When Workers Strike, Prisoners Pay: Adelaide’s Lockdowns Reveal the Machinery of the Carceral State

South Australia has spent the past week proving a truth many of us have known for decades: the prison industrial complex is not a collection of isolated agencies, it is one sprawling, interconnected machine, and when one cog stops turning, it grinds human beings into dust.

The Public Service Association (PSA) walked off the job to fight for a wage increase. Workers have the right to fight for fair pay and safe conditions. But instead of directing their industrial action at the state, they held prisoners hostage to their demands. The result? People locked in their cells for 24 hours at a time. No visits. No calls. No hospital transfers. No court appearances. No releases. Minimal food. Women in solitary confinement left without case reviews. Families cut off from their loved ones. Christmas approaching, and prisoners, many of them unsentenced, being used as leverage in a dispute that has nothing to do with them.

This wasn’t just one group of workers walking off the job. The strike revealed the true scale and cohesion of the prison industrial ecosystem. First it was the prison officers. Then the Home Detention monitoring unit downed tools. Then the sheriff’s officers. And soon after, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions signalled they too would refuse to participate in court matters in solidarity.

Prisons like to pretend they are distinct from the rest of the justice system. Police say they’re not responsible for what happens in prisons. Prisons say they’re not responsible for what happens in courts. Courts say they only interpret the law. The DPP insists they are “independent”. Surveillance contractors claim they simply provide equipment. But this week exposed the truth: they are all part of one interlocking web of control, punishment, and coercion: a web so deeply woven that when one strand snaps, the entire structure quivers.

The solidarity shown among these departments should force the public to ask a harder question: if they can unite so seamlessly to defend their own interests, how tightly coordinated is their role when it comes to punishing ours?

Because make no mistake, this is punishment. Prisoners were used as bargaining chips in a wage dispute they did not create, cannot influence, and have no escape from. Their bodies became the pressure point. Their deprivation became the leverage. Their suffering became the currency of negotiation.

And this is the logic of the prison industrial complex laid bare. It is not just about bars or cells. It is an entire ecosystem of workers, agencies, courts, lawyers, contractors, unions, technologies, and bureaucracies whose power depends on keeping people locked in, locked down, and locked out of public sympathy.

You cannot be a prison officer and say you’re not part of the PIC.
You cannot be a sheriff’s officer and say you’re not part of the PIC.
You cannot work for the DPP, the courts, corrections, monitoring services, transport units, or youth justice and pretend your labour does not feed the same machine.

This week proved that they know they are connected, and they will act like it when their interests are at stake.

The tragedy is that incarcerated people have no such luxury. They cannot walk off the job. They cannot withdraw their labour. They cannot refuse unsafe working conditions. They cannot withhold their bodies from being used as the site of political pressure. They live, and die, inside a system whose workers can weaponise their absence while the people inside are never permitted autonomy, agency, or reprieve.

For decades, abolitionists have argued that the prison industrial complex is not a metaphor. It is not a rhetorical flourish or an activist slogan. It is a literal description of a networked system of state and corporate actors whose survival depends on punishment. The events in Adelaide should end any public illusion that these agencies operate independently. The web is real. And when it trembles, it is always the caged who feel the quake first.

If the government wants to resolve this crisis, it must stop treating prisoners as disposable collateral. If the union wants to claim moral legitimacy, it must stop leveraging the captivity of criminalised people as its bargaining chip. And if the public wants to understand what is happening in our name, it must finally confront the truth: prisons are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.

And that is why they must be dismantled.