#PrisonStrike

Inside the 2018 nationwide prison strike with Amani Sawari of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak; Greg Kaufmann on how a universal basic income found its way to Mississippi; plus the news of the week ICYMI.

This week on Off-Kilter, late in September, prisoners across the U.S. completed three weeks of strikes protesting the inhumane conditions and exploitative labor practices in America’s correctional facilities, lifting up mass incarceration as modern day slavery. People behind bars are paid pennies an hour and, in many states, paid nothing at all for their labor, legally — because of an exemption in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, which abolished “chattel slavery” but allows involuntary servitude as part of a punishment for a crime. To discuss what the strikes have accomplished so far and what comes next, Rebecca talks with Amani Sawari, a spokesperson for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, the incarcerated organizing group behind the prison strikes.

Later in the show, Mississippi may be one of the last places you’d expect to find an effort to provide people in poverty with a guaranteed basic income. But starting in December, 16 low-income mothers living in public housing in Jackson, Mississippi, will receive $1,000/month for a year — to spend however they see fit — as part of a pilot program called the Magnolia Mother’s Trust. Rebecca talks with Greg Kaufmann, founding editor of TalkPoverty.org who’s now back at The Nation as their poverty reporter, about the pilot and what it might mean for the national conversation around universal basic income.

But first, Trump’s tax fraud, DC’s supposedly progressive Council gives tipped workers the middle finger by voting to repeal Initiative 77, Amazon finally jumps on the $15 bandwagon, a new study finds universal preschool helps moms get back to work, and other things you might have missed with all eyes (rightfully!) on the goat rodeo that is SCOTUS right now, as Jeremy Slevin returns with the news of the week ICYMI.

This week’s guests:

• Amani Sawari, spokesperson for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak
• Greg Kaufmann, Contributing Writer at The Nation and a fellow with the Family-Centered Social Policy Program at New America
• Jeremy Slevin, director of antipoverty advocacy at the Center for American Progress (and faithful sidekick)

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read more about the 2018 national prison strike’s 10 demands, get up to speed on the strikes in this Vox explainer, and sign the petition to demand basic human rights for incarcerated people
• Learn more about the Magnolia Mother’s Trust guaranteed minimum income pilot here and in Greg Kaufmann’s piece in The Nation

For more on this week’s ICYMI topics:

• Read the full New York Times blockbuster report on Trump’s tax fraud; plus Media Matters’ report on how Fox News drove the myth that Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy drove up workers’ wages
• Get a breakdown of who on DC City Council voted to repeal Initiative 77 (and don’t forget, it was just an initial vote, so there’s still time to call Council at (202) 724–8000…)
• Here’s more on the good news from Amazon, who announced they’re raising the minimum wage for their workers to $15/hour
• And here’s the CAP study on how universal free preschool in DC helped moms get back to work

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, for a look inside the prison strikes and where the prisoner led movement to end the modern day slavery that is cheap and free prison labor from here I talk with Amani Sawari of the Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, the incarcerated organizing group behind the prison strikes. Next, I bring back my good frien Gregg Kaufmann, founding editor of Talk Poverty who’s now back at The Nation as their poverty reporter. He discusses his reporting on a new pilot program that will give low-income Mississippi mothers a guaranteed income of $1,000 per month to spend anyway they choose. But first, Jeremy Slevin, hello.

JEREMY SLEVIN: Hello.

VALLAS: Hello.

SLEVIN: Hello.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Hello!

SLEVIN: This is going to be the whole segment!

VALLAS: This is my new, speaking of pilot programs, the new pilot program on Off Kilter is just me doing this to you to see what happens, how’s it going so far?

SLEVIN: It’s going great. [LAUGHTER] So far I think it lasted five ‘hellos’.

VALLAS: Don’t assume I’m done because once you get me going with something. so there’s a lot going on this week that is not to do with the Supreme Court and that’s what we’re going to talk about in this ‘In Case You Missed It’ and I want to be clear, it’s really really important that people stay very focused on the Supreme Court because we have literally days to change the outcome of what may happen with Kavanaugh’s confirmation. But there’s also a lot of really important stuff happening especially in the world of poverty and inequality and that’s some of what you came with this week as you do every week.

SLEVIN: So let’s kick it off with I’m sure many people saw the new blockbuster report from The New York Times. It was a year long investigation. Are you laughing because I said ‘blockbuster’?

VALLAS: I am.

SLEVIN: I hope we don’t get sued.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I’m laughing because I really kind of wanted to respond, yeah it was way better than the Netflix report.

SLEVIN: Oh God, alright.

VALLAS: I might actually vote myself off this episode just based on my performance so far, Jeremy, tell us about this blockbuster report.

SLEVIN: This was an investigation that took about a year as one Times reporter said, “Do you know how much it takes for The New York Times to accuse anyone, much less a sitting president of tax fraud? A lot, and yet here we are.” So I think there’s the White House is trying to spin this as some boring dense report but it’s actually quite simple. I’d say the too long don’t read is that Trump essentially got over $400 million inherited from his dad through all sorts of tax dodges and tax schemes and The New York Times report spends a lot of time walking through, in vivid detail many of those schemes and hijinks which we don’t have time to go into here but I think the takeaway is pretty simple. I think for a while folks have known that his self image as a self made man is a lie and that he’s been incredibly secretive about his tax returns and how he makes his money and we now have the kind of missing link showing that in fact obviously he’s not a self made man and he inherited his money illegally.

VALLAS: And what have we heard from Republicans in the wake of this blockbuster report? These are people who often talk about how we need to clamp down on waste and fraud and abuse and they sort of, “fraud”, the ‘F’ word with them, obsessed, obsessed with fraud. But they’re really only talking, when they say that about low-income people who maybe turn to nutrition assistance or other forms of public benefits. They’re nto talking about tax fraud by super rich people including Republicans like the sitting president and so we haven’t heard that I’m aware of any calls for, I don’t know, maybe his tax returns which he still hasn’t released and there’s been no word of hearings or anything coming out of this report so far.

