WHERE LIFE IS PRECIOUS, LIFE IS PRECIOUS

Where Life Is Precious, Life Is Precious

Rhode Island’s ACI Hunger Strike, Public Health, and Traditions of Resistance

On August 22, people incarcerated in Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) went on a hunger strike. Facing unbearable conditions—heat strokes due to lack of ventilation and air conditioning, exploitative wages, reduced recreational time, outdated facilities, black mold, and abuse from correctional officers—those incarcerated in Maximum Security approached DARE’s (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) Behind the Walls Committee. The group, made up of individuals impacted by incarceration including family, friends, and allies, soon organized a car rally in support of those on the inside. On August 22, more than 30 cars loaded with people showed up at the Cranston facilities.

Despite this mobilization among leftist, anticarceral activist circles in the state, the Rhode Island Department of Corrections (RIDOC) continues to deny a hunger strike ever took place. J.R. Ventura, the department’s spokesperson, told the Providence Journal that “there have been no actions to indicate a hunger strike inside our facility, and no reports of inmates declaring to be on one. Everyone here has either come out to eat or have chosen to stay in their rooms and eat the commissary food they have purchased to keep in their cells.” Cranston’s mayor and Rhode Island’s governor have not commented on the matter.

Tunji, a member of Behind the Walls, went on the Providence Leftist Radio podcast to discuss the hunger strike and highlight the demands of those incarcerated in Maximum Security. When the host brought up RIDOC’s constant denial of the happenings inside the facility, Tunji answered: “We have one gentleman who I know personally, I know his family, I know his mother, he calls me on the phone … He was the one who suffered from a heat stroke.”

In that brief sentence, Tunji challenges a system that labels those incarcerated as the ‘dangerous other.’ For Tunji, the incarcerated individual is not a shapeless figure, representative of an evil that must be severed from society and punished, but a member of his community entitled to care and dignity. An individual with ties and history. DARE’s support towards those incarcerated in Maximum Security is a local action demanding immediate relief, but it is also part of a larger conversation about the American carceral state and the importance of working to make its violence apparent.

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In 2020, Tiara Mack, the current senator for Rhode Island District 6, visited the ACI. “It was jarring,” she said in an interview with the College Hill Independent. Mack described the lack of open spaces (while the facility has huge green areas, they were not being used due to understaffing), absence of recreational opportunities, and writings on the walls that read, “They are trying to kill me.” Mack recounted what she witnessed then as “disturbing,” but has been preparing to tour the facility again since the hunger strike began.

“The first thing I did was text the members of DARE,” Mack said. She eventually managed to speak with the state liaison for RIDOC, Ryan Crowley, who denied not only the hunger strike but also that any individuals had suffered from heat-related illnesses. When Mack pushed back, providing names and specifics, Crowley said that continuing with the conversation would be a violation of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects patient health information from being disclosed without authorization). “It has been a frustrating matter trying to get to the truth because RIDOC has, time and time again, lied about the care and treatment people behind the walls are receiving,” she said.

RIDOC’s silence is part of a long tradition of state-sanctioned violence that seeks to shape our perception of justice. For most people in our carcerality-inclined culture, “bad people go to jail,” Mack said, and our political behavior tends to reflect that assumption. News stories end with words such as “arrested,” “seized,” or “sentenced.” Headlines rarely recognize the humanity of incarcerated individuals, much less the reality of the punitive, profit-focused system that has swallowed them. There is even less space for stories about how the incarcerated survive and resist such a system within its walls.

The reality—the one underlying every conviction—is that the majority of people who end up in prisons are low-income, housing-insecure, and suffering from mental health crises. But the prevailing narrative in the U.S., pushed by centuries of punitive politics, focuses on individual actions and labels them as signs of moral deviation. “It’s not a sexy topic,” said Mack. “No one wants to talk about confinement and torture … It’s a harder narrative to create for people who don’t see poverty as state-sanctioned violence.”

But reframing popular conceptions of criminal justice is only part of the problem. According to current Rhode Island law, people arrested on a simple probation violation may be held at ACI for up to 10 days, and often longer, while awaiting a hearing. Incarcerated people in the state face wages between $0.50 and $3 a day. They lack access to education, and are often stripped of their right to vote. Prisons reproduce the poverty that fills them, even though, Mack said, “some of the egregious crimes that happen in Rhode Island … are white-collar crimes,” which involve corruption, wage theft, and fraud—and are rarely investigated.

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In 2017, according to data released by the Vera Institute of Justice, 55 percent of Rhode Island’s incarcerated population was Black or Latinx. But those populations comprise only 21 percent of the state’s total population. “Our system of mass incarceration is built upon racism,” Amanda Klonsky, a fellow at the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project and an educator in prisons for more than 15 years, told the Indy. “It is clear to me that if the majority of people behind bars were white these conditions would be addressed,” she said.

