Scores of Texas prisoners have entered the second week of a hunger strike in protest at being saved indefinitely in solitary confinement, a type of incarceration in the US that human rights teams have denounced as torture.
Inmates throughout the Texas jail system have been refusing meals since 10 January in an organized outcry against being held in isolation in some circumstances for many years. Estimates of the numbers of prisoners concerned differ. The Texas division of prison justice (TDCJ) places it at 72, however exterior advocates liaising with the strikers say it’s no less than 138.
In Texas, solitary confinement is used as a way of management designed largely to forestall violence between prisoners. The concept is to segregate these concerned in jail gangs, or “security threat groups” as they’re referred to as, which embrace the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican mafia.
Inmates are assessed for indicators of gang membership akin to tattoos and different indicators, and if they’re labelled with a gang standing are then positioned alone in a cell indefinitely, no matter any behavioral violations or wrongdoing. The indeterminate size of a solitary time period in Texas has made the state a nationwide chief in the usage of this excessive type of lock-up over extended intervals.
The state presently has greater than 3,000 inmates in “restrictive housing”, as solitary is understood. Of these, greater than 500 have been remoted for no less than 10 years and 138 for no less than 20 years.
Brittany Robertson, an outdoor consultant for the hunger strikers, informed the Guardian that situations in the solitary cell have been brutal. “Most units don’t allow calls, no contact visits, no oversight or effective grievance process. Mail is delayed up to a month, there are staffing shortages and with no security checks there are a lot of suicides.”
She added that the prisoners who had joined the protest “truly feel this is in the best interest of all, including the prison employees who are suffering appalling conditions as well”.
Robertson has collated a set of official complaints from solitary prisoners. One inmate reported that he had an contaminated abscess on his again that was going untreated; a Black prisoner complained that African American in solitary have been being singled out for “physical and psychological abuse”; and a 3rd offender requested being transferred out of the solitary unit as a result of “my life is in danger here”.
In a separate report, a prisoner recorded what privileges he was afforded by way of in August 2022. He was solely allowed to make a telephone name to a beloved one as soon as in the month, and that was at 12.39am in the early hours.
As for out-of-cell time, he was granted a short recreation interval on solely two days in the month. The remainder of the time he spent in his isolation cell.
The placing prisoners have modeled their calls for on California the place prisoners staged a hunger strike in 2013. Two years later the California inmates efficiently litigated a federal settlement which ended the usage of solitary in the state based mostly on gang standing alone.
The Texas hunger strikers ready written complaints and demands which they introduced to the jail authorities three months earlier than they began the present motion. In it they mentioned that they have been struggling “deprivations of our senses, inhumane treatment and conditions, and long-term mental, physical and emotional harm which endure long after release and cannot be undone”.
Their essential demand is that Texas strikes from the present system of placing prisoners indefinitely into solitary based mostly on their gang standing to a “behavioral based system to address the behavior of individuals – only those who engage in serious rule violations should be placed in restrictive housing”.
They add: “Under no circumstances will any prisoner remain in solitary confinement for more than 10 years.”
Savannah Kumar, workers legal professional of the ACLU of Texas, mentioned that the prisoners’ proposals have been “clear, common-sense measures consistent with the US constitution. In the face of draconian and torturous treatment, the people on hunger strike are asking just for reasonable reforms that have already been implemented elsewhere.”
The latest data collated by the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) and the Arthur Liman Center at Yale legislation college estimates that there have been between 41,000 and 48,000 in isolation in US jail cells in July 2021. The CLA-Liman report recorded that Texas had by far the biggest variety of prisoners who had been held in solitary for greater than 10 years, with solely Alabama and the federal Bureau of Prisons coming wherever shut.
A plethora of human rights teams have categorized extended solitary confinement as a type of torture. In 2011, a special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Council concluded that as brief a timeframe as 15 days in solitary can quantity to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and even torture”.
The psychological risks of extended solitary confinement have lengthy been identified. “There’s plenty of research showing that after just a few days people deteriorate mentally, can develop suicidal ideation and experience PTSD afterwards,” mentioned Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab on the LBJ School throughout the University of Texas.
Deitch described the Texas system, whereby prisoners with gang affiliations could also be put into isolation indefinitely with out having dedicated any violation, as “Kafkaesque”. “If one of the reasons you are placed in that status is because you have a tattoo, well, the tattoo isn’t going away while you’re in there so the idea that your case is periodically reviewed is meaningless.”
One solution to get out of solitary is for inmates to resign their gang membership by way of a program often called Grad (gang renouncement and disassociation course of). To accomplish that, nevertheless, exposes them to distinctive hazard as they’re marked as a snitch.
In a press release, the TDCJ mentioned that “if known prison gang members in state custody do not like their current confinement conditions, they are free to renounce their gang and we will offer them a pathway back into general population. We will not, however, give them free rein to recruit new members and try to continue their criminal enterprises.”
The TDCJ mentioned that solely inmates “who are confirmed members of the most organized and dangerous prison gangs, inmates who are escape risks, and inmates who committed assaults or multiple other serious disciplinary offenses are incarcerated within [solitary]”. The assertion mentioned that the jail service had made “great strides” in reducing the usage of isolation, from a peak of 9,186 prisoners in 2007 to three,172 final 12 months.
The hunger strike continues.
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