SLEVIN: Of course, so actually Marco Rubio said I think it’s a testament to how complex the tax code is. So they are trying to essentially blame Trump’s tax fraud on the tax system, which they are making more complex. So it doesn’t hold water.

VALLAS: And which they’re making easier for rich people to basicly have rigged in their favor.

SLEVIN: Right, and the irony of this is it comes right after the tax scam, which is what we’re calling it, which not only made it easier to do this by raising the estate tax, which is one of the many ways Trump inherited his money by making it more complex and actually making it more complex for rich individuals so they can game the system for passthroughs and what not but they’ve also consistently gutted the IRS which enforces this. And I think one of the key pieces of this story is that the IRS never caught any of this. I think someone said imagine if the IRS actually focused on white collar crime or white collar tax fraud. It speaks to not just Trump but how wide spread this must be and it’s even easier now.

VALLAS: And it’s interesting to use the word complex or complexity I feel like one man’s complexity is another man’s loophole. This stuff is literally designed to allow rich people to get away with paying less in taxes and that as you said is not just about what we saw from tax scam 1.0, it’s what they are literally in the process of trying to do with a second round, a second helping of massive tax cuts for the richest people in this country which actually just passed the house last week under quiet of night because all eyes were focused on the Supreme Court.

SLEVIN: It was actually the day of that all day Kavanaugh hearing, they quietly passed with all but I think ten Republican votes and three Democratic votes a second tax scam to make the individual provisions which many benefit the wealthiest permanent and that would cost about $3.8 trillion bucks.

VALLAS: Over the next couple of decades on top of the $1.9 trillion already added to the deficit by tax scam 1.0. So and not to just to have listeners be aware, this isn’t something we’re expecting to become law tomorrow. This is probably a little bit more of a hey donors we’re still fighting for you right before the midterms kind of message that Republicans in congress are seeking to send here and we don’t expect the senate to take this up anytime soon but a very real, very concrete reminder of what the Republican agenda on taxes looks like and it’s not about helping the working folks that they keep trying to lie and tell us these tax plans are actually about helping. But that’s not the only news on taxes that we saw this week. Actually we have some new insight into how the media has been covering these tax proposals.

SLEVIN: Yeah, so a few studies came out about how companies have actually used the tax cuts. Of course in the wake of the tax cuts a lot of companies announced one time bonuses, there was some really bad media coverage, I’d say suggest that companies were reacting to the tax scam positively by putting it back into workers. So a new survey by a consulting agency found that virtually none of it has gone into increasing wages. The biggest chunk, 49% has gone into increasing investments, increasing cash, these are all things that line the pockets of shareholders. They have invested in employee training, increasing acquisitions, paid higher dividends to shareholders. So way down at the bottom, at about 13% is enhancing employee benefits. And you may say oh 13% is still good but keep in mind a lot of, of course, the provisions for low-income people are temporary and meanwhile the cost of living continues to rise at a much faster pace. So even the tiny, tiny, fraction that people have seen in their paychecks is offset but everything else.

VALLAS: And to be clear, the surveys you’re talking about really actually of employers, these were of companies. What are you doing with the money you got? And they’re the ones telling us eh, well we’re not really giving to our workers in higher pay if we did give bonuses last year we’re not planning to do it again this year. It really confirms companies are not using their tax savings to increase worker pay. So a zombie myth that got perpetuated by a lot of mainstream media outlets not that long ago that really needs to die now that more and more evidence is coming out tell us what’s really happening with this money. I also want to give a shout-out to a report that didn’t come out in the past week but is very timely, especially on this point and it came from our friends at the National Employment Law Project as well as the Roosevelt Institute, they teamed up on this to look at hey, what would happen if companies actually put the money that they spend on say, stock buybacks to wealthy shareholders towards workers wages? And they looked at a couple of years of data and they found that McDonald’s could give it’s 1.9 million workers a $4,000 annual raise, all of them. Starbucks for example could give everyone if it’s workers in the US a $7,000 raise. And get this, Lowes, CVS and Home Depot could give every single worker that they employ in the United States a raise of at least $18,000. So just to put a little bit of a finer point on how this money is and is not being spent, it’s not going to workers and this is what it would mean if it were.

SLEVIN: And you began this conversation by mentioning how terrible the media coverage has been on this. And there was a new, again, we’re citing reports left and right here, we’re such nerds.

VALLAS: It’s like we work at a think tank or something, man!

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: But a new study from Media Matters that basically found probably a shocker to no one that Fox News leads all networks in basically continuing to push the false narrative that Trump’s tax cuts somehow increased wages. And it doesn’t end, there was a terrible from Axios this week, headline “The Trump Way Often Works”, saying “his tax cuts continue to juice a red hot economy that has consumers confident, stocks soaring.” It just drives me crazy.

VALLAS: So it’s not just Fox, right, that’s actually a really good reminder. There’s a lot of folks who pick up the Trump talking points and print them uncritically even when the data and the evidence fly in the face of the myths that they’re putting in their reporting. So a lot on the tax front but we’ve got to put taxes in the rear view mirror just for a second and move onto something that is not happening in congress or the White House but is happening in DC as a matter of local politics and policy.

SLEVIN: Yeah this is something you talked about before, but this week the DC Council voted to repeal Initiative 77 which was the ballot measure that voters passed over the summer that would have raised wages to $15 an hour for tipped workers, putting it in line with the minimum wage in the city. This was a hard fought battle in which the restaurant industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and honestly there are no words because this is coming from a supposedly progressive city council overturning the will of the voters after a big money campaign. There’s no other way to say it to fight this.

VALLAS: And in the process, this is the supposedly progressive DC council siding the freedom caucus who didn’t want to see this ballot measure go into effect and siding with the restaurant industry, as you said, over DC’s workers and tipped workers are among those who face the highest rates of poverty, of economic hardship more broadly, many of whom are living paycheck to paycheck with really unpredictable pay because of what being a tipped worker means. And it’s not even just about siding with conservative ideologues and well heeled corporate campaigns over this city’s workers, this decision also flies in the face and is just a giant middle finger to the lower income communities of color who overwhelmingly make up the people in this city who did vote for the ballot measure and who amounted to a majority because this ballot measure did pass by 57%.

