Prison and prisoners' movements ➔ United Prisoners Union
Item
Identifier:
IA.ITM.000258-->
Description
This version of the United Prisoners Union poster, of which three or more versions were created, shows five raised fists with shackles or handcuffs breaking apart a chain together.The colors of the background of the poster range from brown to black to red to pink to yellow, suggesting the multiple skin tones of prisoners who may be in the union.
Dan Berger informs us, “The Prisoners‘ Union specifically emerged out of the nineteen-day strike at Folsom prison in Fall 1970. Activists with the Prisoners Union and its associated groups argued that prisoners were laborers who ought to receive protection and remuneration for their work inside. They waged semi-traditional union campaigns to win the right to collective bargaining.”
He continues, “the innovation of prisoner labor unions…enlisted thousands of prisoners across the country in the 1970s, garnering a good deal of visibility through campaigns to organize the “convict class,” as they called it, on the basis of their position as laborers.” It is this relationship to unpaid and non-voluntary labor that reinforced the belief that prisons were modern-day slavery. The visual information in the poster relates imprisonment to slavery in the use of manacles and chains, and relates to the political analysis of imprisonment which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, due much to work of various Black revolutionary and civil rights groups.
The Beckley Post-Herald from 9 November 1971 unflatteringly reports, “In California, convicts and former convicts have formed a group known as the United Prisoners Union whose slogan is "power to the convicted class." The objective of the criminal organizers is to form a national union that will represent the nation's 200,000 prison inmates… [with a] legislative objective--limiting prison terms to a maximum of 10 years… the United Prisoners Union has drawn up a "bill of rights" for alleged prison reform.”
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Related posters can be seen in the All of Us or None collection, currently at the Oakland Museum.
From the OM’s description: “The UPU was a prison rights organization formed by Wilbert "Popeye" Jackson. [LMC]”
Here: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/201054453
And here: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/2010545849
More contextual information may be found in Dan Berger’s 2010 dissertation, “We Are the Revolutionaries: Visibility, Protest and Racial Formation in 1970’ Prison Radicalism”, available freeling online at http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1321&context=edissertations
Lastly, a similar poster sold on Ebay for $197 recently: http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-Original-United-Prisoners-Union-Silk-Screen-Poster-1960-70s-/231165176073