Prisoner Unions

History

Following prisoner work strikes in California throughout the 1960s, a small group of attorneys and exprisoners formed the United Prisoners' Union in [Page 764]1970. By 1972, it had started to focus on litigation and legislation relating to prison unionization, responding to specific inmate problems and building membership within California's male prisons. In San Quentin State Prison, Harlan X. Washington and 15 other Muslim inmates successfully recruited not only their fellow Muslims, but also members of the Aryan Brotherhood, demonstrating the union's appeal across race lines. Washington was transferred to the prison at Soledad, where he continued to organize. In 1973, at its peak of 3,000 members, the union split into the Prisoners' Union, which confined itself to prison issues, and the United Prisoners Union, which allied itself with the more radical Bay Area groups.

In January 1976, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) and the Prisoners' Union agreed that the union would have the right to represent Soledad inmates and to organize within the prison. In turn, the CDC could suspend the union following a public hearing. However, word leaked to the press, the California Correctional Officers Association threatened to strike, and the Soledad prison authorities rejected the inmates' charter and bylaws for their first chapter. The union then petitioned the courts for the right to hold meetings. The California Supreme Court, however, ruled that prisoners' unions violated institutional security. Three years later, the court upheld the CDC's prohibition of correspondence between union members in prison and on parole.

Despite such setbacks, the Prisoners' Union was one of the groups responsible for the 1971 abolition of California's Indeterminate Sentence Law, which allowed indefinite incarceration until rehabilitation had been proven. The union continues to exist as a support for inmate grievances, although it now makes no effort to organize and hold meetings in prisons.

In 1971, men in New York State's maximum-security Green Haven Correctional Facility organized their own labor union to gain the same rights, privileges, and protections for prisoners as outside labor; to advance their economic, political, social, and cultural interests; and to promote unity between inmate laborers and workers nationwide. By 1972, organizers had gathered nearly 1,200 union membership cards from the facility's 1,800 inmates and had allied itself with the Distributive Workers of America. In response, union members were segregated and transferred to prisons further upstate, and the Public Employees Relation Board of New York (PERB) ruled that prisoners were not public employees and thus had no right to organize and collectively bargain under the Public Employees' Fair Employment Act. During this time, prisoner unions also emerged in North Carolina, Michigan, Delaware, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, Wisconsin, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

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