Texas prisoners are 10 days into hunger strike over solitary confinement

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s each day e-newsletter that retains readers in control on probably the most important Texas news.

Ten days after Texas prisoners across the state (*10*) to protest the state’s harsh solitary confinement practices, dozens of males are nonetheless refusing meals, and a few are reportedly dropping kilos of weight a day.

Texas prisoners in solitary confinement are stored in single-person cells for at the least 22 hours a day. When staffing ranges enable — which may be uncommon — they get out of their cells to bathe or train alone in caged out of doors areas. Thousands of prisoners are stored in such situations, and so they are sometimes held in isolation for years.

In November, greater than 500 Texas prisoners had been in solitary confinement for greater than a decade, based on jail officers.

Under division coverage, prisoners are assigned to solitary in the event that they are escape dangers, have dedicated violent assaults or critical offenses in jail, or are confirmed members of harmful jail gangs. For months, males at a number of Texas prisons have been urging prison officials and lawmakers to maneuver away from the observe of placing — and maintaining — prisoners in solitary as a result of they are affiliated with a gang, even when they’ve had no behavioral issues.

Without a notable response to their proposal, they started the hunger strike final Tuesday, on the primary day of the state Legislature.

Brittany Robertson, an impartial activist who has coordinated with males in additional than a dozen prisons earlier than and throughout the hunger strike, stated she estimated a whole bunch of males started refusing meals final week. On Jan. 13, the primary day the Texas Department of Criminal Justice formally acknowledged the strike as a result of three days had handed, the prison system reported 72 prisoners had been ravenous themselves.

By Tuesday, the quantity dropped to 51, based on TDCJ spokesperson Amanda Hernandez. On Thursday, she stated 38 prisoners had been nonetheless refusing meals.

Hernandez stated prisoners’ commissary gadgets had been additionally being monitored, presumably to make sure males reporting to be on strike aren’t consuming packaged meals they purchased beforehand from the jail retailer. Prisoners have reported that their cells are routinely looked for meals, based on Robertson.

The males are additionally dropping weight quick, based on a protesting prisoner. In a Friday message, a prisoner within the Coffield Unit stated weigh-ins revealed that a number of males had misplaced 5 kilos or extra in sooner or later. He stated lots of the males had been starting to really feel dizzy and have muscle cramps, based on an image of the letter despatched to The Texas Tribune.

According to jail coverage, these taking part in hunger strikes should be medically evaluated each day, with the choice for medical doctors to force-feed prisoners if it’s deemed mandatory. Hernandez stated Thursday no medical intervention had but been required for the strike.

Messages despatched to protesting prisoners by the Tribune this week haven’t but been answered. Robertson reported a lot of the prisoners’ emails and letters have taken longer to obtain than common, which males suspect is in retaliation for his or her protest. Hernandez stated the slowdown is as a result of there was a rise in mail, making a backlog for inside evaluations of prisoner communications.

Prison gangs, typically organized by race, are notoriously harmful and infrequently deemed answerable for a lot violence behind bars. Still, indefinite solitary confinement has been increasingly criticized as disastrous for psychological well being, and international human rights standards deem it torture.

The protesters’ proposed modifications are just like a settlement agreement reached in federal court docket in 2015 in opposition to California’s solitary confinement practices. After a wide-scale, two-month hunger strike in 2013 and years of prisoner-led litigation, California agreed to not place individuals in solitary based mostly solely on their gang standing and to not maintain them in isolation indefinitely.

In Texas, the prisoners are additionally asking officers to shift from “gang-status” solitary placements to “behavior-based,” and supply clear pointers and agency timelines on how and when individuals in solitary would get out.

So far, TDCJ has not bowed, as a substitute blaming the strike on an order from a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas in federal jail. Hernandez stated final week that the company won’t give gangs free rein to recruit new members.

Robertson dismissed TDCJ’s conclusion, saying that lots of the placing prisoners are members of Latino gangs and wouldn’t comply with orders from the Aryan Brotherhood. Instead, she stated, males from completely different gangs discovered a technique to come collectively to battle for change.

Prison officers have additionally identified that gang members can get out of solitary by renouncing their gang and going via an intensive reentry program particularly for gang members. Many prisoners, nonetheless, wrestle to get into this system or select to not enter it, based on the placing prisoners and jail rights advocates, as a result of it typically requires them to call different gang members or incriminate themselves.