QUESTION: Where to find information about a hunger strike at FCI Tallahassee in 1998?
Submitted by Anonymousy on Tue, 03/25/2008 - 5:20pm.
question / pregunta:
In 1998, women at FCI TAllahassee staged a hunger strike (two of the women referred to it as a "food strike") to protest the conditions of the prison. In response, the staff first tried to break the strike by offering a steak dinner. When that failed, they pulled women out of bed and showers, shipped them to a detention center and, from there, transferred them to different prisons (both state and federal even though all are federal prisoners) across the country.
Where and how would I find media coverage about either the hunger strike or the repercussions?
Answers
answer
Submitted by MRM on Wed, 03/26/2008 - 12:13pm.
answer:
I tried LexisNexis Academic, using various combinations of keywords, but found no mention of this incident. I also tried the following databases: Contemporary Women's Issues, Gender Studies Database, GenderWatch, and Studies on Women and Gender Abstracts.
I'll leave this question "unanswered," though, in case someone else turns up something useful...
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Submitted by jim miller on Sat, 03/29/2008 - 1:02pm.
answer:
It would be VERY difficult to prove this did not happen, but based on our searches of newspaper databases, we have to wonder if this may be an incident that happened elsewhere. Lexis Academic, as indicated in our earlier answer, gets nothing in major news sources. Even if we select "Florida News Sources", and search: tallahassee and federal correctional (dates Jan 1, 1997-Dec 31, 1999), we get 7 very unrelated articles. Even a VERY broad search: tallahassee and federal correctional and hunger and strike (all dates) gets 1 hit, with the prison in part of a news summary, and a widely separated news note on a hunger strike at Ft. Benning in 1990.
In Factiva, the search: tallahassee and "federal correctional" and hunger and strike (all dates) gets only 3 hits. The only connection to FCI Tallahassee is a mother who staged a hunger strike at a prison camp in Coleman, Florida, and got moved to FCI Tallahassee in January 2000.
So unless the person or source that gave you this information can give you more hints about it (possibly a different prison near Tallahassee?), your only recourse would be to do an investigation of potential sources of information (people) around the Tallahassee area. Possibly Florida prisoners' rights organizations could give you names of people to ask.
Jim Miller
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