Building an Inside-led prison abolition movement:
An interview with Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun
By Devin Cole posted on January 12, 2021
On Jan. 5, Devin Cole spoke with Free Alabama Movement co-founder and freedom fighter Bennu Hannibal Ra Sun about the economic side of the ongoing 30-day Economic Blackout and Alabama prison strike in January, the growth of social media and prison abolition, and what it will take to build a truly structured prison and slavery abolition organization.
Devin Cole
: Members of the Free Alabama Movement and other prison abolitionists are saying that Securus Technologies’ implementation of video visitation equipment is a front for permanently removing all in-person visitation and replacing it with video visitations only. Can you talk about these concerns and why they want to do away with in-person visitation?
Alabama prisons: ON STRIKE!
Occupied Muscogee Creek / Cherokee / Yuchi / Choctaw / Shawnee / Chickasaw land
As of Jan. 1, 2021, incarcerated workers in Alabama’s odious prison system are on strike! Led by the Free Alabama Movement, incarcerated workers throughout the state of Alabama have put down their work tools and refused to go to work from now until Jan. 31.
The inhumane conditions of Alabama Department of Corrections, their negligence around COVID-19, and their implementation of video visitation equipment in prisons that ADOC claims is “due to COVID,” but is really a front for eliminating in-person visitation, has contributed further to the psychological warfare against everyone incarcerated in Alabama prisons and has fueled this strike.
Free Alabama Movement launches 30-Day Economic Blackout Prisoners call for boycott and work strike due to continued human rights violations and mounting deaths by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC). This story was first published by the San Francisco Bay View.
The Alabama Department of Corrections, under the leadership of embattled and controversial commissioner Jefferson Dunn, continues to be in the news as the death toll within the prison system continues to rise. The failed prison system is set to reach another historic high in preventable deaths due to violence, as well as continuing to rank among national leaders in suicides and drug overdose deaths. At the same time, the ADOC’s lack of a plan, testing or effective response to COVID-19 is causing additional deaths.
FAM launches #30-Day Economic Blackout
December 16, 2020
by Free Alabama Movement
The Alabama Department of Corrections, under the leadership of embattled and controversial commissioner Jefferson Dunn, continues to be in the news as the death toll within the prison system continues to rise. The failed prison system is set to reach another historic high in preventable deaths due to violence, as well as continuing to rank among national leaders in suicides and drug overdose deaths. At the same time, the ADOC’s lack of a plan, testing or effective response to COVID-19 is causing additional deaths.
In response to these and other conditions, the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), a civil and human rights organization founded in 2013 and led from inside the ADOC by activists incarcerated there, have issued a call for a 30-Day Economic Blackout to protest the blatant civil, human and constitutional rights violations being imposed upon the 20,000 plus men and women incarcerated in ADOC. FAM