By Timothy DuWhite
On August 21st, 21 cities across this nation went on strike against the deplorable state of prisons in this country. These 19 days of resistance included work stoppages, sit-ins, and hunger strikes, and follows the valiant riot of the inmates at Lee County earlier this year, as well as the one-day prison strike of 2016.
Even despite her hectic schedule filled to the brim with fighting for her people’s liberation—writer, prison activist, and community organizer Amani Sawari managed to find time to chat with us about her involvement in this year’s strike.
We discussed her involvement in the movement, the motivations to extend the strike from 1 to 19 days, the media’s silence around this effort, and much more. This is part two of our two part interview. You can read part one here.
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Timothy: Well, that actually brings me perfectly into my next question. I was thinking about media. And though I definitely heard a lot more about this action than I did two years ago, it still was kind of quiet in news cycles. How has the efforts of the mainstream to keep this quiet affected the work.
Amani: I definitely think that there’s an agenda that’s fighting against what’s going on in prison. And it’s definitely an interest of the states to keep what’s going on in prisons quiet, because there’s this illusion of safety that helps the state maintain mass incarceration. We know that our communities aren’t safer because more people are in prison, but a lot of people still believe and think that. I like to bring up what happened in Lee County this year as a perfect example. The officials took away prisoners lockers as a safety precaution, but this safety precaution led to 17 people being critically injured and 7 people dying. There’s obviously nothing safe about taking away prisoners lockers in an attempt to eliminate contraband. And that’s the same sort of metaphor that we need to use on the outside, these safety precautions are just an illusion and we need to really get behind what needs to happen instead of taking things away from people to do this kind of illusion of safety. We need to be educating people, we need to be providing rehabilitation.
A lot of people didn’t know that rehabilitation was cut out for people who are labeled as “violent offenders.” That doesn’t make any sense. And in the mainstream people were like, “Oh, wow, why are people in prison then?” Because we’re warehousing bodies, we just want them to sit, rot, and stay in there as long as possible and become more bitter and more angry and less prepared to get out—so people can make more money off of exploiting their labor. People are starting to connect the dots and see what doesn’t make sense. I think that a lot of education still needs to happen, but a huge amount of awareness happened with the national prison strike, and we’re starting to see that when prisoners go out in front and take the lead and put their demands out there. A lot of people will stand behind them because we can no longer exclude prisoners from criminal justice reform. Their lives depend on these reforms and they should be the ones that are making these changes and taking the lead on telling us what changes need to be made, because they know better than we do!
T: Absolutely, absolutely. So what are some of the demands of the strike, or the prisoners rather?
A: Prisoners had 10 demands, and one thing a lot of people focused on was demand number two, an end to prison slavery. Prisoners want to be paid fair wages for the work that they do. People say, “Oh, why, they get free food, they get free clothes”, not really, they still have to buy jackets, they have to buy shoes, they have to buy all their hygiene products, they have to buy food for the time after 6:00 when dinner is served. I know I get hungry after 6:00. They have to buy music, entertainment. If someone is incarcerated for 10 years they might want an MP3 player one day or a television, and these things cost the same, if not more because there’s a monopoly on the companies that are in there. There might be one or two companies that they can purchase from, and therefore prices are so much higher because of that.
They have to pay to send out emails, to send out mail, to talk on the phone. If someone’s getting paid $2 dollars for eight hours of work and then they have to pay $3.50 for a 15 minute phone call, we are sort of keeping them in this state of financial instability and financial oppression, and we need to be preparing prisoners to be on the outside. They should be able to learn how to budget and use money. They should be able to save up for when they get out—dare I say have a little bit in the bank for when they get out. They should be able to support their families. Their families, many of which are already in poverty, shouldn’t be having to sacrifice by sending in hundreds of dollars when they’ve already lost this entire stream of income. It should be the other way around, if anything. Prisoners want to be able to make a fair wage.
And then there are a lot of demands that tie into changes in policy. Like demand number three, a rescinding of the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act. That act bars prisoners from being able to have their rights protected in the courts, so there’s no judicial oversight to what’s happening to prisoners. A lot of the times when prisoners do file a grievance on something that’s happened to them, the same people investigating those grievances are the ones who caused them or who were involved in the abuse. And that is completely unjust. We wouldn’t want that on the outside, and so that shouldn’t be happening on the inside. And then rescinding of laws like the Truth in Sentencing laws, the Sentencing Reform Acts that have a mandatory minimums. And we’ve seen over and over again judges say, “I wouldn’t even give this sentence but there’s a mandatory minimum so I have to give you this sentence.”
