On Tuesday, America’s vast army of incarcerated men and women – at 2.3m of them they form by far the largest imprisoned population in the world – will brace itself for what has the potential to be the largest prison strike in US history.
Nineteen days of peaceful protest are planned across the nation, organised largely by prisoners themselves.
Good for them. Prison reform is one of the many things that need to be changed!
Agreed. Private prisons are growing and are pure evil as well.
So, I barely heard anything about it so far. Is anyone covering it?
Slow news day.
On the one hand, this sounds like the beginning of a joke… “What are they going to do if they refuse to work? Fire them from prison?”
On the other hand, it’s such an important issue in the US. It has the highest incerceration rate in the world, higher than Russia and China combined. When Saudi Arabia can turn around and say: “My human rights violations? You’re one to talk, what about your prisons, United States of America?”, you know you have a problem.
Then I went to the Prison Policiy Initiative website linked in the article. Prison population is 90% men, they get higher sentences for the same crime and also generally more difficult prison conditions and most of the hard labour, but the only “gender disparity” the Prison Policy Initiative can find is that the 90% ratio is gradually going down, which doesn’t even make sense. They even have one fact sheet for everyone and one for women. So I guess it’s true what they say, that there are only two genders: women and “persons”. What a depressing state of affairs.
Really, I think gender imbalance in prison is the least of a million other problems. First of all most of these prisoners shouldn’t even be there, secondly conditions in the prisons are horrific, third, the race imbalance is the real problem because it highlights POC second-class-citizenship and endemic racism.