For many of the millions locked behind bars in the United States, conditions are absolutely dismal. Unsanitary conditions, lack of access to health care, inadequate food, and brutal solitary confinement policies often make a mockery of prisoners’ humanity.
Prisoners at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, a “supermax” prison, have decided to fight back, launching a hunger strike to demand humane living conditions. Prisoners are demanding fully cooked meals, more sanitary conditions, and the end of indefinite detention by prison authorities.
The candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Peta Lindsay for president and Yari Osorio for vice president, salute this action and urge all people to support the just demands of the prison strikers!
Approximately two-thirds of Red Onion inmates live in tiny solitary confinement cells where they are locked down 23 hours of the day. The average stay of a person in isolation is 2.7 years. A 2011 report by the Council of Europe stated that more than 14 days in solitary should be considered “injurious” to the prisoner.
This is part of a long-term trend of torturous isolation cells being used in the U.S. prison system. While in 1985 there were only around a dozen isolation cells scattered across the nation, currently 44 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have brutal lockdown units. From 1995 to 2000, the number of prisoners held in solitary cells grew at about twice the rate of the prison population as a whole.
The mentally ill often make up a large proportion of the isolation cell population. In Arizona, for instance, 26 percent of the inmates in the state’s two “supermax” prisons are mentally ill. At Red Onion, of the 500 prisoners estimated to be held in isolation, 173 are thought to suffer from mental illness. One man spent 14 years in isolation despite having been previously diagnosed with mental illness.
This is just a further example of the brutality of the U.S. penal system. The War on Drugs, massive poverty, and a racist campaign against Black youth have created an explosion of the prison population in the last 30 years, primarily composed of Black and Latino young people.
The fourth point of our Ten-Point Program states:
Stop racist police brutality and mass incarceration.
More than 3 million people are behind bars in the largest prison complex in the world. Mass incarceration of our youth is the real crime. End the mass incarceration of oppressed communities. Fully prosecute all acts of police brutality and violence.
The Red Onion hunger strike is an important front in the struggle against this vicious system of mass incarceration. Following similar actions in Georgia, California and other states, it is clear that this strike is also part of a growing movement of incarcerated persons to reclaim their right to humane treatment.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation 2012 Presidential Campaign asks all those concerned with a future where people’s needs are placed before corporate profits to actively support the Red Onion hunger strikers.
Join us in the struggle for a better world!
VOTE PSL 2012!
