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DESCRIPTION:Prisoners across the US have called for a nationally coordinated work 
 stoppage and protest starting on Sept 9th, the 45th anniversary of Attica. 
 The safety of these prisoners and the effectiveness of the protest depend 
 greatly on outside support. There is a robust and expanding outside support 
 network that you or your organization could join to participate in this, 
 the first prisoner protest of its kind. We’re hoping Sept 9th will 
 fundamentally change not only the dialog, but the landscape of prison in 
 America.\n\nAnnouncement of Nationally Coordinated Prisoner Workstoppage 
 for Sept 9, 2016\n\nPrisoners from across the United States have just 
 released this call to action for a nationally coordinated prisoner 
 workstoppage against prison slavery to take place on September 9th, 
 2016.\nGet it as a zine PDF. En Espanol or mailroom friendly\nThis is a 
 Call to Action Against Slavery in America\nIn one voice, rising from the 
 cells of long term solitary confinement, echoed in the dormitories and cell 
 blocks from Virginia to Oregon, we prisoners across the United States vow 
 to finally end slavery in 2016.\nOn September 9th of 1971 prisoners took 
 over and shut down Attica, New York State’s most notorious prison. On 
 September 9th of 2016, we will begin an action to shut down prisons all 
 across this country. We will not only demand the end to prison slavery, we 
 will end it ourselves by ceasing to be slaves.\nIn the 1970s the US prison 
 system was crumbling. In Walpole, San Quentin, Soledad, Angola and many 
 other prisons, people were standing up, fighting and taking ownership of 
 their lives and bodies back from the plantation prisons. For the last six 
 years we have remembered and renewed that struggle. In the interim, the 
 prisoner population has ballooned and technologies of control and 
 confinement have developed into the most sophisticated and repressive in 
 world history. The prisons have become more dependent on slavery and 
 torture to maintain their stability.\nPrisoners are forced to work for 
 little or no pay. That is slavery. The 13th amendment to the US 
 constitution maintains a legal exception for continued slavery in US 
 prisons. It states “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as 
 a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, 
 shall exist within the United States.” Overseers watch over our every 
 move, and if we do not perform our appointed tasks to their liking, we are 
 punished. They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of 
 the other torments remain: isolation, restraint positions, stripping off 
 our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals.\nSlavery 
 is alive and well in the prison system, but by the end of this year, it 
 won’t be anymore. This is a call to end slavery in America. This call 
 goes directly to the slaves themselves. We are not making demands or 
 requests of our captors, we are calling ourselves to action. To every 
 prisoner in every state and federal institution across this land, we call 
 on you to stop being a slave, to let the crops rot in the plantation 
 fields, to go on strike and cease reproducing the institutions of your 
 confinement.\nThis is a call for a nation-wide prisoner work stoppage to 
 end prison slavery, starting on September 9th, 2016. They cannot run these 
 facilities without us.\nNon-violent protests, work stoppages, hunger 
 strikes and other refusals to participate in prison routines and needs have 
 increased in recent years. The 2010 Georgia prison strike, the massive 
 rolling California hunger strikes, the Free Alabama Movement’s 2014 work 
 stoppage, have gathered the most attention, but they are far from the only 
 demonstrations of prisoner power. Large, sometimes effective hunger strikes 
 have broken out at Ohio State Penitentiary, at Menard Correctional in 
 Illinois, at Red Onion in Virginia as well as many other prisons. The 
 burgeoning resistance movement is diverse and interconnected, including 
 immigrant detention centers, women’s prisons and juvenile facilities. 
 Last fall, women prisoners at Yuba County Jail in California joined a 
 hunger strike initiated by women held in immigrant detention centers in 
 California, Colorado and Texas.\nPrisoners all across the country regularly 
 engage in myriad demonstrations of power on the inside. They have most 
 often done so with convict solidarity, building coalitions across race 
 lines and gang lines to confront the common oppressor.\nForty-five years 
 after Attica, the waves of change are returning to America’s prisons. 
 This September we hope to coordinate and generalize these protests, to 
 build them into a single tidal shift that the American prison system cannot 
 ignore or withstand. We hope to end prison slavery by making it impossible, 
 by refusing to be slaves any longer.\nTo achieve this goal, we need support 
 from people on the outside. A prison is an easy-lockdown environment, a 
 place of control and confinement where repression is built into every stone 
 wall and chain link, every gesture and routine. When we stand up to these 
 authorities, they come down on us, and the only protection we have is 
 solidarity from the outside. Mass incarceration, whether in private or 
 state-run facilities is a scheme where slave catchers patrol our 
 neighborhoods and monitor our lives. It requires mass criminalization. Our 
 tribulations on the inside are a tool used to control our families and 
 communities on the outside. Certain Americans live every day under not only 
 the threat of extra-judicial execution—as protests surrounding the deaths 
 of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and so many others have drawn long 
 overdue attention to—but also under the threat of capture, of being 
 thrown into these plantations, shackled and forced to work.\nOur protest 
 against prison slavery is a protest against the school to prison pipeline, 
 a protest against police terror, a protest against post-release controls. 
 When we abolish slavery, they’ll lose much of their incentive to lock up 
 our children, they’ll stop building traps to pull back those who 
 they’ve released. When we remove the economic motive and grease of our 
 forced labor from the US prison system, the entire structure of courts and 
 police, of control and slave-catching must shift to accommodate us as 
 humans, rather than slaves.\nPrison impacts everyone, when we stand up and 
 refuse on September 9th, 2016, we need to know our friends, families and 
 allies on the outside will have our backs. This spring and summer will be 
 seasons of organizing, of spreading the word, building the networks of 
 solidarity and showing that we’re serious and what we’re capable 
 of.\nStep up, stand up, and join us.\nAgainst prison slavery.\nFor 
 liberation of all.\nFind more information, updates and organizing materials 
 and opportunities at the following 
 websites:\n-SupportPrisonerResistance.net\n-FreeAlabamaMovement.com\n-IWOC.noblogs.org\n\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/08/16/18790178.php
SUMMARY:Nationally Coordinated Prisoner Workstoppage
LOCATION:nation-wide prisoner work stoppage
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/08/16/18790178.php
DTSTART:20160909T190000Z
DTEND:20160910T190000Z
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