For Klonsky, the system treats individuals’ lives, specifically those of Black and brown people, as disposable—an attitude that current public health crises have only accentuated. She remembers, during the emergence of COVID-19, the torturous conditions in which incarcerated people were confined. The prison system shut down everything: visitations, extracurriculars, educational programs, and more. What followed was a complete lockdown, she said: people were being held in their crowded cells for 22, sometimes 23, hours a day, suffering from poor ventilation and heat. The outcome of such conditions? By April 2021, over 2,500 incarcerated Americans had died of COVID-19, a rate of 199 deaths per 100,000 people, according to a JAMA Network research letter published in October 2021. By contrast, the U.S. population writ large faced a death rate of 80 per 100,000 people. Jails became “viral incubators,” said Klonsky, contaminating the communities around them.

According to Klonsky, “the conditions of mass incarceration themselves are a threat to public health.” Now, with monkeypox spreading quickly throughout the United States, the country has once again failed to prioritize the lives of the vulnerable. In response to a vaccine shortage, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has confirmed that those incarcerated will not be vaccinated unless there is confirmed exposure. While Klonsky stressed that vaccination post-infection can prevent illness, she noted that the strategy is not effective within the reality of prisons. “You can have someone in your cell who has [monkeypox] and you have no idea they have it,” she said. Federal campaigns have targeted gay, transgender, and nonbinary communities, but those communities are also disproportionately represented among the incarcerated population. Much more than those on the outside, incarcerated individuals are exposed to inhumane conditions that heighten the spread of diseases. “We shouldn’t do that to people even in the absence of [monkeypox],” Klonsky said. For Klonsky, the Rhode Island hunger strike was a landmark, an example of how we should approach transformative justice. “It shows us that incarcerated people can themselves lead movements for justice,” she said, and that we should be following the lead of those directly impacted by incarceration, instead of suppressing their voices with our own demands. “The way to enact change is to make sure we are centering the voices of incarcerated people and their families,” she said, “that we are taking their leadership seriously.”

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In Rhode Island, DARE seeks to confront systems that divide communities and profit from their oppression. To do so, DARE has focused not only on advocacy, but also on creating networks of care and support, taking up the role of rehabilitation themselves. DARE’s history dates back to 1986, when it was founded around a kitchen table, according to their website. From registering voters, improving bilingual education, campaigning for police accountability, and more, DARE has been an example of the power of non-state actors in Rhode Island.

DARE’s campaigns for decarceration have centered people impacted by the carceral system. Through the organization’s contact with incarcerated individuals, DARE exposed atrocities during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as resistance within ACI walls, such as the hunger strikes. For example, last year DARE was instrumental in publicizing a hunger strike at the ACI that sought to disrupt a facility-wide lockdown planned for a correctional officer celebration.

“There can be no vision of a better world if we don’t believe primarily and wholeheartedly in people and their stories.”

Instead of describing themselves as a ‘voice for the voiceless,’ DARE is a megaphone to those most vulnerable to practices of silencing. Thanks to community organizing, narratives such as Zackary’s, a young person sentenced to 35 years at the ACI who was among those subject to brutal conditions during the pandemic, will remain part of an archive of resistance. “I have been in prison for about 6 years now and my experience here has been what someone would expect a prison to be like, difficult, disgusting, vile, and sickening,” they wrote in a letter published by DARE. “So I ask the public, don’t you want people here who are getting out to be treated like human beings … How can a man focus in a wicked place like this?”

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Earlier this year, I encountered the work of Iris Marion Young, whose posthumous book Responsibility for Justice criticizes what she calls “the liability model of justice.” Such a model, she claims, is “backwards-looking,” concerned with assigning blame after an injustice has been committed and mitigating its harms. It focuses on singling out individuals who deviate from the law, laying responsibility at the feet of the individual alone.

But for Young, responsibility is communal. Young sees humans not as self-sufficient but as intertwined within a myriad of structures that shape the reality we share. The recognition of those structures is what Young calls “political responsibility,” intrinsically collective, public, and transformative. Instead of blaming the evils of society on certain individuals, Young wants us to recognize how we have, consciously or not, contributed to dehumanizing carceral systems.

Of course, Young’s ideas are part of a much longer tradition—echoed by DARE, Klonsky, Mack—of Black activists. W. Haywood Burns, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Edwin Ellis, and thousands of others, named and unnamed by history, have long addressed how any system of oppression sustains itself on an exclusive conception of humanness. There can be no vision of a better world if we don’t believe primarily and wholeheartedly in people and their stories. And a rally of cars letting abused incarcerated people know they are not alone is definitely a start.

In our interview, Klonsky mentioned the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Where life is precious, life is precious.” Once we understand that, no voice will go unheard, no story will go unread. Then, we can find justice.

JULIA VAZ B’25 will support people behind bars by participating in DARE’s phone zap action (more information on Instagram @dare.pvd).