Step 1: Donate to Michael Kimble here (sugg. donation $40)

Step 2: Register for “Let the Crops Rot in the Field” here

What role do strikes and work stoppages play as modes of militant collective resistance behind prison walls? If corporate profits are not the main drivers of mass incarceration in the so-called u.s., what accounts for the continued persistence of prison work stoppages and labor strikes into the present day? How do incarcerated people understand the role that their own labor plays in upholding the prison system?

Drawing on the history and present demands of the Free Alabama Movement, a prisoner rights group that organized one of the largest prison strikes in u.s. history beginning in 2016, this workshop will attempt to broaden and complicate our understanding of prison labor in the Amerikan prison system, as well as the human agency that its withholding can restore to incarcerated people. Participants will receive a list of short readings to engage with before and after the workshop.

Andrew Ross is an activist and professor at NYU, where he helps direct the Prison Research Lab. Ross has written on a wide variety of topics, from labor, incarceration, urbanism, politics, and technology, to environmental justice, music, and film. He is the author of numerous books, including Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery (Orr Books, 2024), which chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons.