MEDIA SILENT AS GUARDS & INMATES UNITE IN
By Alice Salles
On September 9, inmates at Holman Prison in
Alabama launched a major 12-state prison strike
to protest the U.S. prison system’s labor practices
and living conditions. The number of participating
states could be even higher, as publications such
as Democracy Now! have reported the strike
happened in at least 24 states.
Regardless of the total number of states, according to
Media Matters, virtually none of the most popular
American media venues or channels have covered
this story.
The Free Alabama Movement, a nonviolent organization focused on “advocating for human rights,” is
one of the groups behind this demonstration and
has been at the forefront of a campaign to improve
prison labor practices since 2012. FAM, as the
organization is commonly referred to, initially led
the strikes, which were primarily limited to work
stoppages. But over time, FAM, along with the Free
Ohio Movement and the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) Incarcerated Workers Organizing
Committee (IWOC), added hunger strikes to their
campaigns, officially launching the effort on the
anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising. That
event inspired the movie “Attica,” starring Morgan
Freeman, which helped the public learn about what
had been going on inside U.S. prisons.
According to the New Yorker, the 1971 campaign
was launched as “a modest petition for decency” that
eventually blossomed into “a full-fledged takeover
— one as surprising to the inmates as to anyone
else — that, after four days, ended in a reprisal riot
by guards and state police that left thirty-nine people
dead.”
Much like the Attica uprising, members of FAM
have focused their protests on the “poor living
conditions and overcrowding,” but initially, leadership was primarily focused on changing forced
labor practices, which include allowing “[c]orporations [to] cut deals with both private and public
prisons, [giving] them access to a labor force that
has no choice but to work for, say, 20 cents an hour.”
TheSovereignVoice.Org