disparities in prison populations. Prison abolitionists generally argue that prison labour should be abolished along with prisons themselves. But calls to simply abolish prison labour ignore the battles prisoners have fought to ensure they have access to work and wages – even if meagre.

The reality is, so long as there are prisons, prisoners will work. Ultimately, if we want to achieve prison justice, we have to change the capitalist society in which prisons exist. The power to make that change will have to come from organized working-class people, including prisoners. A prisoners’ union could be an incredibly powerful vehicle for changing prisons and society.

According to Canadian law and correctional policy, prisoners don’t work as punishment, but for their own “rehabilitation.” The vast majority of Canadian prison labour is institutional maintenance work – the cooking, cleaning, clerical, and other work necessary for prisons to function. Prisoners also work in prison industry programs that produce furniture, textiles, agricultural products, prefabricated houses, and laundry services. In Canada, most of the goods and services produced by prison industry programs are for “state use,” meaning they are sold exclusively (or near exclusively) to government departments and agencies.

Working prisoners deserve all the same rights as other workers, including the right to unionize.

The promise of corrections is to reform those in conflict with the law into “productive members of society.” However, the most significant reason Canadian prisoners work is because correctional systems rely on unpaid or poorly paid prison labour to subsidize their operations. Due to their status as “offenders,” prisoners are coerced – sometimes explicitly, sometimes in roundabout ways – to work, and they perform this work without any of the normal legal rights protections of workers. This creates a situation where prisoners work in dangerous conditions, for little pay, all in the name of their own rehabilitation.

These exclusions are unjustifiable on moral – and even legal – grounds. Working prisoners deserve all the same rights as other workers, including the right to unionize. Since prisons rely on prison labour, the potential to refuse work is a powerful tool to back prisoners’ voices with real power. Prisoners have long understood this, and prison strikes have been an important form of protest since the dawn of the penitentiary.

A labour union for prisoners may sound far-fetched, but there are historical precedents. In the early 1970s, prisoner union organizing was relatively widespread in the United States. One study found that by 1973, prisoners in at least 44 institutions in 20 different states had formed or attempted to form a union; some even won support from organized labour. This is significant because, for much of its early history, the labour movement opposed prison labour on the grounds that it drove down the wages of “free workers” and was largely unconcerned with the situation of prisoners. In New York, prisoners at the Green Haven Correctional Facility won the backing of District 65, an affiliate of the Distributive Workers of America. The North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union (NCPLU) won the support of the North Carolina American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest association of worker unions in the state.

A prisoners’ union could form the basis to link activists and organizations involved in labour, anti-racist, and decolonial struggles, contributing to building a broad political coalition around these and other issues.

However, none of these unions would succeed in winning formal certification or negotiating a collective agreement. In 1977 the United States Supreme Court ruled against the NCPLU, declaring prisoners did not have a constitutional right to join or form unions in the U.S. While some prisoners’ unions attempted to organize after this ruling, 1977 marks the end of the main period of prisoner union organizing in the United States.

Prisoners also organized in Canada. A wave of prison strikes in the summer of 1975 led to the formation of the Prisoners’ Union Committee (PUC). The PUC was an “outside-based” organization, largely made up of lawyers and activists who had cut their teeth in the student, anti-war, and women’s movements. While outside-based, the PUC did have strong connections to prisoner activists and organizers. By July 1975, over 300 prisoners in B.C. had signed a petition demanding the provincial and federal prison systems recognize the PUC as their bargaining agent. Striking prisoners in Ontario prisons made similar demands, and PUC organizers reported to media that they were also in contact with prisoners in the Prairies and New Brunswick. By the end of the summer of 1975, prison protest tactics shifted, and a number of large riots marked the end of the strike wave and the PUC’s organizing efforts.

The PUC, however, would not be the last prisoner union effort in Canada. In 1977, prisoners working in the abattoir at Guelph Correctional Centre, a provincial jail in Ontario, successfully established a local of the Canadian Food and Allied Workers Union and negotiated a series of collective agreements with their employer, the private firm contracted by the province to run the abattoir. Later, between 2010 and 2015, a group of prisoners formed the Canadian Prisoners’ Labour Confederation and attempted to unionize federal prisoners.

By July 1975, over 300 prisoners in B.C. had signed a petition demanding the provincial and federal prison systems recognize the PUC as their bargaining agent.

