By Marcus Day
19 February 2013
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/19/pris-f19.html
Nearly 50 prisoners launched a hunger strike on February 4 at
Pontiac Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in central
Illinois. As of February 16, almost two weeks later, some 25 inmates
remained on the strike.
The protest comes in the midst of increased overcrowding and growing
violent confrontations. On January 29, Pontiac was reportedly placed on
lockdown after a prison guard was injured by an inmate. A prison at
Pickneyville, Illinois, reported an attack on a guard in January, and
Menard Correctional Center, located 70 miles south of St. Louis, has
seen at least two attacks on guards over the last month and a half, in
addition to an inmate dying there under suspicious circumstances.
Among other complaints, the hunger strikers at Pontiac (which is the
oldest prison in Illinois and the eighth-oldest in the country) have
stated that Plexiglas barriers placed on their cell doors, installed
recently supposedly to increase security, are preventing their rooms
from being heated. Inmates are protesting as well against a lack of
necessities, such as the forms required for them to receive visits,
legal-sized envelopes, cleaning supplies and hygiene products. Inmates
have claimed that they are charged $5 to use items like nail clippers,
and that these utensils are not sterilized between uses, even though
some of the prisoners have communicable diseases.
The Uptown People’s Law Center noted at the beginning of the protest
that prisoners could face punishment for launching the hunger strike.
“They don’t take these decisions lightly. They are well aware of the
risks,” Legal Director Alan Mills told WSIL, a southern Illinois
television station. Indeed, a few days after the hunger strike began,
an article in the Pontiac Daily Leader stated that some
prisoners who had made formal complaints felt that they were being
harassed and retaliated against by guards and prison administrators.
Protests over intolerable prison conditions have been steadily
increasing since the onset of the financial meltdown in 2008,
particularly in those states, such as California and Illinois, where
the budget crisis is deepest. A 27-year-old inmate died in California
almost exactly one year ago, after a four-day hunger strike similarly
launched in protest against overcrowding and poor living conditions
(see “California
hunger striker dies as prison conditions deteriorate”).
Notably, a significant portion of those participating in the current
hunger strike are said to have been transferred from Tamms, the
“supermax” prison in southern Illinois that was closed at the end of
last December. Some of these prisoners have claimed that conditions at
Pontiac are actually worse than what they faced at Tamms.
The ACLU has recently estimated that as many as 25 percent of
inmates housed at Tamms had been in continuous solitary confinement for
10 years or more. As numerous studies have shown, even relatively short
periods of social isolation can have devastating and permanent physical
and psychological consequences. Last fall, in fact, the UN Special
Rapporteur on Torture issued a finding that stated indefinite solitary
confinement constitutes a form of torture.
However, the closure of Tamms and the transfer of those inmates to
maximum-security prisons were hardly motivated by an upsurge of concern
over the welfare of those prisoners. Just last week, the Illinois
Department of Corrections announced that because of overcrowding, six
prisons throughout the state would begin housing inmates in gymnasiums.
The Illinois prison system now houses nearly 50,000 inmates in a system
designed to hold 33,000.
Over the last 40 years, although the state population has only grown
12 percent, the number of those behind bars has grown from 7,000 to
more than 49,000, an increase of almost 700 percent and the result of
the right-wing, “law-and-order” policies pursued by both major parties.The deterioration of prison conditions ultimately has its roots in the intractable crisis of capitalism. On the one hand, as social inequality continues to soar and opposition grows among workers, the Obama administration and the political establishment generally are turning to increasingly brutal and anti-democratic forms of rule. On the other hand, both Democrats and Republicans are using the financial crisis as a pretext for launching the initial waves of austerity against the most vulnerable layers of society: the elderly and infirm, students and youth, the desperately poor, and prisoners, among others.
Many of those who currently work as guards themselves were once
skilled laborers who were left unemployed after the US was
deindustrialized.
Illinois governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, has made the closure of
state prisons a key component of his budget-cutting agenda, which has
slashed state funding for Medicaid by more than a billion dollars and
is in the process of targeting state employee pensions. The American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which
represents Illinois prison guards, has vocally campaigned against
Quinn’s plans to close down state prisons.
AFSCME’s protests against prison overcrowding and violence, however,
are in no way motivated by humanitarian interest over the fate and
living conditions of prisoners—in fact, quite the opposite.
As Friedrich Engels noted in his classic work The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State, the repressive
power of the capitalist state, which “consists not merely of armed men
but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of
all kinds…increases in the same ratio in which the class antagonisms
become more pronounced.”
In opposing Quinn’s prison closure plan, AFSCME seeks only to
protect the institutional interests of the prison guards in this
repressive state apparatus; their dispute with Quinn amounts to no more
than tactical differences over how to most effectively manage these
“institutions of coercion.” Only the working class, basing itself on a
revolutionary socialist program, can once and for all do away with this
system of oppression and put an end to the domination of class by class.
The author also recommends:California prison overcrowding set to worsen as governor raises state cap
[16 January 2013]
Overcrowding,
budget cuts strain Illinois prisons
[27 July 2012]
[27 July 2012]
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