Photo Credit: Lauren Miller
Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) is an organization dedicated to giving a voice to incarcerated people and to ending human rights abuse in American prisons. The Wisconsin branch of IWOC recently published an investigation documenting “a pattern of medical neglect, mistreatment, exploitation and other forms of abuse” in state prisons. Off the Cuff talked with Alan Schultz, a member of IWOC’s National Steering Committee and former prisoner.
Can you explain what IWOC is?
It was created as a labor of love in 2015 and was mainly inspired by George Jackson’s ideas on unionizing incarcerated people. Extensive letter-writing campaigns ensued, networks of inside organizers and pen pals grew and eventually, folks who had been working with other abolitionist groups were asked to support a prison strike in 2016. Milwaukee’s IWOC started in a similar manner—through letter-writing campaigns, actions and meetings to directly affect change in the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC).
What does IWOC do specifically?
Photo Credit: Lauren Miller
IWOC is meant to aid those incarcerated by acting as a conduit of communication for them, to assist in facilitating the autonomy and self-organization of incarcerated people to have some control over their workplaces, living environments, health care, treatment, safety, food and visitations. We investigate grievances we hear from incarcerated people, which can become smaller issues that can be built into a portion of a campaign.
The Milwaukee IWOC has worked toward getting transparency and changes in the DOC’s Committee on Inmate Youth Deaths (COIYD) and has conducted phone and email zaps to try to prevent harm to incarcerated people, among many other things. We routinely send a newsletter of incarcerated people’s messages of their conditions at their prison, their poems, artwork and words of encouragement for others in similar situations. We’ve also conducted outside pickets of facilities—sometimes informational ones like we have been doing with the CLOSEmsdf campaign for more than two years now, once a month.
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Why do you want to close the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility (MSDF)?
There are many issues with the facility. I have personally known two of the 17 people who’ve died there since 2001. There is no sunlight at MSDF; no outdoor recreation. It’s severely overcrowded, resulting in three people being placed in cells not meant to house that many; one person must sleep on a plastic “boat,” which has to be slid out in front of the cell’s only toilet, and incarcerated individuals have to spend more time than they should in cells as MSDF is severely understaffed. I encourage people to visit the CLOSEmsdf.org website to better understand the entire issue.
What are some other prison practices IWOC denounces?
The Wisconsin DOC censors mail if it is deemed to potentially facilitate inside organizing, and Wisconsin has one of the nation’s most censored prison mail systems. The letters, if rejected by the institution, tend to be marked “Return to Sender,” and the incarcerated person is usually informed a letter came but was rejected and vaguely states what the reason for the rejection was. Additionally, unionizing is considered “group resistance” and is enough to get a person put in solitary confinement. In some states (though not Wisconsin currently), that could be considered gang affiliation and cause one to get a gang enhancement tacked on to a pending sentence, which could get you housed in a different pod or unit that could prove more dangerous.
What are some of IWOC’s achievements?
We’ve helped link incarcerated people to legal assistance, as well as to relatives they’d lost contact with. IWOC has interviewed family members of those who’ve committed suicide while incarcerated and spoken on their behalf at COIYD meetings. Recently, we’ve gotten the COIYD to at least agree to look into whether they can divulge precisely how many people are dying in each separate prison so we can pinpoint if one is an outlier in causing or having deaths associated with it. This committee has existed since 2005, yet nobody knows what its recommendations are, and they refuse to acknowledge open records requests.
