A-Infos (en) anarkismo.net: Announcement of Nationally Coordinated Prisoner Workstoppage for Sept 9, 2016 by Support Prisoner Resistance - Free Alabama Movement - IWOC

Prisoners 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. ---- This is a Call to Action Against Slavery in America ---- In 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. ---- Announcement of Nationally Coordinated Prisoner 
Workstoppage for Sept 9, 2016 ---- On 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.

In 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.

Prisoners 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.

Slavery 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.

This 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.

Non-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.

Prisoners 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.

Forty-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.

To 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.

Our 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.

Prison 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.

Step up, stand up, and join us.
Against prison slavery.
For liberation of all.

Find more information, updates and organizing materials and opportunities at the following 
websites:

-SupportPrisonerResistance.net

-FreeAlabamaMovement.com

-IWOC.noblogs.org

Related Link: https://supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/29600
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