Like many other prison systems, the California prison system has completely given up on rehabilitation (if that was ever really the goal of such systems in the U.S.), and instead has embarked on a widely acknowledged and well documented campaign against those locked up in its prisons. Its tools include deliberate fomenting of racial strife, gender policing, sanctioned rape and sexual abuse, labor exploitation, systemic humiliation, social deprivation, degradation, and denial of legal due process. One of the most dehumanizing of the prison system's tools (and there are many), is long term isolation, through solitary confinement in facilities euphemistically called "Secure Housing Units" or SHUs in California prisons. The prison system offers, as a thin justification for the use of these techniques, the need to maintain "discipline" and "order."
In the face of the ongoing human rights abuses in California prisons, as of Thursday of last week, almost 12,000 people in prison are participating in a hunger strike. They have only five demands, which, to me, are devastating in their simplicity.
It is an outrage that it takes a hunger strike to have these demands heard. And it is an indicator of how spiritually and morally bankrupt, corrupt, unaccountable and fundamentally broken the prison system (including the private corporations and prison guard unions that are part of that system) has become that CDCR (the California agency that runs prisons) has refused to adequately meet these demands.
There was an initial hunger strike that people locked up in Pelican Bay prison started on July 1, 2011. Thousands of other people who were locked up in other prisons joined that strike in solidarity. Leaders inside called off the strike after almost a month when the CDCR offered to meet some of their demands.
However, it has since become clear that CDCR did not bargain in good faith, and abuses in prison continue, with no clear commitment on the part of CDCR to end them.
People in California, the U.S., and internationally should pay attention to what is happening. Despite a systemic attempt to debase them, people in prison have come together to organize against abuses, and to assert their dignity. They are a shining example of the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of towering odds, and deserve our enthusiastic and grateful support.
A 2009 article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande examines the use of isolation in prisons:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande
For updates on the strikes:
http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com
Some history about Pelican Bay
http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/pelican-bay/305-2/
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