“ORGANIZINGBEHINDBARS”BYFRANKBROWNING. FROMRAMPARTS,FEBRUARY1972,PP.40-45.COPYRIGHT ©1972BYNOAH’SARKINC.(FORRAMPARTSMAGAZINE).
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On a morning early in November 1970, just 30 miles from Governor Ronald Reagan’s headquarters in Sacramento, the 2000 inmates at California’s Folsom Prison stopped. They stopped washing clothes. They stopped fixing lunch. They stopped scouring the floors. They stopped making license plates. By the time most rush-hour commuters were parking their cars to go to work, every job at Folsom, except critical hospital care, had been shut down. Bulls, wardens and job supervisors throughout the prison ran scared—and with good reason. For, unlike previous abortiveattemptsatinmatestrikes,this operation had been pulled off with precise timing and total unanimity. The result was perhaps the most resilient show of inmate solidarity in recent California history. More importantly, it set the stage for what has become the mostambitiousprisonorganizingeffort to date—the movement to build a prisonersunion.
For several weeks before the strike at Folsom, rumors of some kind of action had circulated throughout the prison. Theguardsknewsomethingwasup,but took confidence in the knowledge that previous strike attempts had fizzled after a few days, never commanding more than sporadic participation. But this time was to be different. Quickly and without a side-glance, a phrase would be murmured. A time stated. A place set. Three men would pass a bulletin board, never faltering, and a cartoon would appear—showing perhaps a lifer sentencing a warden. Or maybe one man would find he was handedapamphlet;hewouldslylyread it, pass it on, and the next man to the johnwouldflushitaway.
By a day or so before the strike was to begin, everything had been set. A manifesto of 31 demands (29 of which became the core demands at Attica nearly a year later) had been painfully and carefully camouflaged in the wall decorationsofonecell.Eachgroup’sjob and its timing had been determined. The earliest shift—up to 5 AM—was to gotoworkasusualandtherebyprotect itself from isolated persecution should the rest of the inmates fail to go out later. When it became clear that the regular shifts weren’t working, then they too would walk off the job. Willie Holder, a soft-spoken Oklahoman who works with the Prisoners Union at San Francisco, remembers the morning in vividdetail: “The last work call was from 7:30 to 8. I was on early shift and I’d just finished folding clothes at the laundry. I put them on the shelves, didn’t distribute ’em, and walked out in the yard. There’s a great mass of people all ganged around and nobody wants to go to work. But somebody starts to walk away and everybody yells to the motherfucker, ‘Where you goin’?’ He comes back and it’s solid. It’s one mind.”
Contact with the outside, mostly through lawyers, had been good, and at the same time a crowd of supporters withpicketsignsweregatheredbeyond the gates. The men inside knew they were there, and that counted. Not all the inmates were certain of outside support.Willieremembers;maybewhat jelled them as much as anything was one man getting up and shouting: “They’re gonna have a rally outside. We can’t let them down. People out there are interested and concerned. We’ve been striking for years and nobody said nothin’ before.”
At a time when the slaughters at Attica and San Quentin are still fresh in most people’s minds, it is clear that strikes like the one at Folsom are not isolated events. The men at Folsom themselves noted that there have been inmate strikesfordecadeupondecade.Butout of the Folsoms, the San Quentins and Atticas have grown the winds of a movement far more difficult to suppress than were the specific incidents at each prison. For the first time inmates and excons have forged themselves together throughout the country to organize for their own self-
protection and to win the basic human rights ostensibly guaranteed every citizen by the Constitution. In California there are already three groups seriously concentrating on forming local prisoners unions. Similar groupshaveformedaroundTheTombs and Attica in New York; union organizing is underway in both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; and two national meetings of people working to build a unified prison movementhavebeenheldinDallasand Washington. These organizers, like Malcolm X and George Jackson before them, leave little doubt that a new consciousnessofrebellioniskindlingin the sewers of American law enforcement, and no longer are convicts quietly taking out their bitterness on each other in the darknessoflongalleyways.
