Activists, pols back detainee food strike at Rikers over poor conditions, lack of services
The detainee food strike on Rikers Island is evidence that the crisis in the jails has reached a critical stage, advocates and elected officials said Thursday.
Some 200 detainees have been refusing meals in four dorms in the Robert N. Davoren Center on Rikers since Friday night, demanding the return of basic services like recreation and medical visits, according to advocates and public defender groups.
“That hunger strike is a direct result of the abuse and the neglect that they are experiencing and we stand with them in unity,” said Andre Ward of the Fortune Society during a protest outside the Rikers Island bridge in East Elmhurst, Queens.
One strike leader, Earvin Bowins, was abruptly transferred out of the Davoren Center by correction officials. His lawyer Christopher Boyle said a correction officer told him it was because he was a leader of the strike.
“They came and got him and said he was being moved,” Boyle said. “They told him, ‘You can’t be in the building anymore. You’re too influential.’”
Boyle found out about his client’s transfer when he visited the Davoren Center after the protest.
“It’s a punitive transfer, you can’t see it any other way,” he said. “So now he’s in GRVC (the George R. Vierno Center), which is where the fight clubs are going on.”
A judge has found that inmate leaders at the Vierno center have forced other inmates to brawl for their pleasure.
The hunger strike protest took place four months to the day after state legislators stood at the same intersection and called Rikers “horror island.” Since then, the same problems of conditions and staffing persist.
Boyle suggested the situation demonstrates the federal monitor installed six years ago to oversee the jails has not improved conditions.
“What has to happen is that the federal government has to come in and take control over the island. They have lost control over what’s going on,” he said.
On Wednesday, the Correction Department disputed with the use of the phrase “hunger strike,” saying detainees were sharing commissary food.
“They resumed eating from the kitchen two days ago,” a spokesman said Wednesday. No new information was offered Thursday.
Meghna Philip of Neighborhood Defender Services said that organization’s clients are not getting medical treatment, nor are they being produced for legal visits and video court conferences. “So far DOC is denying the basic reality of what’s happening,” she said.
Mayor Eric Adams said Thursday he was briefed on the strike by Correction Commissioner Louis Molina. He appeared to assert Molina met with the strikers.
Some activists suggested things could get worse.
“The conditions are deplorable, we’re talking about basic conditions,” said Raphael Medina, who sent a year at the Davoren Center as a teen in 2004 and now works as a counselor with Exodus Transitional Community. “If they don’t start listening, the protests are going to get worse, more structured and more dug in.”
Added Jason Scott, who was previously detained on Rikers in 1995 and also with Exodus, “And that means worse conditions for the prisoners.”