SLEVIN: Keep in mind it passed in 7 out of 8 wards. In some wards, ward 8, which is predominately African-American, it passed by more than 30 points. So this wasn’t a close call for the voters. So not only is it turning their back on many of their low-income constituents. It sets a really, really scary precedent because you’ve seen in the past a lot of Republican legislatures trying to thwart the will of their people essentially to overturning Medicaid expansion or overturning minimum wage increases. And it’s a sad state of affairs to see that can happen in a Democratic led jurisdiction.

VALLAS: And it’s anti-democratic, it’s icky on a lot of levels and I can’t remember being quite so angry at a supposedly progressive body. I do want to give a couple of additional notes here. One is that the ballot measure has not yet procedurally been repealed. An initial vote has been taken, there’s more process that has to happen. So for folks who care deeply about this issue, it is still a good time to call your councilmember but I also want to give a quick shout-out to Elissa Silverman, who was one of the only members on council, she and Councilmember Cheh were two of those fighting more ardently against this repeal and really down to the wire trying to offer a compromise. Trying to do something to protect at least some workers from losing this, from really having this stolen out from under them. So for anyone wondering how to contact DC Council, you can 202–724–8000, let them know how you feel about this because it ain’t over til it’s over.

SLEVIN: Yeah I’ll just add one last point, currently writing a piece on the total amount that the lobby contributed to council members and to their own campaigns so they contributed nearly $300,000, $287,000 to the campaigns of the mayor and council member since 2012. They also funded a over $300,000 campaign called Save Our Tips, a misleading title in the city to defeat because there was nothing comparable on the other side. So yeah, money.

VALLAS: So take us to some good news Slevs because I’m getting angry even just talking about this again and the good news actually takes us back to the minimum wage.

SLEVIN: Yes so great news from Amazon.com for a change.

VALLAS: Look at you, you went with the “dot com”.

SLEVIN: You know I’m still ‘90s.

VALLAS: It was on brand with the blockbuster piece.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: This new fangled site called “Amazon dot com”, can get all of my favorite book titles.

VALLAS: I think if you’re going to do that you probably should’ve gone with the “www” part too.

SLEVIN: Some reason I have like a 1940s radio announcer accent when I talk about Amazon. Anyway, this week Jeff Bezos after weeks, months, years of pressure announced that they were setting their minimum wage within the company at $15 an hour. that is huge, huge news. They are the second largest employer in the entire country. The hope is that this will set off a chain reaction essentially forcing other employers to do the same but I think credit where credit’s due. I don’t think this happened in a vaccum, this was after tireless advocacy by not only the Fight for $15, which has lead $15 minimum wage increases in many states and cities but also Bernie Sanders’ office who has been at the forefront of singling out Amazon and Jeff Bezos as a bad actor and having bad working conditions and put forward legislation trying to stop it. So a huge victory and it shows that advocacy works.

VALLAS: It is also notable to me that this announcement comes in the wake of Bezos having announced that he was going to give $2 billion, he was committing $2 billion to this massive philanthropy investment and some of it’s about education, and boy is that a segment of it’s own, some of it is about helping homeless familes, a lot more to be seen on what that means. But there was a really healthy conversation happening where a lot of folks in the media, a lot of folks writing op-ed pieces saying, alright, great that you’re doing this philanthropy thing but maybe if you’re trying to help low-income families and low-income workers you should start by taking a look in the mirror and thinking about how much and how little you pay your own workers and maybe this kind of philanthropy is a nice thing to do but it doesn’t get you out of your obligations as a corporate citizen and as a human who is trapping your many, many workers in poverty. And there’s a much longer conversation to have there about the intersection of philanthropy and public policy but really notable to me that his feet were sufficiently held to the fire by Sanders and others even in the wake of an announcement on the philanthropic front that he and others might have thought were going to buy him a pass from actually doing the right thing and raising his workers wages.

SLEVIN: I think that’s right. I will add that they don’t get off Scot-free. Amazon, not dot com, is still one of the most visible and forceful union busters in the country, a video leaked last week of their training for managers of how to fight union organizing without violating the Fair Labor Standards Act which went, was extremely aggressive even compared to other companies like Wal-Mart, so while it’s welcome news the best way to ensure that people are paid a living wage and to make sure that they have the power to negotiate is to let them form a union.

VALLAS: So we have like thirty seconds left and there was a really cool report that actually came out of the Center For American Progress just a few days ago and I wanted to give it a little air time because it had some huge findings to do with childcare.

SLEVIN: And we’re giving kudos now to the DC council after slamming their decision —

VALLAS: Well, I think it’s fair.

SLEVIN: Yeah, so DC Council and the city notably has one of the most generous paid leave programs in the city. They also have one of the most generous early childhood pre-K programs in the city.

VALLAS: In keeping it with being usually a pretty progressive council and place.

SLEVIN: Exactly. And there are often claims made that pre-K doesn’t only just help the child but also helps bring women back into the labor force and increase their earnings and we now have new research that confirms that we have a perfect test case in DC and just in the couple years after DC began offering universal pre-K, the city’s maternal labor force increased by about 12 percentage points and 10% is attributable directly to preschool expansion. They now participate in the labor force at the same exact rate of mothers with kids in elementary school. So it virtually erased every child care tax essentially the lost earnings of women who are forced to be out of the labor force when they have kids in the early years. So not only huge for DC but lends a lot of credibility to the arguments behind universal pre-K.

VALLAS: And back to credit where credit is due, Rasheed Malik is our colleague behind that awesome report, you can find it on our nerdy syllabus page. Jeremy that was a lot and there were ups and downs, I feel like it was a rollercoaster, I went back to the 90s and not just because of what you’re wearing, although that’s a lot of days.

SLEVIN: This is literally from the ‘90s.