If prisoners are successful in winning formal unionization and collective bargaining rights, as some provincial prisoners in Ontario did in the past, they may be able to use the rights afforded to unionized workers to check the power of prison administrators. Collective bargaining over labour issues would be a clear opportunity to challenge the unilateral control of administrators over prison labour programs. This happened in the case of the Guelph Correctional Centre where unionized prisoners were able to receive temporary leave to attend union meetings in the community. In the United States, prison union organizers fought critical battles around free communication and censorship on the basis of labour rights, albeit mostly unsuccessfully. Finally, a prisoners’ union could form the basis to link activists and organizations involved in labour, anti-racist, and decolonial struggles, contributing to building a broad political coalition around these and other issues.

Given the dysfunction of prison employment programs – and prisons more generally – it is less a question of if prisoners will make another attempt to seek unionization and more a question of when. And the real question is who will support them when they do.

This is an adapted excerpt from Solidarity Beyond Bars: Unionizing Prison Labour, published in 2023 by Fernwood Publishing.

Jordan House is an assistant professor in the department of labour studies at Brock University. His research focuses on prison labour and prisoner-worker organizing, new forms of worker organization, and labour movement renewal.

Asaf Rashid practises criminal, immigration, and prison law in Halifax/k’jipuktuk. He is a member of the Canadian Prison Law Association and Nova Scotia Criminal Lawyers Association, sits on the board of the East Coast Prison Justice Society, and is a former union organizer.

ABOLISH PRISONS

A seventh inmate dies at Wales' troubled Parc Prison

Wayne Hay is the seventh prisoner to have died in the jail in just over two months


Conor Gogarty

1 MAY 2024

Parc Prison (Image: Wales News Service)

An inmate has died at a troubled Welsh prison. Wayne Hay, 47, is the seventh prisoner to have died at Bridgend's HMP Parc in just over two months.

A spokeswoman for G4S, the private firm that runs Parc, said Mr Hay died on Tuesday. "His next of kin have been informed and our thoughts are with his family and friends," she added. "As with all deaths in prison, this will be investigated by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman and the cause of death is for the coroner to determine."

WalesOnline has asked G4S and South Wales Police whether the death is being treated as suspicious. The force previously said it was treating two of the six Parc inmate deaths between February 27 and March 19 as non-suspicious, but believed the other four to be drug-related. Detective Steve Jones said in March that "a fast-track process has been undertaken and identified the presence of nitazene-based substances in connection with all four deaths". The psychoactive substance spice was identified in connection with two of the four deaths.

We recently revealed allegations from former Parc prisoners and staff of severe violence, drug dealing and corruption in the jail. 

You can read more about the crisis at Parc here.

Imprisoned Workers Bring State Lawsuit to Abolish Involuntary Servitude in Alabama’s Prisons

On International Workers’ Day, suit challenges constitutionality of government actions to punish resistance to forced labor among majority-Black prison population

May 1, 2024, Montgomery, AL – On International Workers’ Day, six incarcerated people are bringing a state court lawsuit against Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) Commissioner John Hamm with the goal of abolishing involuntary servitude in the state’s prisons. They are asking a state court to declare that recently enacted state laws and policies violate the state constitution, which, as of only two years ago, makes slavery and involuntary servitude illegal in prison.

A notorious prison system, Alabama’s is the most overcrowded in the country, operating at over 168 percent capacity, and, while Black people make up 26 percent of the state population, they account for 53 percent of the prison population. Until the fall of 2022, Alabama still permitted slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons, exploiting an infamous loophole in the Alabama Constitution and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But following a successful labor strike by incarcerated workers, Alabama voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that expanded the ban on slavery and involuntary servitude to prison. With their state court lawsuit – the first of its kind – the plaintiffs seek enforcement of the amendment.

In response to the labor strike, the state implemented three laws that authorize punishment for incarcerated people who resist forced labor: Governor Ivey’s Executive Order No. 725, ADOC Revised Administrative Regulation 403, and revisions to Section 14-9-41 of the Alabama Code. This lawsuit challenges those two executive actions and Section 14-9-41—all of which prohibit incarcerated workers from refusing to work and authorize punishment for such refusal. People incarcerated by ADOC are routinely punished, or threatened with punishment, for declining to work; such punishment can include loss of earned good time credit, solitary confinement, transfer to a higher-security (and more violent) prison, and loss of contact with loved ones.

“We chose to file this case on May 1, in solidarity with workers around the world, because ending forced prison labor in ADOC isn’t just about stopping the State’s extractive profiteering from the labor of Black people – both inside and outside of prisons. It’s also about eliminating the control that forced prison labor enables the State to exercise over Black people – an extension of the control exerted by the State through slavery, the Black Codes, convict leasing, and Jim Crow,” said CJ Sandley, Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the workers through its Southern Regional Office.

