The right to hunger strike and carceral domination

Hunger strikes are against prison rules all over the world. Prison officials appeal to their responsibility to preserve detainees’ life and/or other state and penological interests to coercively interfere with hunger strikes, including through force-feeding and punishment. They often charge hunger strikers with “inciting violence” and “participating in a riot,” and generally conceive of hunger strikes as blackmail. For sympathetic observers, the prohibition of hunger strikes and punishment of prisoners who wage them are wrong and disingenuous given hunger strike’s obvious nonviolence and nature as a symbolic form of protest. However, hunger strikes are neither obviously nonviolent, nor merely symbolic. To refuse to eat is not violent; but to willfully starve oneself is self-directed violence, since the agent’s intentional deprivation of food has a high likelihood of resulting in injury. Moreover, to threaten self-harm to obtain concessions from prison and state authorities is a form of coercion, which does resemble blackmail. Can we uphold the right to hunger strike and prison authorities’ duties not to coercively interfere with hunger strikes while simultaneously acknowledging this violence and that coercion? Not only can we, I argue in this paper, but we must include recognition of these features in an adequate account of prisoners’ right to hunger strike and authorities’ duties toward them. A close analysis of the site of hunger strike—prisons, which include penitentiaries, jails, military prisons, immigration detention centers, and refugee camps—is key to such account, as we cannot understand the resort to hunger strike, its self-violence, and coerciveness, without grasping the oppressive power relations that characterize prisons. A familiar, and in-principle justifiable, side of what I call “carceral unfreedom” consists of the restrictions on detainees’ negative freedom as non-interference, including deprivations and mistreatment. “Carceral domination,” the other side of carceral unfreedom, involves unjust violations of prisoners’ interest in being free from others’ arbitrary power (their freedom as non-domination). Carceral domination is inherent in the structure of custodial dependence, given prison officials’ coercive capacities and discretionary powers. Carceral domination gives rise to a right to resist oppression for every detainee. According to the radical argument I articulate, this right to resist oppression grounds a right to hunger strike, whereby detainees use self-starvation as a form of countervailing power against prison and state authorities, in highly constrained environments with few alternatives. In my view, the right to hunger strike protects prisoners’ freedom as non-domination and is instrumentally and intrinsically related to the protection of this freedom. I distinguish this defense of the right to hunger strike with justifications of particular exercises thereof, which rest on various factors, including unwarranted incarceration, inadequate detention conditions, mistreatment, and violations of prisoners’ basic rights. Thus, every prisoner has a right to hunger strike but not every hunger strike is justified.