Submitted by existential1 in AskRaddle

I was listening to a recent episode of "The Ex-Worker" podcast, and after riffing on the inefficacy of voting and spending time on convincing politicians to do this or that, they ended the program with an ask to call prison wardens to change x or y thing for a particular inmate.

Is it just me, or is this not any different? It is still calling a state representative to do something non-oppressive isn't it? Am I missing something?

Asking for myself, not a friend.

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Pop wrote

Its a bit more direct if you're talking to the individual who has the power over a smaller institution

If you're managing to piss the person off by having the phone ringing all the time, then it's more like direct action
sometimes its easier just to stop being an asshole to one of your prisoners than to deal with phonecalls all day, but a petition doesn't need to be looked at

and if it's as part of other actions, it can potentially help

That said, I don't really know, never done it

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Sunset_Peach wrote

yeah it doesn't sound like nicely asking a prison warden to do something will work...

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sudo wrote

I was part of an organization once that occasionally did phone zaps like this. Behind closed doors, we all knew that calling wardens and such would never really change anything. That was never the point; the point was to use it as a medium to spread awareness of whatever the situation was, and to use it as a gateway for people to do more (actually useful) activism with the organization. It also had the secondary benefit of essentially DDOSing the police department's non-emergency phone lines for a day or so.

We never publicly acknowledged any of this, because doing so would ruin the effect.

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