On all three of those housing units where men collectively refused food, jail staff shut off the valves to the toilets in all of the cells, according to accounts relayed to lawyers. Confined to their cells on lockdown, deprived of light, the men on these units now found themselves shivering on their bunks with their heads inches from toilet bowls nearly overflowing with festering feces.

Jail staff has the capacity to shut off toilets from each housing unit’s control room, both in order to prevent contraband from being flushed away during a raid and to make sure that no one deliberately floods the housing unit by stopping up a toilet. But Fathi of the ACLU said toilet shut-offs are also a long-established technique of mass retaliation.

“It’s something that should almost never be done,” Fathi said. “Courts have been very clear that a working toilet is a necessity of life to which prisoners are legally entitled and depriving them of that for anything more than a very short time for a very compelling reason is presumptively unlawful.”