The six plaintiffs –Trayveka Stanley, Reginald Burrell, Dexter Avery, Charlie Gray, Melvin Pringle, and Ranquel Smith – have all been punished or threatened with punishment for resisting forced work. The lawsuit requests a court order to stop the defendants and their agents from subjecting them to forced prison labor and involuntary servitude, or threats of forced prison labor and involuntary servitude, for not working or refusing to work, and to declare certain state legal measures authorizing such actions unconstitutional. Their suit also asks the court to expunge from their records any relevant disciplinary reports and behavior citations issued after November 28, 2022, when the new constitution was ratified.

“I am motivated by my passion to fight for an end to all injustice. That passion burns brighter than my fears. We must stand for something or we will fall for anything. This lawsuit is about the unpaid, overbearing state jobs that I, as well as my fellow inmates, are being forced to work against our will. According to Article I, Section 32, this is against the law,” says Plaintiff Trayveka Stanley, currently incarcerated at Montgomery Women’s Facility in Montgomery, Alabama.

According to Plaintiff Reginald Burrell, who is incarcerated at Decatur Work Release in Decatur, Alabama:“The most influential public officials in the State of Alabama today remain loyal to and act in unity with their racist slave legacy from the Confederacy and the Jim Crow era, continuing to deliberately make, enforce, and defend bad policy decisions and practices, knowing it results in the demise, disadvantages, and disenfranchisement of poor whites and African-Americans, perpetuating hopelessness, despair, and excessive suffering in our lives today, and knowing it induces, in many circumstances, desperate choices under duress, to give themselves reason to enslave us through incarceration by the Alabama Department of Corrections for the sole purpose of continuing forced labor, slavery, and involuntary servitude in this state.”

Currently incarcerated at Elmore Correctional Facility, Plaintiff Ranquel Smith said of ADOC’s system of forced labor, "Being at work release can get stressful sometimes. I fully understand that at work release you get a little freedom, such as working a free world job, taking home passes, and much more, but all that can be taken away so fast by refusing to work a job that's not fit for you or not in your best interest. You will receive a disciplinary write-up and/or have good time taken away. To me, that's not being treated fairly at all.”

Alabama is one of several states to join the growing movement to abolish prison slavery and involuntary servitude at the state and federal level. Voters in Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont have approved similar changes to their states' constitutions to remove the loophole permitting slavery as a form of punishment for incarcerated people.

With a strategic Southern Regional Office centered in Jackson, Mississippi, the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Southern Justice Rising initiative represents our deepened, renewed institutional commitment to liberatory movements in the Southern states like Alabama. We have worked closely with generations of Southern freedom fighters and continue that historical work by partnering with Southern grassroots movements, human rights defenders, and community organizations fighting to transform material conditions, dismantle systems of oppression, and advance visions of collective liberation today.

The Center for Constitutional Rights works with communities under threat to fight for justice and liberation through litigation, advocacy, and strategic communications. Since 1966, the Center for Constitutional Rights has taken on oppressive systems of power, including structural racism, gender oppression, economic inequity, and governmental overreach. Learn more at ccrjustice.org.

ABOLISH PRISON

Researchers call for action to protect prison staff and prisoners from hidden psychological harm

Overcrowded prisons are at breaking point. Now, researchers are sounding the alarm over a largely overlooked issue: moral injury

University of Bath

Overcrowded prisons in England and Wales are at breaking point, with self-harm at record levels. Now, researchers are sounding the alarm over a largely overlooked issue: moral injury, a psychological wound caused by witnessing or experiencing events that deeply conflict with a person’s values.

Experts from the University of Bath, UCL, King’s College London, Combat Stress, and NHS partners have published a report in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology urging the UK government to provide targeted mental health support for prison staff and prisoners.

The call to action comes amid stark Ministry of Justice figures showing that self-harm in prisons in England and Wales has reached its highest levels since records began in 2004. His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, has also warned of the devastating impact of overcrowding on prisoner wellbeing.

Recommendations for change

The researchers have outlined practical steps the UK government can take to tackle moral injury in prisons:

• Tailored mental health programs: Develop approaches that fit the limited resources available in prisons.
• Prevention strategies for staff: Introduce coping workshops, psychoeducation, and peer support networks to help staff manage stress.
• Enhanced role for chaplains: Train chaplains to support both staff and prisoners in dealing with moral injury.
• Creative therapies: Use group-based approaches like art or music therapy when one-on-one sessions aren’t possible.

Call to Action

Lead researcher Dr Victoria Williamson from the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath said:

Our findings reveal a serious gap in mental health support for both prison staff and prisoners. This isn’t just a personal issue for those affected—it’s a systemic problem that requires urgent action. If we address moral injury, we can improve mental health, reduce reoffending, and help create a more resilient prison workforce. Supporting staff and prisoners with effective interventions isn’t just ethical—it’s vital for the health of the prison system and our society.

