For three decades, Robert Earl Council, also known as Kinetic Justice, has organized resistance while incarcerated in Alabama. He co-founded the Free Alabama Movement in 2013. In 2016, this coalition helped coordinate the largest prison strike in U.S. history, in which 24,000 incarcerated people in 24 states participated.
And those efforts have not come without consequences.
Justice is known for filing lawsuits and assisting other incarcerated people in reporting abuses in Alabama prisons, which, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, are the deadliest in the U.S.
Hunger strikes, educational outreach, labor strikes, and other organizing tactics have successfully threatened the prison system, despite retaliation in the forms of solitary confinement, starvation, and physical violence.
All tactics are designed to achieve critical human rights demands, including an end to forced, unpaid prison labor, overcrowding, poor healthcare, and repressive prison legislation.
Unsurprisingly, the leader of this collective resistance movement is being targeted yet again. This time, a lawsuit says Lieutenant Jeremy Pelzer encouraged other incarcerated people to murder Justice, once saying, “I’m tired of this bastard and all his lawsuits."
This targeting only indicates the strength of the resistance movement, and a need for those outside prisons to support the organized demands of incarcerated people even more.
If you would like to support and learn more about the Free Alabama Movement, you can do so at this link: https://pushblack.news/p1r .