The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization in the United States, has just won a temporary restraining order against the Anchorage Correctional Complex in Alaska’s federal district court. The Friday decision ensures that the facility will cease starving Muslim prisoners observing Ramadan.
Ramadan began May 16 and will last until about June 15. During this period, observant Muslims do not eat or drink during daylight hours.
Most facilities accommodate inmates by providing pre-dawn and post-sunset meals. Instead, Anchorage Complex officials were giving those observing Ramadan meals of just 500 to 1,100 calories each evening, well short of the 2,600 to 2,800 calories each should be receiving.
Providing just a fraction of the calories inmates need each day would have been bad enough if they could have eaten what was being provided. What’s worse is that these meals included pork. Islam forbids the consumption of pork at all times.
The problem doesn’t lie with the law: It was purely human indecency. Both state and federal law require officials to respect religious practices. And it’s not like officials didn’t know how. Inmates submitted multiple complaints before CAIR sued, and CAIR’d previously issued a guide to Islamic religious practices for correctional institutions.
CAIR’s suit is based on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA, as well as the First and Fourteenth Amendments, which protect religious exercise and guarantee equal protection, respectively. RLUIPA bars prisons nationwide from violating prisoners’ religious freedom.
“The Constitution and Congress forbid prisons from compelling inmates to choose between their faith and food,” said [CAIR] National Litigation Director Lena Masri. “We hope that a court will do what Anchorage Correctional Complex officials will not: ensure that Muslim inmates are not starved or forced to violate the principles of their faith during the holy month of Ramadan.”
What’s frightening is that the officials’ behavior may not have been a matter of negligence or indolence. As CAIR’s documented, bias-motivated incidents against Muslims in the United States rose by nearly 20 percent from 2016 to 2017; anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by 15 percent.