The following is excerpted from the EOCI News:
"Due to security concerns and changes in technology, later this year the Department of Corrections (DOC) plans to make changes to the inmate phone system. No changes will occur until a permanent rule is adopted. When this happens, we will turn on a security feature that will require that you maintain a list of the phone numbers you want to call... every inmate will be limited to a list of 40 numbers, not counting attorneys and some transitional resource phone numbers."
The DOC pigs tried this last summer while I was at OSP, and we broke the pigs with unity by a phone/commissary strike. It lasted 2 weeks and they put the supposed leaders of the strike in administrative segregation but the strike continued. We won the release of our comrades from ad-seg plus the abandonment of this phone rule(the same one they're trying now). We were also able to be heard on other issues, but the people, I'm sad to report, were sorely unprepared for this and made no significant demands.
As of now, the comrades of Oregon State Penitentiary are again peacefully protesting this restrictive policy and invasion of privacy by not using the phones (I haven't heard any other positions taken). DOC is losing money and face when our comrades stand united and must listen to the cries of the oppressed within Oregon gulags. Comrades, this is a major weakness in the capitalist economy within ODOC that can be exposed, they use our slave labor to profit, they sell us their products at one price (a prison monopoly), they profit by phone service. They are at our mercy! Stand together.
-- an Oregon prisoner, July 2005