VALLAS: Yeah, I can tell and so will our listeners after we post a picture in some tweet as we like to do to shame you appropriately, thank you Will for taking that as I’m saying this, Jeremy thank you for catching us up on the news of the week in case we missed it. But don’t go away next up I’m talking with Amani Sawari of Jailhouse Lawyer Speaks, the incarcerated organizing group behind the prison strikes about where they go from here, don’t go away.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Late last month prisoners across the US completed three weeks of prison strikes protesting inhumane conditions and exploitative labor practices in America’s correctional facilities. The movement illuminates mass incarceration of an instance of modern day slavery. People behind bars are paid pennies an hour and in many cases paid nothing at all for their labor and this is legal in the United States of America in 2018 because of an exemption to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment abolished so called chattel slavery but it also involuntary servitude as part of a punishment for a crime. As a result hundreds of thousands of prisons across the US work in typical jobs like kitchen work, cleaning and G.E.D. tutoring as well as incredibly dangerous jobs like fighting wild fires but are paid paltry wages for their work. In California for example inmates fighting the state’s record setting wildfires were paid just one to two dollars a day for putting their lives on the line. To discuss what the prison strikes have accomplished so far and what comes next for their prison led movement, I’m thrilled to welcome Amani Sawari a spokesperson on behalf of Jailhouse Lawyer Speaks, the incarcerated organizing group behind the strikes. Amani thanks so much for joining the show.

AMANI SAWARI: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So just to start us off, help people understand what were these prison strikes, what were they in response to? One of the reasons being cited in a lot of the press coverage of the strikes was a prison riot at Lee Correctional Institute that took place earlier this year, which has been described as a quote, “mass casualty event” by state officials and resulted in at least 17 people losing their lives.

SAWARI: Yes so the prison strike is a response directly to what happened in Lee County where so many prisoners lost their lives all completely avoidable deaths due the lack of medical treatment that was provided to prisoners that were suffering for over 7 hours as fights were breaking out in Lee County and the reason why those fights broke out were because of prison conditions that we can see across our nation. Overcrowding, lack of protection, lack of trust between inmates and the officials and the staff who are supposed to be protecting them. The abuses that happen on a daily basis, physical, emotional, sexual abuse that happens to prisoners. So these are all things that boiled over in Lee County, prisoners’ lockers were taken away which the only way that prisoners can securely store documents and items, valuable items of their while they’re incarcerated and then after their lockers were taken away which was said to be a security measure by officials the room assignments were switched between prisoners that put different inmates into groups with strangers, groups that they didn’t know, into rival groups and conflict naturally occurred as a result of those circumstances. So the fact that a security measure could lead to the loss of life on such a massive scale in one prison is something that can happen anywhere. And prisoners recognize this.

After that incident occurred prisoners were not asked what their opinion, they weren’t asked how they felt, what their experience was, what their perspective was, it was just labeled as a mass casualty incident and kind of swept under the rug, officials put out a statement saying that this was due to gang violence and contraband and it’s really sad to see that a statement like gang violence and contraband can be used to absolve officials’ responsibility in that case. It doesn’t matter who’s involved in a gang or what contraband is found, officials are always responsible for the death of the inmates in their care, especially when that death is due to the circumstances that are supposed to be a safety measure so we really need to push back and interrogate that and this was prisoners’ response to that; this was their pushback. This was them saying ok this is what we’re going to do in order to provide a solution to what’s happening over and over again in our country. And even during the strike, 16 prisoners lost their lives in Mississippi, prisoners were dying every other day due to the circumstances that are normal in our prisons. And it’s really sad that people can die left and right and that’s just the normal way that prisons operate, prisoners no longer want to be living under these conditions or working under these conditions and they no longer want to be exploited and abused at this rate. It’s time for us to shine a light on what’s going on inside and to support prisoners.

VALLAS: And part of what’s really significant about how much press coverage finally did start to attend these multiple weeks of mass prison strikes is that these are conditions that the vast majority of people in this country have no idea go on every day because it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. Would love to hear you talk a little bit about how the organizing actually took place. A lot of people might be familiar with how labor unions might organize strikes or walkouts or protests on picket lines when it comes organized labor outside of correctional facilities. But what does it look like to actual do prison organizing behind bars and how did that actually result in this level of record setting mass strikes?

SAWARI: Yeah so one of the things that characterizes a work strike is the public seeing on the outside, people standing, refusing to work, holding up signs in mass and that’s something that we don’t get with a prison strike. We can’t drive by and see prisoners outside holding up pickets and join them in line in that same sort of way. So the prison strike was very unique in the way that prisoners executed their actions. They did so in one of four ways depending on their status, their location and the privileges that they have. So one of the main ways that people are most familiar with who’ve heard about the strike is work striking, their refusal to go into their work assignments and them saying I get paid this many pennies an hour, I don’t think it’s right so I’m not going to go to work.

But a lot of prisoners do not have jobs, they don’t have the privilege to have a job and they don’t work in prison. However they can still participate in the prison strike through sit ins and a lot of prisoners would gather together, sit in a common area and refuse to move until it was time for lockdown. A lot of prisoners who wanted to participate in the strike were removed from general population so they could no longer be in a sit-in or be in a work strike. However they participated through boycotting, and boycotting is probably the least reported action that prisoners did and it’s one of the most popular. They’d boycott talking on the telephones because their telephones are paid every 15 minutes costs three dollars to talk on the phone. They’d boycott commissary, they’d refuse to purchase snacks, food, clothes, boots, sanitary items, hygiene products, cosmetics. They refused to make those purchases for those two and a half weeks. And then the final way that prisoners could participate if they didn’t have the privilege to have a job, if they were in ad-seg and they couldn’t be in general population or even if they didn’t have the privilege to talk on the phone. A lot of prisoners who are in solitary can’t talk on the phone. They can to participate by refusing the food that they were served three times a day. So that’s one of the final ways is hunger striking and so prisoners would either work strike, participate in a sit-in, boycott commissary or telephones or they would simply hunger strike so it doesn’t matter where a prisoners was or what their privileges were or their status in the prisoner, they could participate in the national prison strike in one of those four ways.