Professor Dominic Murphy, from Combat Stress & King's College London said:

Whilst research in moral injury started within military populations, we know other groups are affected as well. The aim of this project is understand how we can use what we have learnt around the management of moral injury-related psychological distress to start to tackle these issues within staff working across the prison sector. We understand that the prison system is under intense resource pressure, but we believe that developing an intervention to support prison staff is worth the investment because it could reduce the significant mental health burden and also help to retain the workforce.

Andy Bell, Chief Executive of the Centre For Mental Health said:

Mental ill health is highly prevalent within the prison population, and prison staff are working in environments that put their wellbeing at risk too. Understanding the risk factors for poor mental health, such as moral injury, and taking steps to address them may help to address some of the causes and triggers of mental distress among people in the prison system.

Co-lead researcher Dr Danielle Lamb from supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North said:

To address these problems we plan to talk to people working in prisons, and NHS staff who support them and prisoners, and co-design an intervention to support them. We’ve planned this project in collaboration with current and former prison staff to make sure we tackle the most pressing issues in the most effective ways.

What Is Moral Injury?

Moral injury happens when people experience or witness events that clash with their core beliefs, leading to feelings of shame, guilt, or anger. Without the right support, this can develop into serious mental health problems.

While moral injury has been widely studied in professions like healthcare and the military, its impact on prison staff and prisoners has gone largely unrecognised—until now.

For prison staff, everyday duties can mean witnessing disturbing events like suicides or self-harm and being unable to intervene, or even using force against prisoners. This takes a heavy psychological toll, contributing to burnout and mental distress.

Prisoners are not immune either. Many struggle with deep guilt over their crimes—especially those committed under pressure or impaired judgment—adding another layer of emotional pain.

The overcrowded and understaffed prison system only makes matters worse. Rising violence, high staff turnover, and a lack of mental health resources leave both staff and prisoners vulnerable to repeated, morally injurious experiences.

Barriers to Support

The study highlights several obstacles that make it difficult to address moral injury in prisons:

• Trauma-focused therapies may not work—or could even harm those experiencing moral injury.
• Prisoners often avoid seeking help because of stigma, mistrust of healthcare providers, or fear of incriminating themselves.
• Staff, already overstretched and burned out, often fail to access the help they need.

This research was funded as part of the Three NIHR Research Schools Mental Health Programme and supported by the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration North Thames.

---

Journal

European Journal of Psychotraumatology

DOI

10.1080/20008066.2024.2445899 

Article Title

Experiences and impact of moral injury in prisons

Article Publication Date

13-Jan-2025

Is There a Future Without Incarceration? Abolitionist Art Shows Us One.

Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present.

By Nicholas Powers , 

Truthout

May 23, 2026

Still from Space to Breathe.

I banged my head on the bars. It was 2:00 am. I was in a Brooklyn jail. Under the fluorescent light, other men slept on the bench. Each one of us was arrested for so-called quality-of-life crimes like drinking a beer on a stoop, blasting a radio, or being unhoused. I shook the bars again. The walls closed in on me. I had a hard time breathing.

When I got out the next day, neighbors told me their lockdown stories. In many cities around the U.S., going to jail is a rite of passage. So many generations of us, men of color, have cycled through prison. It shaped how we see our future. I didn’t want that to be my future, or my son’s future.

I spent a short time in jail, but many of my neighbors spent years behind bars. Every day, more and more people are being arrested. Now the Trump administration is expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jails, and more are threatened with imprisonment as the administration labels left-wing groups and individuals “domestic terrorists.” Add to this the use of artificial intelligence to enhance state and corporate surveillance, and we face a future of the U.S. becoming a totalitarian carceral state.

Is a world without prisons possible?

It is, but it begins in the artistic imagination. We see, listen and read art, but rarely learn about art that challenges the powerful. Yet, overlooked by critics is prison abolitionist art. It literally spans centuries. You see it in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from 380 B.C. and in the 2025 Afrofuturist film Space to Breathe. Prison abolitionist art has three major themes: using prison as a metaphor for society; showing how the mind escapes metaphorical prisons; and, finally, imagining a world without mass incarceration.

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A strong, popular social movement can fight it. We need a vision to guide it. Prison abolitionist art shows the way.

A Nation Behind Bars

“Land of the free and home of the brave,” the crowd sings. When I go to sports events, people with a beer buzzed from beer sing the national anthem. When the last note is sung, the stadium erupts in cheers. Yet I don’t join. Underneath the patriotism is a bleaker reality: for many, the U.S. is a prison.