Prison reform movements have of course passed through the American political geography before—one in the ’30sandagainintheearly1950s.Inboth casesprisonreformreallymeantsimply adding a new kind of guard to the shotgun-brandishing bulls who already walked the rails. The newcomers were psychologists and social workers, people whose educated benevolence was supposed to hasten the way to rehabilitation for the unfortunates inside the joint. Nothing much was done to change the pattern of life for prisoners, and the reformers were simply added to the payroll. With the legacy of the ’50s fresh in their minds, today’s prison organizers don’t speak the same language as the prison reformists. The reason is simple. The reformerswenttograduateschool,and make a living at reform. The organizers
went to prison, and learned to build strikes. The California case is a good example—partiallybecauseithappened earlier—of how a serious prison movement was built by inmates and newlyreleasedex-cons.
Though the strike at Folsom Prison lasted 17 days, none of the demands were met. The warden likes to say the strike flopped. Willie Holder and the people at the Prisoners Union say it didn’t. And when wardens from prisons around the country locked themselves away in a closed conference at the San Francisco Hilton last fall, they didn’t seem quite so sanguine. Movements like the prisoners unions, they muttered, threatened the fabric of America’s penal system. Willie Holder agrees. So does Popeye Jackson, a key organizer for the California-wide UnitedPrisonersUnion,whoduringhis 19 years in the joint spent time in every maximum security “adjustment center” in the state but one. The Folsom Manifesto’s demands, they say, have made their way into every major prison inthecountry.Thereseemslittledoubt that the spirit of the Manifesto has indeed permeated America’s prison sub-culture, for in the last few months [i.e., late 1971] demands and strikes for prisoner rights have come from every cornerofthecountry.Moreconcretely, the idea of forging a prisoners union is adirectfalloutoftheFolsomstrike.
Shortlyafterthestrikeended,pressure on both sides of the walls had grown strong enough for a handful of people to call a working session the following Januarytoformaprisonersunion.... Most of the Union convention focused on rights and grievances of California
prisoners: the indeterminate sentence whichgivesprisonofficialscontrolover the length of an inmate’s term, minimum wage and workmen’s compensationbenefitsinprison,parole board policies, and medical care. Yet moreimportantthananyofthespecific goals that came out of the convention wasthedeterminationtobuildaunited front between people who were still locked up and ex-cons now free on the outside. To build that kind of union means to work in direct opposition to most of the prison reform projects conceived over the decades, and in particular to combat the use of terms like “rehabilitation” for what actually goes on in prisons. In an article on paroles in the Union’s paper, The Anvil, James Testa explains what rehabilitation means: “The real key to releasefromprison,thequickestwayto get ‘rehabilitated,’ is to learn the ‘art’ of deception. Group counseling in prison is mandatory. If a prisoner is expected to be released in as short a time as possible, he has to take the parole board (Adult Authority) a good program. That is to say, he must cooperate to the extent that he becomes an automaton.” Or as San Francisco Prisoners Union President Willie Holder puts it, rehabilitation is really only being reconstructed to acceptprisonlifeandauthority.
Though the two union groups may differ on tactics, a common organizing target will almost certainly be those traditional labor issues: pay and working conditions. Prison wages in Californiarangefromtwocentsanhour to a top of sixteen cents. The work is hard, and, even measured against the termsofrehabilitationandtraining,itis
often useless. (San Quentin, for example, operates the only cotton mill in California.) The United Prisoners Union focused directly on the labor issueinitsopeningstatement:
Half a man’s life is made up of the time he devotes to labor. Whether in prison or on parole, we are compelled to work for a living. Work is the major provision of a people. If we do not work, we steal. If we steal, the chances are we will be returned to prison. If we can’t find work in a system that does not provide jobs for everybody, we are sometimes returned to prisons with a parole violation.
despite the wardens’ best efforts at stopping it, is well circulated among inmates. The papers are vital to inside organizing, for In confirming to prisoners the fact that people outside the walls care about and want to support them, these tabloids vitiate the isolated psychological climate prison authorities depend upon to stymie inmate organizing. . . .