Now that’s not something that we can directly see on the outside and the way that we were able to find out what’s going on in prisons is through prisoners writing in and saying we are work strike here at this prison and they’d write into JLS or they’d write into the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee and we would collect those reports and then we would be able to display them and those reports came in from at least 17 states around our country. And then we’d also had participation in at least 35 prisons in our country, hundreds of prisoners were able to participate in Washington alone, we had 200 prisoners in detention centers in Takoma hunger striking. So we were able to see this en mass as more prisoners found out about the strike throughout the two weeks they began to participate and reports are still coming in from different states in ones that participated. So it’s very interesting the way that prisoners have been able to demonstrate to the outside how they are striking, and it’s really exciting to see that people on the outside have been stepping up and making themselves present in place of prisoners. So while people don’t drive by and see prisoners outside holding pickets they can drive by and see people outside doing noise demos or standing out front of McDonald’s. We stood out front and picketed McDonald’s here in Seattle because McDonald’s uses prisoners labor to make their uniforms, their plastic cutlery and their containers. So we were the ones that were the bodies outside while prisoners were the ones making the sacrifices inside. So that’s a way that the strike happened and was visible and present throughout those two and a half weeks.

VALLAS: One of the points that you’ve made in talking about the structure of these strikes and the types of tools that you were just describing that folks behind bars have been putting to use throughout these prison strikes is that for inmates in correctional facilities, they don’t have a lot of leverage. Their bodies are the main leverage that they have.

SAWARI: Right and that’s one of the only things that they really have control over and sometimes not even complete control over. They can’t decide when they can go out, when they can make the choice to even sometimes go to the bathroom, go outside, start the workday, end the workday, but they can choose not to go into work, they can choose to sit in one spot all day. They can choose not to talk on the phone or not to purchase from commissary and these are huge sacrifices. They sound simple to people on the outside like oh, you’re not going to talk on the phone. For prisoners to choose not to talk on the phone, they’re choosing not to interact with anyone in their family outside for two and a half weeks. I have friends who didn’t speak to their kids, to their wives, their husbands, all throughout that period of time and it’s very, very difficult not to connect to some of your main sources of support and stability outside during a volatile time, especially when you’re in a violent environment. These are these people’s main sources of support and just encouragement while they’re going through their incarceration. And so for them to make the choice to cut that off in order to prove the point of the inhumane conditions that they’re in, that’s a huge sacrifice. And then for people who have made the choice not to purchase from commissary or to purchase anything. They don’t have alternatives. Us on the outside, we can choose to fight prison industrial complex by saying I’m not going to go to McDonald’s anymore. And there are hundreds of alternatives of where to get a cheeseburger. But when someone on the inside says I’m boycotting, I’m hunger striking, they can’t just drive to the next drive through, they just don’t eat. They don’t eat anything, they can’t call anyone, there’s no alternative. So for prisoners to do this, to demonstrate this and to be strike and even in the face of threats from officials and retaliation from officials and even watching their bunkmate get sent up to solitary for striking and they still persist, at the very least we can stand in solidarity and make the choice to choose an alternative to the companies that exploit their labor.

VALLAS: What is the significance of this being a prisoner led movement and I want to be clear, I’m talking with you. You’re a spokesperson for this organization Jailhouse Lawyer Speaks, which is one of the groups behind the strikes. But you are a person yourself is on the outside, I’m not speaking to you inside a prison right now. Talk to me a little bit about what it’s important that this movement is led by prisoners inside prisons.

SAWARI: It’s extremely significant that prisoners are the ones that are taking the lead in this movement because they are the ones whose lives are most impacted by the demands that they’ve put out. It’s been too long that we have no allowed the marginalized communities to be a part of the decision making process. Our country has a history in our government making decisions on behalf of Native Americans, on behalf of Black people, without any of those people being a part of the deciding board. And they we wonder why the policies that we’ve enacted have not be official or have not had the results that we were looking for, it’s because we didn’t include them in the conversation. We’re doing it again with prisoners, we’re putting out reforms and we’re putting out bills and we don’t ask them or consult with them for what’s best for their population and for their environment. We keep passing bills that don’t have the massive effect that it needs to have and now prisoners are speaking up. They haven’t been asked what their opinion is, they’re just putting it out there because they already understand that it’s been too long and it’s gone too far and at this point, our prisons are bursting at the seams. And prisoners are the ones that are suffering from that.

So legislatures and people on the outside, even citizens on the outside that aren’t directed impacted are voting on laws like Truth in Sentencing laws that keep prisoners in prisons longer. Laws like the Prison Litigation Reform Act that bars prisoners from being able to participate in the judicial process and sue. Laws like the Sentencing Reform Act, removal of Pell Grants that don’t allow prisoners to take advantage of government funding for their education. These were passed by people who were not directly impact and now the people who are directly impacted, the prisoners are suffering and so now they have put out ten demands that are very concise and very specific and these are the changes that they need to see in their criminal justice system in order for their environments to actual be corrective and to be actually have an impact that is rehabilitative for everyone, not just for the inmates but for the staff as well to make those environments safer and more healing spaces. And so prisoners have put these demands out, they’re not radical. Some people have said oh, these are huge. How could a prisoner actually have voting rights?

And it’s really not radical for a group that have been oppressed and abused for decades to ask to be a part of the conversation and to demand that their voices be heard and that their rights be protected. Prisoners do have several rights, they have the right to raise concerns about their environments and to be accommodated, they have the right to be free from sexual abuse, from physical abuse. They have a right to have those rights protected. They have a right to have access to legal materials and legal advice. And so these are all things that aren’t being protected, that prisoners are asking to have support from the public and the only way that we can do that is if we listen to them and if we shine a light on what’s going on inside. So we need to stay connected to prisoners and continue to support them in this movement. This movement is very unique in that it is led by the people who are directly impacted by these demands.

VALLAS: And now a lot of folks might be familiar with the fact that people can be forced to work for pennies on the hour or even for free when they’re behind bars. That’s an issue that periodically that gets some level of attention but it may be new for people to be hearing about this in the frame of this being modern day slavery. And it also may be new to some of our listeners that this is not just legal but that it was absolutely and explicitly intended the way that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was drafted and continues to read today. Would love to hear you talk a little bit about the role of modern day slavery as the frame really leading the, one of the main reasons behind these strikes on how you’re talking about this and also in how a lot of the mainstream media have actually picked this up.

