Support Operation PUSH Prisoner Strike throughout Florida prison system, initiated on MLK Day

The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition stands in solidarity with the Florida Prison Strikers.

Stay informed and updated with links below. Please help amplify the striking prisoners’ voices.

These are the strikers’ demands (in their words):
1. Payment for our labor, rather than the current slave arrangement
2. Ending outrageous canteen prices
3. Reintroducing parole incentives to lifers and those with Buck Rogers dates

Along with these primary demands, we are also expressing our support for the following goals:

• Stop the overcrowding and acts of brutality committed by officers throughout FDOC which have resulted in the highest death rates in prison history.
• Expose the environmental conditions we face, like extreme temperatures, mold, contaminated water, and being placed next to toxic sites such as landfills, military bases and phosphate mines (including a proposed mine which would surround the Reception and Medical Center prison in Lake Butler).
• Honor the moratorium on state executions, as a court-ordered the state to do, without the legal loophole now being used to kill prisoners on death row.
• Restore voting rights as a basic human right to all, not a privilege, regardless of criminal convictions.

Supporters of Operation PUSH march in solidarity with prisoners on Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, Gainesville, FL, Jan 15, 2018. (Photo from Fighting Toxic Prisons)

Florida Prisoners Are Laying It Down
with a work stoppage, an economic protest

Prisoners’ Statement: FL Prisoners Call for Operation PUSH to Improve the Lives of Incarcerated People and the Communities We Come From (with intro from Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons) https://fighttoxicprisons.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/fl-prisoners-announce-operation-push-starting-jan-15-to-cripple-prison-system/

Great Audio Interview: Oakland IWOC speaking on Operation PUSH on KPFA with Cat Brooks Jan 23, 2018 https://soundcloud.com/oakland-iwoc/oakland-iwoc-speaking-on-operation-push-on-kpfa-upfront-with-cat-brooks

Jan 19, 2018 Update on Operation PUSH (originally posted on SPARC) https://fighttoxicprisons.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/updates-on-operation-push-in-the-florida-department-of-corrections/

Are Florida prisons suppressing an inmate strike or just lying about it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/24/are-florida-prisons-suppressing-an-inmate-strike-or-just-lying-about-it/?utm_term=.8b74c32b7067

Florida Officials Deny Operation PUSH Is Ongoing, Even As They Retaliate Against Prisoners https://shadowproof.com/2018/01/25/operation-push-update/

Please stay updated through these sites:

• • • Supporting Prisoners And Real Change (SPARC) https://www.facebook.com/SPARC-133851070619730/
    • Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP)
      https://www.facebook.com/FightToxicPrisons  and https://tinyurl.com/ycxgf66w
    • IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) https://www.facebook.com/incarceratedworkers/ and https://incarceratedworkers.org/openaid-home

Recent Call to Action! Demand Florida DOC Stop Torturing Rashid Johnson

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson (#158039) wrote an article about the Florida prison strike, “Florida Prisoners Are Laying it Down” which was published online on January 9, 2018. The following day warden Barry Reddish retaliated against Rashid’s use of his First Amendment rights, ordering that he be given a disciplinary infraction for “inciting a riot”. Further, on January 19th Rashid was thrown in a cold cell, with a broken toilet, no heating, and with a window that will not fully close, allowing cold wind to blow into the cell. The cell has the same temperature as the outside, where temperatures have been repeatedly at or below freezing.  Kevin “Rashid” Johnson was not allowed communication with his attorney or anyone on the outside for 6 days.

UPDATE: People made many calls to the warden in the prison where Rashid is being held.

Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Four Years and Still Fighting

by Claude Marks – Isaac Ontiveros  July 9, 2015
Originally published in Counterpunch

Four years ago prisoners in California – led by those in the control units of Pelican Bay – organized a hunger strike to demand an end to the torturous conditions of solitary confinement. Two more strikes would follow, with over 30,000 prisoners taking united action in the summer of 2013—both in isolation and in general population in nearly every California prison. The strikes reflected significant shifts in political consciousness among prisoners and their loved ones. The violence of imprisonment was further exposed by demands and heightened organization from within the cages. Prisoner-led collective actions as well as growing public support dramatically have changed the political landscape.

The organization of hunger strikes in 2011 surprised many, especially the CDCr – the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (the lower case ‘r’ by most prison writers derides the Orwellian use of the word rehabilitation), the media, and much of the public.

Current prison organizing continues a historic legacy of struggle. Among prisoners, the strikes of 2011-2013 were compared to the Attica Rebellion of 1971. Shortly before that rebellion, prisoners at Attica refused to speak or eat in the facility’s chow hall, paying tribute to Black Panther Party member and California prison movement leader George Jackson, who had been assassinated at San Quentin prison August 21st. Jackson was a skilled and effective leader who connected the human rights demands of prisoners to revolutionary ideas both globally and in the streets. He argued with powerful clarity that racist and exploitive power relations could and should be changed through political and military struggle, and that Black liberation was achievable as part of an international struggle to destroy imperialism. Within the prisons, he built unity across racial lines – thinking that a unified prison movement could succeed in winning basic human rights both within the cages and in oppressed communities. While the state obviously found Jackson’s ideas and example extremely dangerous, many prisoners and community members found them a clarion call for action.

On September 9^th 1971, Attica erupted. Led by prisoners affiliated with the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and the Five Percenters, the rebellion seized control of several large areas of the prison and issued a manifesto demanding, among other things, better health conditions, an end to political persecution of prisoners, and a right to organize or join labor unions (these demands were very similar to the Folsom Prison manifesto written in California in 1970). After four days of negotiations, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered that the prison be retaken – in the ensuing brutal military assault 39 people were killed by state police and prison guards.

While Attica is one of the most remembered uprisings, between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, there were over three hundred prison rebellions across the US, including those at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1973, the Idaho State Penitentiary in 1972-3, the August Rebellion in 1974 at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York State, a 1975 demonstration at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women, and the Penitentiary of New Mexico in 1980.

In response to these militant uprisings, prisons developed unprecedented strategies of repression, isolation and for a time resistance took less dramatic forms. Yet prisoners were still inspired to resist. In one example, in 1995 women in CA state prisons initiated a class action law suit against genocidal health care conditions and successfully organized family members and allies across the state to support them.

Prisoners in California in 2011-2013 organized against the very policies, strategies, and technology that had been put into place to neutralize the rebellions of previous decades (both inside and outside prison)—including solitary confinement, gang validation (which includes the criminalization of George Jackson’s writings), and the gutting of educational programming. In turn, prisoners used similar historic strategies – collective direct action, multiracial unity, and building strong support and solidarity networks on the outside.