Work in prison is labor intensive and health deteriorating. It relies on wages that would be illegal outside of prison. It is coercive, neither voluntary nor desired. However, because prisons use resource deprivation to control populations, a job inside can seem like a lifeline. Whether it’s working in the kitchen or the maintenance department, doing trash detail, bagging commissary, working an industry job as a cabinetmaker or welder, cleaning housing units and washing the laundry, sweeping administrative offices, or waxing and buffing the hallway floors—all for around a dollar a day, on average—a job in prison can mean eating a little more and being able to afford pharmacy items, sneakers, and shower shoes. Jobs also give us time out of the cell, where we spend upward of twenty hours a day sharing six feet by nine feet of space with another human.
The fact remains, though, that this work is abusive, involuntary—and indispensable for the prison to function. Imprisoned captives have collectively sacrificed toward abolition by refusing to work before. Drawing inspiration from the Attica rebellion, in 1974 Alabama’s Inmates for Action organized a collective labor strike to protest barbaric conditions and the often-lethal violence carried out on work farms. Southern states have been at the center of the movement to destabilize, decarcerate, and destroy the system of human caging from within ever since. On the forty-fifth anniversary of the Attica rebellion, in 2016, the nation witnessed the largest prison strike in U.S. history when the Free Alabama Movement and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee mobilized 24,000 people across 24 states in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and boycotts to resist inhumane conditions and to demand that the Thirteenth Amendment’s clause legalizing forced labor for those convicted of crimes be repealed. Two years later, in South Carolina, activists called for a nationwide prison strike, demanding decarceration, funding for rehabilitation programs, voting rights, and the end to racism in the criminal legal system.
Unfortunately, in each of these instances, state violence ended all collective participation, leaving demands unmet: labor still forced, conditions still barbaric, and sentencing still disproportionately racist. The 1974 rebellion ended in four dead imprisoned organizers, the 2016 work stoppage with massive statewide lockdowns, and the 2018 rebellion in batons, not ballots. In truth, because of such repressive tactics, we will likely never know the full extent of incarcerated people’s labor organizing, since those who attempt anything of the kind are almost always met with swift reprisals, punishment, and silencing.
So what would happen if the 1,500 people caged at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Connecticut, the largest prison in New England by population, said, “We ain’t working no more”?
It would cost the prison tens of thousands of dollars to perform all the critical functions its captives do on a daily basis, and taxpayers would carry the burden of subsidizing all the work we refused to do to keep the institution going. The staff would have to clean the showers. Unclog the toilets. Fix the pipes and take out the garbage. Provide hospice care. They would be forced to prepare our food themselves, or let us starve.
I asked folks what they thought about the idea of using a labor strike to demand changes to our material circumstances.
“A labor strike in the prison would be like an engine not working in a car,” concluded a captive advocate who has worked every job in the prison over the past two decades. “The prison would be unable to operate. The incarcerated can then negotiate for things that can be useful toward liberation.” Another brother agreed: “It would be the single most useful thing we can do.” He pointed out that it would also require the vast majority of the population to be on board because it’s “not just about getting workers to say no, it’s also about getting enough people to say no” as the prison looks to replace striking workers.
Nearly everyone I talked with expressed their belief that a strike would only be effective if “we all came together.” That’s the crux of any mass movement for change, especially in here. What does coming together look like when the prison does everything it can to pit us against each other—by race, by age, by housing assignment, by any form of perceived difference or disagreement they believe they can exploit? And when we do unify and mobilize, how do we protect the most vulnerable? We are living in anxious times under intense circumstances. Yet we contribute to our own undoing with coerced labor that keeps these institutions functioning. We can no longer follow the rulers’ rules of resistance that don’t allow the space for collective struggle to fully materialize.
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Inquest, finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
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The biggest immediate obstacle we face is that organizing in prison—even just talking about prisoner unity—cannot be done without threat of harsh institutional repercussions. (For their protection and my own, I am not naming anyone I engaged with when writing this essay). These repercussions loomed over a brother inside, as he described how he “loved the idea of everyone quitting their jobs,” but feared that a “failed attempt could be devastating for anyone who may be up for parole.” We run the risk of being slapped with administrative punishments for “conspiracy to commit,” which can mean the difference between being parole-eligible and remaining captive for decades more.