SAWARI: Yeah, the 13th Amendment wrote slavery into the Constitution. It protected slavery as a practice and it gave slavery a place in our country to safely be used by people who needed slaves when slavery was said “abolished” and so the 13th Amendment is widely known as the amendment that abolished slavery however you can’t properly abolish something by including an exception to its abolishment. If I were to say you can’t have cake except for in the afternoons that’s not the you can’t have cake rule. It’s just this is when you can have cake rule. And so the amendment to abolishing slavery says slavery is not allowed except for in the case of punishment of a crime. And so it’s not slavery is no longer allowed it’s just tells us when slavery is allowed to be used, and slavery is allowed to be used in our prisons and it functions that way in prisons. The United States is a world power because of slavery and so it’s not a surprise that the founders of this country made sure to reserve slavery to protect it in some type of way so that the country did not lose it’s world power status, it’s ability to have this free labor source that it can constantly build upon. And so that is how prisoners operate, they operate as our slaves, they operate as this free labor source that we can use to clean our highways, to mainstain the prisons themselves, to cook the food, to train dogs for the job programs, to provide free labor to companies like McDonalds and Victoria’s Secret and Wal-Mart and all the companies that manufacture their products in the prisons, that’s what Wal-Mart does, to make their cutlery and their containers like McDonald’s does so underwear, these are all like sweatshops. We frown upon the sweat shops overseas and abroad but we have them in our country and if you just look at a map of prisons in the United States, it’s astounding to see how many prisons we actually have in our country and we’re continuing to build more because they’re so overcrowded. It is intention the way that the amendment was written to protect this practice that allowed for our country to become the world power that it is. And so now it’s time in this century to say we don’t want slavery in our country. We don’t want prisons to operate as free labor sources where people can come in and exploit the people there. We want our prisons to operate in order to restore people, to rehabilitate people, to restore families and communities. We don’t want them to have these generational effects that slavery has continued to have because we refused to let that practice go. It’s time to build our country on something else so that we can actually heal the people who have been suffering from slavery for decades. prisoners realized that they are being exploited now they are begging to have a right to live and to have a right to actually have access to the resources needed in order to restore their lives and we’re not able to give them that because of this amendment that protects their exploitation.

VALLAS: Amani in that last minute or so that I have with you the strikes got a tremendous amount of attention and it’s huge kudos to you, to Jailhouse Lawyer Speaks to all of the folks behind bars who were going on hunger strikes, going without talking to their loved ones, all of the things you were describing all for purposes of raising attention and awareness to the exploitation and inhumane conditions that they are forced to suffer without anyone ever seeing or even being aware or the outside of what is permitted to go on. Where do things go from here? Now that these strikes did get this level of attention, now that folks are maybe paying attention for a couple of minutes in a news cycle that feels like its impossible for folks to break through for anything longer than a couple of tweets, where does this movement go from here?

SAWARI: Where the movement goes from here is people recognizing that prison resistance will continue, prisoner resistance has been going on since prisons have been in our country and so prisoners will continue to resist on the inside. However the new aspect to prisoner resistance is public support and solidarity on the outside with prisoners on the inside. Now that our eyes have been opened through prisoners’ sacrifice in the national prison strike we can’t close them, we can’t say OK that was cool and move on. It’s OK for us to go on in life but we need to add prisoner support to our day to say. This isn’t something that just happens overnight. The prison industrial complex has been a monster that has been growing since chattel slavery was evolved into the penitentiaries so it’s time for us to fight this monster by adding prison support and solidarity to a part of what we do everyday. People need to join the Prisoners’ Human Rights Coalition and really watch the actions that come out. So there are ten demands and I really urge everyone to read through those demands and just pick one or two that really resonate with you and follow those demands whether it’s an end to Truth in Sentencing laws and bringing back good time in a specific state. I know that’s a fight that’s really happening in Michigan or getting prisoners their right to vote, that’s really happening in South Carolina, or watching the exploitation of prison labor and really calling on those companies that exploit prisoners labor to withdraw from the prison industrial complex or raise their wage to the prevailing wage that’s a fight that’s really happening in New York. So depending on where you’re at or what demand really resonates with you follow that as a part of the Prisoners Human Rights Coalition and take on those actions.

Right now there’s a petition circulating to members of congress asking them to pay attention to prisoners’ demands and we’re asking them for their response. That petition is on cause and it has over 30,000 signatures right now just these few weeks after the strike because supporters have really committed to seeing those demands fulfilled. This isn’t over under every single demand has come into fruition in our country and all of these demands are things that can happen within the next one or two years so please keep your eyes on this movement and continue to support prisoners because prisoners are the most vulnerable right after the strike ends. This is the time where after people have forgotten about the strike or moved on that prisoners start to really suffer from retaliation. So it’s our responsibility as taxpayers who are funding these prisons to really demand that that light continues to be shined in the prison and we must continue to support prisoners as they continue to resist on the inside.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking Amani Sawari, she’s a spokesperson on behalf of Jailhouse Lawyer Speaks, the incarcerated organizing group behind the prison strikes. Amani, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show and thank you for your amazing work to advance this movement. Folks can find all of the things that Amani just mentioned including a link to that petition on our nerdy syllabus page. Amani thank you so much.

SAWARI: Thank you, thank you for having me.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. “Obama praised the idea, reporter Annie Lowery and facebook co-founder Chris Hughes recent published books about it. The city of Chicago is exploring it and the town of Stockton, California has begun a pilot program experimenting it. But Mississippi is arguably one of the last places you’d expect to find an effort to provide people in poverty with a guaranteed basic income. But in December 16 mothers in public housing in Jackson, Mississippi will begin to receive $1,000 per month for a year no strings attached.” So write Greg Kaufmann over at The Nation in an article looking at a new pilot program called the Magnolia Mothers Trust, through which 16 low-income mothers will receive a guaranteed income of $1,000 a month to spend as they see fit. To talk about this new pilot program and what it might mean for the national conversation around universal basic income, I’m thrilled to have the excuse to talk to my good friend Greg Kaufmann who listeners of the show will remember as the founding editor of Talk Poverty but who’s now returned to spending his days as the poverty reporter for The Nation and a fellow at the Family Center Social Policy Program at New America. Greg, hi, welcome back.