The U.S. is the independent democracy with the highest incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. has roughly 342 million people; according to the Prison Policy Initiative, 2 million are jailed at any given time. When you read that number, it is important to know two things. First, mass incarceration is a pyramid of federal and state prisons as well as immigration jails. Add local and juvenile jails. Add CIA foreign black sites and overseas ICE jails. The U.S. prison system is like one of those face-hugger parasites from the movie Alien, feeding off the host. Each year, 10.5 million people are arrested, or one every three seconds.

Second is that prison is larger than the physical cell. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 650,000 people are released from prison each year, but “two-thirds will likely be arrested in three years.” Why this revolving door? Well, of the 19 million people convicted of a felony and the 79 million who have a criminal record, re-entry into life is a gauntlet of obstacles. The Sentencing Project paints a vivid portrait of post-prison life: Very few rehabilitation programs. Minimal financial resources. Employees often don’t hire people convicted of felonies. Landlords discriminate. Some people convicted of felonies can’t vote or get public housing. They face stigma and isolation. They become an invisible underclass.

Put two and two together and what becomes clear is that mass incarceration is a factory that transforms millions of people a day into permanent prisoners. Even when it spits them out and they are technically “freed,” they face poverty, depression, and stigma that drives them right back into jail — which, by the way, costs $445 billion a year. Whole generations of people are destroyed so money can be made.

Many of us feel rage at being jailed. The anger is stuffed down until you take your child to a playground in a bright afternoon. You can’t help but worry which one will be caught by that system. Who is going to get jailed later in life? You hate that you even have to think about it. But you do. And you hold your child even tighter.

Prison Society

Is there a way out? Yes, but the first step is using prison as a kind of prism to analyze society itself. Incarcerated artists created, and continue to create, a canon spanning literature, cinema, and music that does exactly that. Through their art you grasp “jail” as something more than a physical building; it can be the structure of a whole society.

You probably were taught in school about “the canon,” or works of art that one must know to be considered “literate.” Maybe they were of exceptional quality. Maybe they helped define a people. Think Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The prison art canon is work by incarcerated artists who explore civil corruption and self-transformation. Prison literature specifically began as fragmentary scenes in other books like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his book The Republic. The canon really gets going in The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 523 A.D. by the philosopher Boethius, the original prisoner-author, while he was unjustly jailed before his execution in 524. Others followed, like Thomas Usk in the 14th century, who wrote The Testament of Love, or George Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections, written in the 15th century. The European tradition of prison literature hit a high point in the 18th century with Marquis de Sade’s sexual mysticism composed in jail.

In the U.S., the tradition of European prison literature morphed into prison abolitionist art. It went beyond merely describing jail or civic corruption to placing self-transformation as the first step to social change. It imagined a world beyond prisons. The first book in this genre was Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative. No, he was not held in a modern jail, but he analyzed slavery as an open-air prison. Slavery, like modern prison, held people captive. It stripped one’s identity. It used violence to force obedience. It taught enslaved people to obey rules to gain easier work. After Douglass escaped and became a famous orator, he was in Washington, D.C., surrounded by powerful politicians. He bitterly realized free whites acted like slaves. They faced poverty and punishment. They lied to get favors. Society was just an open-air plantation. He wrote, “The same traits of character seen in slaves, are seen in the slaves of political parties.”

More than a century after Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” again used the prison metaphor to describe life under racial segregation. He wrote of the open-air prison of segregation, “when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next.” A supposedly free society was like a large jail.

You see the prison metaphor 136 years after Douglass in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, in which the protagonist Andre says to his friend Wallace that modern life is “…the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built — they’ve built their own prison.”

The prison metaphor, or seeing the U.S. through the prism of the prison, is a common theme. You see it in films like the Matrix and Hunger Games trilogies. You see it in books like George Jackson’s 1972 Blood in My Eye or Assata Shakur’s self-titled 1987 autobiography, Assata. You see it in new works like Jean Trounstine’s 2026 novel, Sounds Like Trouble to Me, in which a former prison guard murders her abusive husband. When she is jailed, she faces the same brutality that she once dished out.

The Illusion of Freedom

Within prison abolitionist art is a shocking contradiction: Freedom is found in confinement. The isolated mind is cut from attachments. In that isolation, one sees through illusions like consumerism, job status, or patriotism. In Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy, he writes, “…human souls are free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” The scene of a prisoner-artist freed from illusion appears through centuries. Nearly 1,500 years later, Malcolm X described in his autobiography the power of learning in prison: “I knew right there in prison that reading had changed my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside of me some dormant desire to mentally alive.”

