On the evening of Friday, May 15th, we got word that the group of around a dozen predominantly Black men who have been unjustly confined for over two months to the Special Housing Unit at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin would be launching another hunger strike. The strikers are demanding full access to legal mail which the GEO Group has denied them, an end to religious discrimination, and a response to their complaint forms which have continued to be ignored or thrown out.

To our knowledge, this is the fourth separate hunger strike to have taken place at the North Lake Correctional Facility within the last two months.

The strike in the general population from the last week, which saw at least a hundred people demanding COVID-19 testing and adequate medical care for everyone in the facility, may have ended after the warden retaliated by throwing four people allegedly involved in organizing it into the SHU. More details on this new hunger strike will be included in a press release coming soon.

#FreeThemAll

TRANSCRIPT:

“We’re about to get back on hunger strike. We’re not coming off. As far as the nine meals, ten, eleven—I don’t think we’re coming off.

Because, let me start with one. Legal mail—we are not getting our mails. Even just like when you’re sending your mails to me and all that, they’ve been taking our mails and they’re not giving our mails. We sent mail to the court, and I know the court’s been sending us back, because they have to send back certain stuff, right? These people, instead of giving his legal mail to him, they actually hid his mail inside the property room. And he found out, and now they’re trying not to do what is right by making a statement that, you know, they did wrong by him. Because the judge has wrote back to him that he has 30 days to send back another mail to them, to the court system, about certain stuff. And by them doing what they did, by having our mails in the property room down there … it’s a lot of stuff going on in here right now.

Our grievances—we’ve been sending our grievances back and forth. These people have been not answering the grievances, and they’ve been—they be throwing away our grievances. They come in and steal it, when we go outside for rec—’cause we have an hour rec—they come in the room and took their papers. That’s another thing.

Religious food. You know, it’s Ramadan, right? The kosher meals—they have actually said they’re limiting the kosher meals. They’re actually discriminating against them. So this has been an ongoing problem in here.

As far as us going and getting designated to the other prisons, they were saying that they’re in fear of their life, in fear of retaliation ’cause we’ve been taking action against GEO. And they just fear that, because of what’s going on—like, people are saying they’re going to go to another GEO—and they’re gonna be, you know what I’m saying? Targeted. So they are really trying not to go back to no GEO. They want to actually go back to the BOP, instead of this. ‘Cause it’s basically the same environment. The same people, the same thing, you know? It’s just going to a different state.

The chaplain is part of the religious food, and been lying, and all this. The Assistant Warden Gray—he came and been lying and do not want to come and deal with the situation that they have actually put us back into now again. So now we’re going back through the whole system, and it’s just crazy. Miss Kramer, who had the signature for the mailing of the legal mail that we’re supposed to get—when you get legal mail, you’re supposed to bring our mail, and they have not done that. She was the one that signed off, they ended up giving it to somebody else, and that’s how our mail has been—you know, just crazy. And as you can see yourself, when you even send us mail, we’re not getting it. And we sent you mail, and you’re not getting it. So it’s obvious they’re opening our mail, throwing it away, taking and doing whatever they’re doing, which is against rights, like you cannot do that. We’re entitled to our frickin’ mail.

So right now we have already refused two meals—tomorrow, to the next day, to the next day, to the next day, to the next day, until all this shit is resolved. I mean, it is ham. It is going crazy over here. The wrongdoing, everything that’s going on here—it’s gonna be a long hunger strike.”