(THE WASHINGTON POST) – Ramadan begins, the lawsuit alleges mistreatment of Muslims at Va. prison. Last year, a Muslim inmate at Virginia’s Wallens Ridge State Prison wrote a letter about alleged mistreatment at the maximum-security facility.
Officers beat Muslim prisoners and withheld their meals, the letter said. One inmate had threatened suicide but prison staffers didn’t seem to care, according to the letter.
“The officers make remarks about our faith such as ‘Why don’t you ask Allah to save you?’ and call us wanna-be sand [n-word],” the letter said. “This letter is a cry for help.”
The complaint is among many that Gay Gardner, an adviser for the nonprofit group Interfaith Action for Human Rights, says she received from Muslim inmates in Virginia state prisons last year during Ramzan begins.
Now, she is suing the Virginia Department of Corrections to force it to explain how it treats some Muslim inmates — and whether they will be able to observe Ramadan, Islam’s month of fasting and prayer.
Gardner said in an interview that she’s been corresponding with inmates in Virginia state prisons for about six years. Though she has received allegations of mistreatment of Muslims from other facilities,
she said she’s “heard a bit more about it at Wallens Ridge.”
The prison, which is in Southwest Virginia near the Kentucky border, houses about 1,000 state inmates and is in litigation over alleged excessive use of solitary confinement, for which it was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2019.
On April 6, Gardner filed a lawsuit against the department in Fairfax County Circuit Court, seeking to compel it to comply with her information request.
The suit cites reports Gardner has received that Muslim inmates at Wallens Ridge were subjected to “abusive and unlawful treatment,” including violence and theft of religious materials, and were “improperly being barred from observing Ramadan.”