[Pnews] What’s behind the hunger strike at Northwest Detention Center

[Prisoner News]

http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2023173231_danbergerangelicachazaroopedprisonhungerstrike20xml.html


  What’s behind the hunger strike at Northwest Detention Center

The hunger strike at Northwest Detention Center reveals a human-rights 
crisis, according to guest columnists Dan Berger and Angélica Cházaro.

By Dan Berger 
<http://search.nwsource.com/search?searchtype=cq&sort=date&from=ST&byline=Dan%20Berger> 
and Angélica Cházaro 
<http://search.nwsource.com/search?searchtype=cq&sort=date&from=ST&byline=Ang%26eacute%3Blica%20Ch%26aacute%3Bzaro>

Special to The Times

MORE than 700 people detained at the Northwest Detention Center in 
Tacoma began a hunger strike on March 7 in protest of their conditions. 
Those still reported to be on hunger strike are on medical watch and 
have been threatened with force-feeding if they continue to refuse food. 
According to their attorneys, participants have experienced other 
reprisals for the strike, including solitary confinement and threats to 
their asylum efforts.

In a public statement, the hunger strikers demanded an end to 
deportations and the separation of families. They also demanded better 
food, medical care and wages for work inside the facility (they 
currently receive just $1 a day for their labor), and an end to 
exorbitant commissary prices. Detainees pay $8.95 for a bottle of 
shampoo and $1 for a single plastic plate.

These problems are not limited to federal detention centers. Along with 
people being held in local jails and state and federal prisons, the 
detainees have launched what may be the most urgent human-rights 
movement in our country today. Just this week, a New York inmate died on 
Rikers Island when his jail cell overheated.

The U.S. prison system is the largest in the world. With 5 percent of 
the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s prison 
population. Sentences are longer and conditions harsher than at many 
prisons throughout the world.

The use of long-term solitary confinement — where some 80,000 Americans 
now spend 23 or 24 hours a day without human contact and are often 
denied adequate nutrition, reading material or visits with loved ones — 
has sparked a growing series of lawsuits, legislative hearings and 
demonstrations.

In California, prisoners have staged a series of hunger strikes since 
2011. At its height in the summer of 2013, 30,000 people in prisons 
around the state refused food.

Similar to the Tacoma detainees’ demands, the California prisoners call 
for an end to group punishment and for prison officials to follow United 
Nations protocols on the use of solitary confinement as well as adequate 
food. Similar smaller hunger strikes have occurred in prisons in Ohio, 
North Carolina, Illinois and Virginia since 2011.

Deportations have expanded dramatically in recent years. According to 
the Pew Research Center, the number of deportations has increased from 
approximately 165,000 people a year in 2002 to almost 400,000 people 
annually for the last five years.

Soon, the Obama administration will have deported 2 million people, who 
are processed through a network of detention centers. By congressional 
order, these detention centers must hold 34,000 people on any given day. 
Many of those facilities are privately run. The Northwest Detention 
Center, one of the biggest in the country, is managed by The Geo Group, 
a company that describes itself as the “world’s leading provider” of 
private prisons and detention centers.

Such investment in detention and deportation has sparked a series of 
efforts among undocumented workers and youth around the country. The 
hunger strike in Tacoma follows a two-week hunger strike that activists, 
many of them undocumented, staged outside a Phoenix detention center 
starting Feb. 24. This week, citing Tacoma as inspiration, migrants in 
the Conroe, Texas, detention center launched a hunger strike.

Nonviolent civil-disobedience actions have prevented deportations in 16 
cities around the country, including at the Northwest Detention Center 
in Tacoma days before the hunger strike began.

Such activism has prompted a series of legislative hearings, judicial 
rulings and conversations about long-term isolation, mass incarceration 
and the force-feeding of detainees. Still, there is much work to be 
done. While the United States may like to be a world leader in human 
rights, its routine practices of confinement violate both international 
standards and human decency.

We do not often look to prisons and detention centers to understand the 
social and political needs of our generation. But we should. Some of the 
most passionate advocates for fairness, justice and human rights are 
incarcerated.

/Dan Berger, a historian of activism, teaches ethnic studies at the 
University of Washington Bothell. Angélica Cházaro, an immigrant-rights 
attorney, teaches at the University of Washington School of Law./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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