The inmates at North Carolina’s Hyde Correctional Institution hung three banners from the prison fence last week as supporters gathered outside. “Prisoners aren’t oblivious to their reality,” said Paul Wright, the executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center and a longtime critic of prison conditions. They see the injustice.”Inmate protests have been happening for generations, but it is only in the last few years that organizers have had success coordinating from penitentiary to penitentiary and state to state. In 2010, Georgia inmates used contraband cellphones to coordinate protests across at least six prisons. And in 2016, prisoners in several states stopped reporting for work to protest their wages.

Source: New York Times August 26, 2018 22:52 UTC