Today marks the beginning of the 2018 prison strike. Incarcerated people across the United States will be striking to demand better living conditions, an immediate end to prison slavery, greater funding for rehabilitation services and more. The Chicago Community Bond Fund is proud to stand in solidarity with the 2018 prison strike. We released a solidarity statement earlier this month which you can read below:

We, the Chicago Community Bond Fund, are in solidarity with all incarcerated individuals who are planning, engaging in, and supporting the National Prison Strike planned from August 21 to September 9, 2018. People in prisons must be given the ability to express themselves and engage in acts of protest designed to meet their own needs. Our support extends to all outlined plans to engage in work strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, and hunger strikes to call attention to the abhorrent living and working conditions inside of prisons, the racialized conditions of parole denials for Black and Brown people, and the expansive violence and dehumanization of the prison industrial complex as a whole.

Chicago Community Bond Fund pays bail for people accused of crimes in Cook County, Illinois. Through a revolving bail fund, we support individuals whose communities cannot afford to pay the bails themselves and who have been impacted by structural violence. In addition to paying bail and freeing as many individuals as possible from pretrial incarceration, it is also our mission to abolish the use of money bail entirely and change the circumstances that require us to pay bail. The collective experiences of the people we pay bail for and their loved ones inspire our vision of not only ending money bail, but also of abolishing the prison industrial complex as a whole.

Chicago Community Bond Fund demands that all requests of the National Prison Strike participants be addressed and that no retaliation results from their organizing. Free them all!

For more information about the strike, visit the official Strike page here:https://incarceratedworkers.org/