Tag: Georgia Department of Corrections

Since June 10 an undetermined number of Georgia prisoners have been on a hunger strike. Some of these men are the Jackson State prison strikers. After two weeks, according to the families of Miguel Jackson and Preston Whiting, they are weak from hunger and subject to fainting spells. But they seem to believe they have little to lose. They are, a letter from one of them asserts, “starving for change.” We must demand justice for Miguel Jackson and other Georgia state prisoners who are being targeted and brutalized for exposing their inhumane conditions and standing up for their most basic human rights.

What is wrong with prisoners asking for better living conditions and pay for work? What is wrong with prisoners requesting better educational programs, better religious programs, better rehabilitative programs or any useful programs at all instead of the current ones in place, which we hardly are even allowed to attend?

A year ago this month, Black, White and Brown inmates in a dozen Georgia prisons staged a brief strike. They put forward a set of simple and basic demands – wages for work, decent food and medical care, access to educational and self-improvement programs, fairness and more.

On Nov. 25, Hancock State Prison in Sparta, Georgia, erupted into a full scale riot, as prisoners ran off the guards in several of the cell houses (euphemistically called dormitories, as though this was a college campus) in protest over abuses by guards and grievances unresolved by administrators.

Georgia prisoner speaks out against prison guard retaliation and brutal abuse resulting from allegations of conspiring in the Dec. 9 prison strike.

Three months after inmate protests at multiple Georgia prisons, public records have emerged to document the vicious assault and battery committed upon handcuffed prisoner Terrance Dean by correctional officers and supervisors of Macon State Prison.

Georgia State Prison, identified by its dwellers as “The Bottom” (i.e., The End), due to its life-negating atmosphere, is once again living up to its sadistic name by fostering and maintaining an atmosphere that produces death.

Inmate beatings by prison guards occur across Georgia following an eight-day peaceful protest to highlight inhumane conditions in the prisons. These protesting prisoners must be silenced because a whole range of corporate interests has found that they can profit from caging human beings.

What is so extraordinary about this action besides its statewide character is its unity among the prisoners — Black, Latino, white, Muslims, Christians, Rastafarians — to achieve their central demand to be treated as human beings, not slaves or animals.

We, as members of activist and community organizations in the Bay Area of California, send our support and salute you for making history as your strike has become the largest prison strike in the history of this nation. We recognize the potential that your action has to improve the lives of millions subject to inhumane treatment in correctional facilities across this country.

by Rashad Price The struggle in Georgia against capitalist motivated "cramming" is a protracted battle. Here at Dooly State Prison and many other camps like...