I'm Lee Rowland.

Welcome to At Liberty, the podcast from the ACLU, where we grapple with today's most pressing civil rights and civil liberties questions.

Today, a nationwide prison strike.

As wildfires raged in California this summer, over 2,000 of the firefighters on site were paid just $1 per hour to battle the blaze.

These firefighters were volunteers from inside of California's prison system. They're part of a national workforce

of incarcerated people, paid pennies per hour, and sometimes nothing at all, for hourly labor

benefiting the U.S. economy. Driven in part by demands for better working conditions and wages,

incarcerated workers last month began a nationwide

prison strike. Today, we're speaking with David Fati, director of the ACLU's National Prison

Project, to learn more about the strike and the organizers' demands. David is a longtime prison

rights advocate who has spent his career fighting for incarcerated

people and against the policies that have given the U.S. the highest incarceration rate

in the entire world. We'll get his thoughts on what the nationwide prison strike reveals

about America's prison culture. David, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me.

Let's start with a basic primer on this summer's prison strike. What is it, and why did it begin?

The nationwide prison strike came about because of a level of dissatisfaction on the part of prisoners with the conditions under which they live.

The United States has the world's largest prison population, 2.3 million people behind bars at any given time,

and the conditions under which many of them live are frankly appalling,

conditions that are unhealthy, dangerous, and sometimes even lethal.

So the prison strike came about as a result of this dissatisfaction really coming to a head,

and some prisoner activists deciding that the time had come to make a stand.

Who were these prisoner activists?

...