Seattle High School Student On Hunger Strike In Solidarity with Striking Prisoners

 This banner was hung on the Green Hill youth prison fence during a solidarity demonstration on Monday 6/8

I received this letter from a high school student who attended this week’s rally in solidarity with the California and Green Hill prison strikes. She told me she shared it with King 5 News but they never responded to her. I am posting it here with her permission, to make the public aware of her courageous action and her insightful critiques of the school and prison systems. Please share this widely. 

Hi,

My name is Alondra Garcia. I’m 16 years old, from Evergreen High School (AAA). I wanted to share that I’ve been on hunger strike since Thursday morning, July 11th, in solidarity with the prisoners who are on hunger strike in California prisons and in the Green Hill Youth prison here in Washington State. I had also fasted on Monday the 8th and Tues the 9th for the same reasons. I decided to restart my hunger strike on the 11th for religious reasons.

I want to say that I believe that everyone should get an education; as long as we don’t get it out here in our population, it causes people to go through the wrong things and get into bad situations. The bad situations cause them to get imprisoned, and when they are imprisoned most of the prisoners want to change but don’t get the chance to change because we are not supporting them. When we, the people, don’t give them any chances, then they have a great chance of going back due to the fact that we are constantly telling them they don’t belong with the outside population and we’re telling them they have no opportunities to work with most jobs.

The “prisoners” are treated as lesser than the rest of us, and it’s not right to judge someone who had to do what he had to do to survive. If people and the system really want there not to be so much violence, they need to stop putting them down and support them on their way to change, and give them the proper education they didn’t get and they now want to learn.

Please hear me out when I say that the public schools only teach us how to be a worker, but in private schools they get taught how to be the boss. There is so much injustice in the justice system and the schools that we, the students, go to. If they want us to graduate then the school system should at least try to help improve, but instead they just talk and talk but never help as much. They don’t clarify what we need to do and don’t actually give us an explanation of why we need to learn it. They give us tests on subjects we didn’t learn about. To make it worse, they base their decisions of how many jails to build on those test scores.

The system is manipulating the youths’ thinking and decreasing their mentality so that they think they are never going far. We are the future, and the prisoners got a right to get treated better. They should have a chance to change and become a better person.

THANK YOU

Sincerely,

Alondra Garcia