Melvin Ray (Credit: Free Alabama Movement)
In an interview with Salon, Alabama inmates say they are engaging in a strike this weekend as the last resort against what they're describing as a modern form of slavery.
“We decided that the only weapon or strategy … that we have is our labor, because that’s the only reason that we're here,” Melvin Ray, inmate at the St. Clair correctional facility and founder of the prison-based group Free Alabama Movement, told Salon. “They're incarcerating people for the free labor.”
The Alabama state Senate recently passed a bill which allows private companies to use prisoners for agricultural work, and as it stands, prisoners already do laundry, kitchen, chemical work, and license plate production.
Ray says in January, a majority of the 1300 St. Clair inmates and 1,100 of Holman’s engaged in a work stoppage, while a Department of Corrections spokesperson downplayed the January work stoppage, saying that only a few inmates actually went on strike and others were prevented from working due to other unrelated concerns.
Ray feels as if this weekend’s strike will be even larger than the last one, but says prison officials are working to stop it before it even begins by thwarting communication and threatening organizers with solitary confinement if they persist.
Asked to describe the living situation, “It’s a hellhole,” he said. “That’s what they created these things for: to destroy men.”
Ray says he has to get inmates to understand that they don't have anything to lose.
“We have to get them to understand: You're not giving up anything. You don't have anything. And you're going to gain your freedom right here.”
He has previously used banned cell phones to document horrid conditions in the prison, such as “unsafe beef, broken fire exits and exposed wires.”
Ray said the strikers want rehab and an end to “the free labor system.”
“There is not even the pretense of doing anything about ‘corrections,’” Ray said. “They're running a slave empire.”
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