In prison abolitionist art, two essential themes appear. The first is to use prison as a lens to analyze society. The second, to show how isolation can be subverted as tool of oppression and used to free the mind from the illusions of freedom that exist beyond bars. What sets the genre of prison abolition art apart from prison art is that the former imagines a future free of incarceration.

Until Everybody’s Free

The world is at the crossroads. On one side, we see signs of mass AI-driven unemployment, coupled with an AI-driven police state. It is a dystopic future: Millions of people warehoused in prisons, guarded by robots. On the other hand, we hear calls for universal health care, moratoriums on data centers, care instead of cops, and as one book title says, a Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

What prison abolitionist art does is provide a vision of a future with no jails. Maybe that’s why science fiction takes the lead. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed portrays two planets, one capitalist, named Urras, the other an anarchist commune, named Anarres. Its citizens, called the Annaresti, do not use prisons but severe social shaming. Another sci-fi franchise that imagines a future with very little use for prisons is “Star Trek.” Aside from a few villains, you don’t see anyone in jail. In a classic “Next Generation” episode, Picard tells a man who was frozen that in the 24th century, there is no scarcity. He said, “A lot has changed in the past 300 years. We are no longer obsessed with accumulation of things. We eliminated hunger, want and the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present. We can ask questions, again. We can hope, too. Recently, I had friends over to binge-watch shows with a prison abolitionist theme. Of course, “Star Trek” episodes were played, but we ended with Space to Breathe, directed by Juicebox P. Burton. It is a sci-fi short film that is campy, Afrofuturist, yet sincere. It portrayed three Black youth in a future with no prisons, looking back at the revolution that ended in Abolition Day, the day when the dismantling of mass incarceration began in this fictional history. Burton told Truthout, “We made this film as a gift to organizers, to help them imagine a different world. To show that their hard work today is building a more, free future.” The movie is showing at Reclamation Day in Brooklyn on June 20th, and activists already are talking about it.

I was lucky to have a link to preview it and showed it to a few friends. As we watched, we were deeply moved by the use of real people, talking in a circle about restorative justice, and footage of former prisoners released and hugged by family. One elder with thick glasses said, “Take the money that’s going for jail and put it into Black community for services like health care and jobs, so people can live.”

Space to Breathe did not have the big budget of “Star Trek.” But seeing Black people in the next century, living in a world we could only dream of, deeply touched us. After it ended, we sat imagining who our children’s children could be. They were radiant. They were free. The room was quiet — so quiet that for a moment, you could hear the future.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nicholas Powers
Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.

AMERIKA; PRISON NATION

Other States Banned Forced Prison Labor. Why Didn’t California?

The liberal state voted to keep prison slavery in its constitution, but the national movement to ban it isn’t deterred.

By Michelle Chen ,

Truthout

December 28, 2024

Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail seen on February 22, 2018, in Los Angeles, California.Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images

Despite the state’s Democratic majority, more than 53 percent of Californians voted against a ban on slave labor in state prisons. Proposition (Prop) 6 would have amended the state constitution by removing a provision that allows incarcerated people to be forced to work. Though it would not ban “voluntary” work in these facilities, it would prevent prison authorities from compelling an individual to work as punishment for a crime. California’s constitution currently mirrors the 13th Amendment’s notorious exception, which bans slavery except “as punishment for a crime.” That “loophole” underpins the link between capitalism and the carceral state. Nationwide, more than 790,000 people in state and federal prisons are estimated to be working — typically in maintenance jobs within their facilities, and sometimes in manufacturing, agricultural and public-service enterprises — generating several billion dollars in revenue annually, according to a 2022 ACLU report. Tens of thousands of them are in California, often earning less than $1 per hour.

Esteban Núñez, chief strategy consultant for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, one of the groups spearheading the Prop 6 campaign, said the defeat of the measure underscored the need for “more voter education” about what the amendment was meant to accomplish, since many voters may have been confused by the somewhat arcane wording to “eliminate involuntary servitude for incarcerated persons” (written by the attorney general’s office). He noted that, despite Californians’ seeming apprehension about the measure, several other states, even Republican-dominated ones, have approved similar bans in recent years.

“This is something that, of course, was personal to a lot of us because we had lived experience with forced labor,” Núñez told Truthout. For many formerly incarcerated advocates like him, ending forced labor behind bars opens opportunities for more productive activities and positive change, like college courses and job training. “Forced labor really prohibits people’s ability to prioritize rehabilitation, and rehabilitation is really what’s going to drive down recidivism,” he added. “Those programs and education are just really vital to preparing somebody to come home.”