GREG KAUFMANN: Thank you Rebecca it’s always great to be with you.

VALLAS: I wish I were welcoming you back for longer than just an interview but we miss you here.

KAUFMANN: Well if I do well maybe you’ll have me on again.

VALLAS: This is always an audition, it’s always an audition with me. Greg, no, we really do miss you but I have to say reading this piece of your over at The Nation on this new pilot program in Mississippi reminds me how much I missed your poverty reporting for The Nation and I am selfishly sad not to have you here but this is really huge and awesome for folks to now be hearing about in a way that mainstream media probably otherwise wouldn’t be covering. So just to kick things off, help people and help me understand what is this program, what are the goals, how are the women going to be selected, what do we know?

KAUFMANN: So this pilot program will give 16 women from 4 federally subsidized public housing communities $1,000 a month for a year by a lottery from these four communities. The women all participated in the design of the program which I think is really important. this wasn’t a program thrown at them and say do this, so there will be for example opportunities for leadership training or counseling to talk about trauma, monthly meetings where they all get together. These are all ideas the women had, a community service project and so the woman who’s leading the project, named Aisha Nyandoro is the granddaughter of a civil rights icon down there in Mississippi named Elsie Dorsey, she learned a lot of her lessons about organizing and working with community through her grandmother. So it’s just a very important project and a fascinating project, really.

VALLAS: And she actually, she’s a Jackson native, Aisha Nyandoro, she runs an organization called Springboard to Opportunities which actually works with a lot of the same types of people who are going to be participating in this program.

KAUFMANN: That’s right and their motto is we’re radically resident driven and what she means by that and she says it directly comes from her grandmother, you go to the communities and you come with the projects together. You don’t say this is what works or what we believe works which I think is central to any way to have success in fighting poverty and in creating opportunities. So they work also in Maryland and DC and Alabama and she says the needs of the community are different every place they work. So yeah I think that radically resident driven model is an important one.

VALLAS: So what was the story behind this particular pilot. How did Aisha Nyandoro and the mothers that she was working with come up with particular idea?

KAUFMANN: Right so I think they’d been working for, I don’t want to get this wrong, for a number of years in these communities and were frustrated that within these communities they weren’t making the progress against generational poverty that they hoped to and so following her grandmother’s model, she just started talking to the families more and more about their needs were and what would make a difference and I don’t think it will come as any surprise to you or your listeners that not having access to cash was a big problem. You look at a $7.25 minimum wage in Mississippi, you look at TANF, cash assistance being virtually unavailable. I mean really what people call welfare reform in 1996 you’ve talked about it, written about it and I’m sure your listeners know about it has made cash assistance unavailable. And so they described what really is, and I think this is in the title of the piece, “poverty is like a pressure cooker.” There’s no room to plan, to breathe, to dream because it’s, how am I going to get childcare? How am I going to make it to work? How am I going to make rent? How am I going to get food? How are my kids going to avoid walking in the wrong part of town where there might be some violence? There’s no bandwidth and so it became clear that if we could just come up with X amount of cash and it took them a while to determine what that would be, what would happen for these women in these communities? Not just in their own lives, which they hope will improve from this pilot but also allow them to engage more in the needs of the communities and try to help lift them up.

VALLAS: And your piece actually details some personal stories of people who Aisha was working with whose lives really helped to illustrate exact what you’re talking about, about that pressure cooker. Would you be comfortable sharing a story?

KAUFMANN: Absolutely. There was a women Aisha spoke of who her transmission failed in her car, it was a $1,500 repair. I cant remember when that was, this summer but she didn’t have the money. So she has to barter for rides to work, rides for her kids to go to extracurricular activities are involved and rides to go to the grocery store and she’s just waiting until her Earned Income Tax Credit which will supplement her low-wage earnings comes in April I guess, which you’ve talked about on the show too is a real problem but until then she’s just trying to survive which is what the experience of poverty is for most people. So something like this would really change their lives, this family’s life dramatically. And I’m looking forward to as I said, this pilot doesn’t start until December and I’m really looking forward to this and getting to know more of the stories and so people, because I think the general public and certainly the media doesn’t do a good job bringing the real experiences of people in poverty to readers or listeners and that’s why a show like yours is so important.

VALLAS: That transmission story, the car failure story resonates a ton with me especially because we often hear numbers thrown around and often I’m one of the people throwing those numbers around, trying to help people understand how widespread economic hardship is at this point, that poverty is not some ‘them’ experience, it’s increasingly a common and mainstream experience but when you look at data telling us that 4 in 10 Americans don’t even have $400 in the bank that really, that is that story about a car needing a new transmission, that person who is one car repair away from poverty if they’re not already in it. So it really puts a human face on some of these statistics that we often use but which aren’t quite humanized until you tell that story. So I also want to talk to you about the significance of this pilot happening in Mississippi. Now Mississippi is a state that has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, it has the highest child poverty rates in the country, it’s also one of the reddest states in the country politically. It’s also the state with the highest rate of African-American residents. But it’s not only those things that make Mississippi perhaps one of the last places in the country that people might have expected this kind of a pilot to take place. Mississippi also had a lot to do and in many ways as you actually write in your piece was ground zero for the modern day approach to poverty and people experiencing it that we’ve seen retain immense popularity not just among Republicans but that also really was the basis for so-called welfare reform in the mid-1990s as you were talking about that birthed that program that helps almost no one called TANF. Tell a little bit of that story and what Mississippi had to do with it.