An end to racist Gang Enhancement laws, which are laws that require that if someone is found to be a part of a gang because of tattoo markings on their body or the neighborhood that they’re from or someone that were in a picture with, that they have a mandatory amount added to their sentence on top of whatever crime was committed. And then also having access to pell grants so that prisoners can take classes when they get out. They already aren’t making a lot when they’re in. They didn’t have access to taking classes most of the time before they were in, so why are we not giving them the opportunity to get an education when they get out or while they’re incarcerated?
A lot of these demands tie into each other in different ways. Different regions of the country are focusing on different demands. For example, South and North Carolina are focusing a lot on the right to vote. In Michigan, they have a good time campaign that they’re focused on right now. Different areas are focusing on the different demands, but nationally these 10 demands are a great umbrella for us to watch and keep an eye on as they’re fulfilled throughout our country. We need to see these demands happen, we need to see progress on every single one of these demands in 2019. We need to see our legislators and our policy makers making a real attempt at criminal justice reform that is inspired and led by the people whose lives depend on these reforms.
T: For my final questions, we had the strike in 2016, now 2018, what should we expect for the future? And also, how can folks continue to engage, and be involved even outside of strikes?
A: Yeah. Resistance is going to continue on the inside, in places like Ohio and South Carolina prisoners are still striking, they’re still doing hunger strikes. We don’t want to just lay this down and say, “Okay, the strike is over, it’s over.” No, it’s definitely not over. Jailhouse Lawyers is going to be coming out with a statement, it’s going to be about their prisoners human rights coalition. They’re putting together a coalition of groups, which we hope would include many of the endorsing groups. A lot of the endorsing groups have already signed on to be a part of this, but the coalition is going to be committed to seeing every single one of the strikes 10 demands fulfilled in this country. And so ads, and actions from her on out we’re going to be saying, “Okay, human rights coalition, this petition is out.”
For example, we’ve got a petition up on KAOS right now that has over 14,000 signatures on it, demanding that legislatures support prisoners demands. We need to educate. That’s what this stage is for right now, educating our legislatures about their demands, letting them know that the strike happened, letting them know the participation that happened on such a wide scale in so many states. Because if we don’t let our legislatures know what we want, then we can’t hold them accountable when the policy changing time comes. Right now we need to be educating our legislatures, we have to tweet at different policy makers and congress people telling them, “This demand! Do you know about this demand! What’s your opinion on this demand! Tell us what your opinion is, because we don’t want to vote you back in if you don’t uphold these demands.”
We need criminal justice reform to be the number one priority in this country. Our country obviously has the biggest issue with mass incarceration in the world, we incarcerate the most of our citizens, and we need to see this cut dramatically. A lot of people need to be coming out in the next year, but I’m going to be realistic and say five.
We need to see a lot of people coming out and we need to see an intentional change from policy makers in the way that they think about criminal justice reform. Now, we’ve seen some reforms, like small reforms, like now women can have as many tampons as they need, but we need to see big transformational changes. We can’t just slap the word “reform” on any change or criminal justice bill, reform means transformation, like a difference, a real difference that’s transforming people’s lives, and that’s what we need to see. We can’t settle on little policy changes, we need to see big change! And the 10 things that prisoners came out with are the big things that we need to keep our eye on and we can’t settle until we see those things happen.
T: Do you have any final thoughts you’ll like to end on?
A: I guess my thing would be just people being really intentional about where they’re spending their money, and being sure that they look up and see is this place exploiting prisoners labor? There’s more places than you think and it’s not always obvious, so just be really intentional about that because our dollar is our most important vote here.
Get involved with actions moving forward by signing the petition!
Timothy DuWhite is a black, queer, poz-writer/artist/nigga based out of Brooklyn, NY. A majority of his work circles around the intersections of state & body, state & love, and state & mind. All Timothy desires is a different/newer world for his sha-daughters, and believes the written word is one tool that could be used towards achieving that goal.