California’s Prison Labor Regime

California’s prison-industrial complex is one of the largest in the country, incarcerating people at a higher rate than most states. The state holds more than 91,000 people in custody as of last November, mostly Latinx and Black men — an ample captive workforce that delivers a variety of goods and services to the government: fighting wildfires, manufacturing office furniture, catering, and, after the pandemic broke out, producing face masks (even as they reportedly were forbidden from wearing masks themselves).

The ballot question, which had no organized opposition campaign and was championed by civil rights organizations and the state’s Reparations Task Force, was framed as a step toward “restor[ing] human dignity” and redressing structural racism in prison.

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But some saw it differently, raising criticisms that seemed rooted in the notion that incarcerated people should have to work to pay the cost of their imprisonment and their supposed debt to society. An editorial in the San Jose Mercury News argued, “The fundamental question here is whether inmates should be required to provide work that contributes toward their room and board. We believe they should, just as the rest of us on the outside who have not committed crimes must also do.” The editorial board also argued that allowing incarcerated people to refuse work might pave the way for more mass work stoppages. (A major prison labor strike erupted in 2016, with tens of thousands of workers in multiple states protesting what they called inhumane and exploitative conditions.)

Additionally, political unease about the public cost of paying incarcerated workers fairly may have drawn opposition. An effort to institute a ban through California’s state legislature in 2022 ran into pushback from the Department of Finance, which estimated that implementing the measure would cost an additional $1.5 billion annually if incarcerated workers became entitled to earn a minimum wage, instead of the typical current pay rates of less than $1 an hour. The price tag led both Democratic and Republican lawmakers to back away from the measure. (In this past election cycle, Prop 6 and its accompanying legislation avoided direct projections of fiscal costs by instead “requir[ing] wages for work assignments in county and city jail programs to be set by local ordinance.”)

Abolitionists acknowledge that eliminating prison slavery will be costly for the governments and companies that have long benefited from it. “There is a price to be paid for abolishing slavery, there’s no question,” Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and co-author of Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery, told Truthout. “But what the legislators don’t do is focus on the benefit,” including the economic gains not just for incarcerated workers but also for their families and communities, which are often distressed, impoverished and disproportionately Black, Brown and Indigenous. Incarcerated workers could better support themselves and their families with decently paid voluntary jobs, which would alleviate dependence on the informal underground economy of prison “hustles” and, once released, help them stably transition to the mainstream economy.
State by State

Though it is a setback for the abolitionist movement, the defeat of Prop 6 comes on the heels of several successful efforts to end slavery in state prisons in a number of other, even more conservative, states. In Nevada this year — a state that Donald Trump won narrowly — voters approved a ballot initiative to abolish prison slavery via constitutional amendment by a 21-point margin, indicating that such proposals have moral appeal across party lines.

Colorado was the first state since the signing of the 13th Amendment to remove the “slavery exception” from its constitution in 2018. Utah, Nebraska, Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont followed with similar ballot initiatives. Alabama’s 2022 abolition referendum included several other measures that removed explicitly racist provisions of the state constitution, including school segregation policies and a prohibition on racial miscegenation.

A bill recently introduced in the New York State legislature would amend the state’s constitution to “abolish slavery without exception,” and a companion bill lays out a framework of labor standards and rights for incarcerated workers. Incarcerated workers would be paid at least the state minimum wage — a massive raise from current hourly wages that typically run under a dollar — as well as workplace health and safety protections, which are crucial for the many high-risk maintenance jobs that incarcerated workers often perform, such as asbestos abatement.

On the national level, advocates face a tougher fight to amend the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment. A bill introduced last year declares “the continued existence of slavery and involuntary servitude antithetical to the democratic values, norms, and mores of the United States and can undermine the moral credibility of our country on the global stage.” However, such an amendment would require a two-thirds majority of both chambers of Congress to move forward for ratification by the states — likely impossible with Republicans in control of the House and Senate.

Led by civil and human rights organizations as well as faith and labor groups, the movement to end prison slavery runs parallel to the contemporary abolition movement, which broadly envisions dismantling carceral institutions — which have disproportionately targeted Black communities since the end of chattel slavery — in order to replace them with community-focused systems of justice.

Abolishing forced prison labor is a step toward removing the capitalist infrastructure that has been built around the systematic exploitation of the incarcerated workforce. The vast majority of the incarcerated workforce is employed in maintenance jobs that keep prisons running, such as janitorial work. About 15 percent work for government-run enterprises and public works, according to the ACLU report’s estimates, while private industries employ less than 1 percent. Shifting all these workers into a system of voluntary labor would require an exponential increase in their wages, especially if incarcerated workers became eligible for standard state minimum wages or prevailing wage standards set for their respective industries. According to a recent study by Edgeworth Economics, transitioning to a voluntary paid workforce would put between $11.6 billion and $18.8 billion of annual wages into imprisoned workers’ pockets, and better-paid work in prison would translate into better economic prospects for workers once they are released.