KAUFMANN: Yeah that is important for people to understand. Before President Clinton and the Gingrich congress did what became known as welfare reform which made cash assistance so hard to come by and really punishes people for being poor, there was a pilot program in Mississippi by the Governor, I think his name was Governor Fordice and he did what basically what TANF does. So there were women who were primarily African-American women who were maybe in college working on associate degrees or working in literacy programs or other kinds of jobs that they were pursuing. They were forced into if they wanted to get any cash assistance and it was very meager, I mean today you’re talking about a maximum of $170 a month for a family of three, that’s less than $2 a day per person.

VALLAS: Which is technically extreme poverty.

KAUFMANN: Right, right so God knows what it was in their pilot project so these women were required to take any job the state offered if they wanted cash assistance. So it was like shrimp picker, poultry plant, other kinds of work that wasn’t going to lead to family sustaining wages and I think a lot of people would read this as creating a source of cheap labor, certainly tied to race. We’re talking about African-American women during a time where the myth of the welfare queen is so prominent and so rather than thinking about say the strengths of the women who were engaged in work trying to better their futures, rather thinking about how to help with transportation or childcare, Mississippi forced them into low-wage dead end jobs which is exactly what happens in TANF today. So the fact that welfare policy is so racialized makes it not much of a surprise that the pilot program started in Mississippi before welfare reform and the fact that it forces people in poverty into dead end jobs began there as well.

So it’s really important that this pilot project is looking at the strengths of women. Again, it’s really pushing back on this idea that people in poverty are lacking and saying hey, they don’t have any space to breathe to develop their strengths like we all want to be able to do.

VALLAS: And they are lacking, they’re lacking money. That is what people who are poor are, they don’t have enough money which is by definition what poverty is. So I’m laughing only because almost everytime there’s a new study that comes out that says wow a guaranteed minimum income reduces poverty. Sometimes it happens in Africa or other places and we get these results and you see on Twitter the collective shrug of everyone being like you mean giving people money makes them less poor? Wow, what breaking news but still this seems to be something that is a really tough nut to crack politically because and I’m going to use a quote here from your piece, “The idea of giving poor women cash without telling them how to use it is a direct refutation of the punitive approach to antipoverty policy that has been ascendant in America since the Reagan years.” And that really is what this model flies directly in the face of.

KAUFMANN: That’s right and something Aisha said that’s not in the piece but there was a great interview and you know you have to cut some of the great things people say.

VALLAS: Sometimes you’ve done that to me.

KAUFMANN: I know it’s terrible.

VALLAS: Good to know it’s not just me.

KAUFMANN: It’s not just you Rebecca. So she was talking about how there’s this idea in the public mind that if we give people in poverty the freedom to do what they want that they’re going to make the absolute worst choices. And she says we have to get to a place of trusting people again that these moms know what’s best for their kids just like other moms do. And moreover and I cant remember, there’s something else that now I’m blanking on that was quite interesting and maybe I’ll remember it next time. But really the idea that people can’t be trusted with money, I remember what I was going to say. Importantly there’s not going to be an intervention. Say I’m spending the money on something, there’s no one who’s going to come in and say oh, we really think you should spend it this way. They’re just going to watch what happens and record what happens and share those stories and I think what we’ll find is when people have money they invest it well to support themselves and their families and their communities.

VALLAS: Which is so notable in a moment where we’re actively fighting to protect programs that don’t even give people cash without any strings, I’m talking about programs like nutrition assistance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which is an in-kind benefit. You don’t get cash you get effectively an EBT card that can only be used for food, so it’s an in-kind thing. The same is true of Medicaid, we’re fighting on all fronts to protect Medicaid, yet another in-kind benefit, we’re not giving people money that we hope they spend on health insurance it’s giving them health insurance. The same is true on the housing front, where there’s a tax on every front to affordable housing programs that are providing people with assistance in the form of housing. And yet here we have someone saying maybe we should actually trust low-income people and low-income people of color and low-income women of color at that, just totally, completely the opposite of what we’re hearing from Republicans in congress and in the White House.

KAUFMANN: Yeah I think that’s a excellent point and makes this pilot and other studies looking at basic income so important because it just goes in the complete opposite direction of where conservative leadership in congress and in the White House is taking us right now.

VALLAS: But also where a lot of frankly folks in the middle and even folks on the left have been comfortable to go because you hear a lot of folks say, wow I would get laughed out of the room if tried to propose giving low income money to make them less poor.

KAUFMANN: That’s right.

VALLAS: So this program is being funded by the Economic Security Project, which supports projects and initiatives that explore effectively giving people cash with no strings. A lot of what they’ve been doing gets talked about in the context of a universal basic income, that gets, a lot of different terms get used, guaranteed minimum income, there’s a lot of different ways people label this. But how do you see this pilot fitting with the national conversation around a universal basic income.

KAUFMANN: My understanding with a lot of the other projects that might even be larger scale that are being worked on, they’re looking at a lot of quantitative data, what are changes in spending habits, what are changes in earnings, that sort of thing. And this project will look at that too but I think the real opportunity here and the real focus and perhaps why the foundation was interested is that they’re going to be able to closely follow the stories of 16 women. They’re going to get to know them very well, from where they are in the beginning and where they end up at the end of the pilot and I think that qualitative data, those stories are tremendously important, especially at a time when the media narrative, the political narrative and too often in the media as well is just dominated by old school lazy, people are in poverty because they’re lazy or making bad choices or whatever it is. I think these kinds of stories will really help to counter that and I think that distinguishes it from some of the other pilot projects that might be out there. I don’t want to say, I might be wrong, the other projects might be great at that but certainly these 16 women and following them are a great opportunity to do that.

VALLAS: And a great opportunity not just to look at poverty reduction but also all of the other types of less measurable but qualitatively describable things that might come out the this experiment like trust, like the strengths that people have when they are relieved from that type of pressure cooker that is poverty and especially extreme poverty. I’ve been talking with Greg Kaufmann, you will know as the founding editor of Talk Poverty, he now has returned to The Nation where he is their poverty reporter and he is a fellow now at the Family Centered Social Policy Program at the New America Foundation. Greg thank you so much for coming back on the show, I miss you, thank you for writing this piece and I can’t wait to have you back to hear what we find from it.

KAUFMANN: Thanks Rebecca, it’s always great to talk to you.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.