Kung Lee at Facing South reports on what appears to be the largest, multi-prison coordinated work strike ever in Georgia, where inmates in several prisons pushed for better wages and living conditions:
Officials at the Department of Corrections have been anxious about deteriorating conditions in Georgia's prisons since early 2010, when wardens were ordered to start triple bunking prisoners in response to budget cuts. Squeezing three prisoners into cells intended for one, prison officials were on the lookout for prisoners to riot, or prisoners' rights lawyers to litigate, or both.
Instead, prisoners used text messages to organize an unprecedented work strike by thousands of prisoners across 10 prisons. Demanding a living wage for work, the prisoners fault the GDC for having prisoners work for free "in violation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude."
The problem, of course, is that the 13th Amendment prohibits involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," which makes a constitutional argument against prison labor hard to make. It's also lucrative for the states -- they're saving money by having people work for free. Officials in Clayton County, Georgia, for example, say that renting prisoners out saves them $2.8 million a year.
The fact that the protest happened at all -- let alone that it was so organized -- is pretty astonishing, particularly given the reported level of participation between groups generally at odds with one another. As Sara Mayeux points out (Mayeux has several other posts worth reading on this), it's also not exactly easy for prisoners to organize in their interests whether starting up a petition, organizing a union, or anything else since there are a lot of legal barriers to doing so out of concern that such efforts could ultimately pose a security threat.