Much of the advocacy around abolishing prison slavery does not go so far as to call for the abolition of prison itself, and some activists say they are above all focused on resolving the immediate human rights crisis of forced labor in prisons. But activists say if forced labor ends in prison, the whole infrastructure of the carceral state will become less economically viable. An obligation to treat incarcerated workers fairly and equally would shake the foundations of a social institution that has been designed for centuries to maximize suffering and exploitation. And empowering the incarcerated with real labor rights would enable them to hold authorities accountable and organize collective resistance to abuse.

“It would alter the balance of power in the prisons quite significantly if incarcerated people have the right to refuse ill-paid and unsafe work,” Ross said. “Because the ability to force people to work is absolutely key to the power of the jailor.”

But advocates acknowledge that ending forced labor in prison is an incremental shift that would not immediately end ingrained practices of oppression in the carceral system; labor remains an everyday part of prison life, and coercive treatment is endemic to the environment. Indeed, incarcerated workers have filed lawsuits in Alabama and Colorado, claiming they have still been forced to work and faced punishment for refusing, despite their states’ prison slavery bans. Those ongoing legal battles reveal how, beyond policy remedies, creating the conditions for true abolition demands sustained vigilance and organizing.

“Formal measures like this are not sufficient, but they’re necessary,” Ross said. “They put you down on the road to freedom, but the road is unbuilt, and you have to then build it.”

Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at Dissent Magazine, and a contributing writer at The Nation, In These Times and Truthout. She is also a co-producer of the “Asia Pacific Forum” podcast and Dissent Magazine’s “Belabored” podcast, and teaches history at the City University of New York. Follow her on Twitter: @meeshellchen.

'Barbaric violence': Video of inmate being beaten to death sparks call for 'immediate action'

Body camera footage of Marcy Correctional Facility officers beating Robert Brooks on December 9, 2024 (Image: Office of New York Attorney General Letitia James)

Carl Gibson

December 28, 2024

ALTERNET

On Friday, the Office of New York Attorney General Letitia James released body camera footage from the night that Marcy Correctional Facility inmate Robert Brooks was beaten to death. Now, calls are mounting for those involved to be held criminally accountable.

Politico reported that both New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and New York state senator Julia Salazar — who chairs the senate's Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee — are both demanding answers and justice. The video shows several officers standing around Brooks, who had just arrived at Marcy after being transferred from the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Oneida County, taking turns beating him while he was restrained in handcuffs and leg shackles. Just six hours after the beating, Syracuse.com reported that Brooks died from his injuries at Wynn Hospital in Utica.

While officers hadn't turned on their body cameras, the video footage was obtained via "standby" mode that captures video without accompanying audio. While there are 13 officers and one nurse involved, none have yet been charged with a crime. Hochul has called for all of those involved in Brooks' fatal assault to be fired. And in a public statement, she seemingly suggested that additional action beyond termination could follow.

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"Like all New Yorkers, I was outraged and horrified after seeing footage of the senseless killing of Robert Brooks," Hochul stated Friday. "The State of New York has zero tolerance for individuals who break the law, and I am committed to holding everyone involved fully accountable."

Sen. Salazar posted a statement to X condemning the "unconscionable violence" displayed by the officers in the body camera footage. She noted that while some of those involved have already been suspended without pay and others have resigned, she noted that she "fully expect[s] all officers involved to be criminally charged for their respective roles in enabling and committing barbaric violence against Robert Brooks, ultimately killing him." She also called Brooks' death a "profound policy failure that demands immediate action."

"Marcy Correctional Facility cannot remain open. The brutal killing of Robert Brooks would be more than enough to demand the closure of Marcy," Salazar stated. "However, there have been additional, previous reports of unconscionable violence against incarcerated individuals by staff at Marcy and at other [Department of Corrections and Community Supervision] facilities. My office has received these reports, and I have urged those with power to investigate these reports to do so."

Brooks was serving a 12-year sentence for stabbing his girlfriend several times. At the time of his transfer to Marcy, Brooks had served seven years of that sentence. Those involved are Officers Mathew Galliher, Nicholas Anzalone, David Kingsley, Nicholas Kieffer, Robert Kessler, Michael Fisher, Christopher Walrath, Michael Along, Shea Schoff, David Walters, Anthony Farina, Michael Mashaw, Glenn Trombly and Nurse Kyle Dashnaw.

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Click here to read Politico's full report, and click here to view the body camera footage posted to Attorney General James' website (some of the footage is graphic and may be upsetting to some viewers.)