by Reina Sultan
This article was originally published at Prism
On Jan. 8, about 200 people incarcerated at Rikers Island began a hunger strike to protest the abysmal conditions at the jail. This is the second hunger strike by prisoners at Rikers during the pandemic. In the early days of COVID-19, incarcerated people protested about lack of PPE, inability to access medical care, and lack of adequate meals. We owe it to them to fight for the closure of Rikers without building new jails and for the immediate decarceration of people held there and in facilities worldwide.
The current hunger strikers describe increasingly dangerous conditions at Rikers, a facility that imprisons more than 5,000 mostly Black and brown people, many of whom are disabled, chronically ill, poor, or otherwise marginalized. Those held there are subjected to dehumanizing and unhygienic living conditions, where they’ve been forced to clean blood and feces from the floor and where mice and water bugs frequently wake them up. Others mention seeing black mold in the bathrooms and mildew on food carts. With winter, temperatures are dropping, and the hunger strikers’ unit is getting particularly cold.
At the end of December, while omicron surged outside, prisoners—of whom only 38% have two doses of the vaccine—were getting infected with the virus at record speeds. Because so many guards have been calling out sick with COVID, prisoners have missed medical appointments, making them even more vulnerable to illness. This is just the latest emergency brought by the pandemic, as many have been held at Rikers for years without a trial as hearings get delayed due to COVID-19 restrictions.
