Melissa Harris-Perry: We're back with The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Over the past three weeks, thousands of incarcerated people in Alabama have gone on strike within state prisons stopping their work for which they are not paid. The action comes after years of reported widespread negligence in the state's prisons. Here with me is Keri Blakinger, reporter for The Marshall Project. Thanks for joining us, Keri.

Keri Blakinger: Hey, thanks for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does it mean to strike? In what ways do incarcerated people have agency as workers?

Keri Blakinger: They can do the very basic thing of refusing to go to work. In some ways that can really come up the works of how prison just functions because aside from some of the factory-type work like producing license plates. They also do many of the basic tasks that are necessary to make a prison run, like taking out the trash, operating the mess hall, things like that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right. What is the catalyst for the labor strike in this case?

Keri Blakinger: Different people will tell you different things as to what prompt them to strike, but it is not a specific incident in the sense that there have been a number of things in Alabama that have been in the news for being problems in their prison system. There was recently the viral images of the emaciated man who had not been getting medical care and there was a botched execution and there had been some reporting saying that those things sparked it, but they did not.

This was about prisoners who were frustrated over the failure to correct conditions, and as a result, they decided to focus on changing laws that would allow people to have a better possibility of release since the conditions themselves have not been fixed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right. The DOJ took the state of Alabama to court back in 2020 and some of the things you're pointing to here, there was a failure to prevent violence and sexual abuse, excessive force by prison staff. Again, the report saying, "Failing to provide safe conditions of confinement in violation of the Constitution." That was more than two years ago. Are you saying the evidence here suggest that those conditions continued in the Alabama jails?

Keri Blakinger: Those conditions are absolutely still the case. There's not been any significant change on that front. Just a few days after the strike began, there was a situation where one prisoner fatally stabbed another and it was caught on camera by someone with a contraband phone and there was video of this killing being spread. Clearly, the conditions are not safer if they're literally recording homicides on camera.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right. Now, I do want to point out that Alabama's governor Kay Ivey has said that the corrections department has this situation well under control.

Keri Blakinger: That was less than 24 hours before that happened. 48 hours after the killing, then there was another fatal stabbing. There's also been at that same prison, a choking on an overdose and some other natural death. The situation's not under control unless you consider it under control because you don't care about incarcerated people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: 14 people have been killed in prison so far this year. Is this simply about not caring about people who are incarcerated?

Keri Blakinger: I don't know if I can guess as to the motives of Alabama or southern incarceration broadly, but when you look at images of the conditions and when you look at the reality of what's happening, it's hard to look at that and say that people are caring.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Part of how labor strikes typically work is that by not working right, by stopping you affect the profits and the viability of a business. In this case, does the work stoppage end up making conditions even worse for those who are incarcerated themselves?

Keri Blakinger: It does. That's part of it. The food has gotten worse partly as a result of the strike according to the state because the prisoners are not working in the mess halls. The state has cut to a holiday feeding schedule, which is two meals a day instead of three. Prisoners are viewing this as retaliation and are sharing images of food that is far worse than normal. That is part of why they're seeing this as retaliation and not simply a response to the fact that there aren't mess hall workers. It's probably both of these things can be true.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Who has capacity to have oversight over this? Again, in the context of the National Labor Relations Review Board when you have non-incarcerated workers who are striking, there are certain kinds, at least theoretically of protections. Those who are incarcerated are so vulnerable to the system itself. Do you have a sense of whether or not families, communities, outside observers, the press are able to get a handle on what's happening?

Keri Blakinger: In some states, it's possible to get a decent sense. Frankly, only when the states are bad enough that there are prisoners using contraband phones on a very regular basis and they're able to document their conditions, then you're able to at least see what's going on inside. That is fairly true in Alabama and in many other southern states, including some of the roughest prison systems. That doesn't necessarily translate to change or oversight because the mechanisms for oversight of prisons, of state prisons are fairly limited.

You can have individual lawsuits, you can have class action lawsuits, you can have the DOJ coming in and doing the lawsuit that is ongoing now and may eventually result in a consent decree, but that's still several years down the line. Other than that, you're relying on state lawmakers, the same folks who have allowed these conditions to continue to implement change on their own or to demand better conditions or give more money to pay for better conditions on their own.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Have you been able to talk with anyone inside the Alabama state prisons at this point?

Keri Blakinger: Yes. I was up on the phone with some of them late yesterday.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are you hearing?

Keri Blakinger: In the prisons that are still participating, conditions have been steadily bad for a couple of weeks. Some of them have been a little frustrated about the number of reports in the media about this strike essentially being over conditions. They've emphasized that it's not simply about conditions, that instead they were trying to focus on the laws that keep people in prison without any chance of release.

In Alabama, for instance, the parole board denied 89% of eligible people in fiscal year 2022 according to some ACLU stats. One of the things that the prisoners wanted to focus on was trying to increase the possibility of release by changing parole criteria so that people have a good sense of what they can actually do to get out and not continue to be subject to these conditions. The fact that many in media have missed that and simply frame this as a strike around conditions has been incredibly frustrating, I think, to some of the men on the inside.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you have a sense for how this might potentially be resolved?

Keri Blakinger: Depends who you ask. One person I talked to said that it seems like the organizers are talking about ending it in a few days, and there's another man that I talked to that said, "No, we can keep going." I think partly because this is a little bit decentralized the way that this was organized, it's a little hard to see exactly where it goes from here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Keri Blakinger is a reporter with The Marshall Project. Thanks for speaking with us, Keri.

Keri Blakinger: Thanks for having me.

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