A brother in here who has done time in a Georgia state prison spoke of retaliation by prison lockdown, a frequent tactic administered against any unified or strategic approach toward systemic change. A lockdown is torture via isolation. Through stretches of showerless, communicationless, interactionless, indefinite days of uninterrupted cell confinement. Lockdowns were a common response to the nationwide protests in 2016 and 2018, and just the planning of a collective effort brought about this torturous repercussion in Georgia: “it sent shock waves through the DOC.” When plans of work stoppages at the Georgia prison were “uncovered” by administration, they locked the prison down. Prison officials knew that a universal work stoppage would “bring them to their knees.” Although the lockdown is a method of response after the fact, it is also meant to serve as a deterrent to future initiatives before they are even imagined.
Prison administrators carry out lockdowns and other retaliatory measures without hesitation. In the face of this powerful tool of deterrence, we require collaboration and support from the free world. We need protection and resources—financial, emotional, and legal. And we also need buy-in from social justice and human rights advocates, lawyers, doctors, educators, and state representatives to ensure our complete and unaltering safety. The presence of our outside allies must be palpable inside if our refusal is to be more than another story of martyrdom. Although allies held simultaneous protests outside of prisons during the most recent prisoner mobilizations—and contraband cell phones, social media, and press coverage played a major role in communication and collaboration—it was not enough to stop state violence from putting an end to calls for justice. Without witnesses from the outside world, we will be pressured, coerced, and tortured into keeping this institution running.
We need our outside allies to be dedicated to our struggle, which ideally would include daily walkthroughs by neutral parties (like a legal observer at a protest) and even an entire in-house department run by non-prison staff committed to our well-being that would review surveillance footage, record testimonials, and help us remain in contact with our loved ones. Essentially, we would need our allies to be present around the clock inside, with zero tolerance for any form of retaliation. For this level of outside witness to even be legally possible, our allies would have to focus resources on enacting legislation and changes to prison administration policies. This is hard work, just so that the real work can begin—but it would have a meaningful impact on our lives inside as we struggle for liberation.
Contemplating the potential result of a complete prisoner work stoppage, one brother mused that it “wouldn’t do much to change [the] judiciary system or practices”—including discriminatory criminalization and rampant violations of due process—but it could “potentially improve the living conditions” of those currently held captive in prison. But what do “improved living conditions” look like? Captivity is inhumane, and people have always rebelled against their imprisonment. From the individual to the collective, from plantations to prisons, from Haiti to Attica—the human spirit will never give in to captivity.
We must not cede ground to the idea that we can reform our way into making prisons humane. We must address social harms without repeating them. We must make a world in which we do not punish humans with cages.
A collective, nationwide, complete refusal to work in prison would be a major step toward abolition. It would make the carceral status quo impossible to maintain. Although abolitionist ideas have grown in popularity among outside allies in recent years, prison abolition must be centered inside prisons, where state-sanctioned violence is most concentrated, led by those confined within them, and built on the back of awareness work. But to do the work of prison abolition inside the prison itself, the incarcerated must identify each other as allies. Initiating hypothetical scenarios toward material change (like the one I offer here), raising the level of political and collective consciousness, treating each other like the human beings we are, caring for each other, working for change with that care—that’s prison abolition. Prison abolition is about participating in every attempt to remake society in service of true justice and safety—and that means calling for the end of inhumane institutional confinement in its entirety.
A nationwide prisoner work refusal can potentially bring us closer to the just and safe society that abolition work desires. The strategy requires long-game resilience, and that’s not just striking for a set of demands. Unlike the more common hunger strikes that often eventually result in court orders to force-feed us, or temporary strikes for pay raises or better conditions (forms of protest that, historically, have left us all still captive), permanent work refusal threatens to bring the entire system down.
The billions of dollars invested into prisons could instead be redirected into ending the circumstances that lead people to prison to begin with. Imagine resources revitalizing resource-depleted communities that mass incarceration has contributed to depleting. Imagine hungry people fed; the unhoused with places to call home; free, accessible, and unbiased health care; and entire communities addicted to education. Imagine prisoners leading the way, no more work leading to no more harm.
Image source: Alina Grubnyak / Unsplash
