The Extreme Suffering of Solitary Confinement Has Propelled 30,000 Prisoners to Go on Hunger Strike

http://www.alternet.org/activism/30000-hunger-strike-ca-prisons

Note: A prisoner hunger strike began on Monday, July 8, with the Los Angeles Times reporting that “ 30,000 inmates refused meals at the start of what could be the largest prison protest in state history,” with prisoners in “two-thirds of the state's 33 prisons” taking part.

Prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) are isolated for at least 22.5 hours a day in cramped, concrete, windowless cells. They are denied telephone calls, contact visits, any kind of programming, adequate food and, often, medical care. Nearly 750 of these men have been held under these conditions for more than a decade, dozens for over 20 years. This treatment has inflicted profound psychological suffering and caused or exacerbated debilitating physical ailments.

Ostensibly, these men are in the SHU because they associate with gang members and isolating them is necessary to prevent gang activity and racially-motivated violence. But in the summer and fall of 2011, these men, joined by other SHU prisoners throughout California, showed this claim to be the lie that it is. Organizing across racial lines, more than 6,000 SHU prisoners went on hunger strike for several weeks to protest their conditions. That’s right - men who have been isolated for over a decade and deprived of basic human rights because they are allegedly connected to racially divided gangs worked together to demand basic rights and constitutional protections for themselves and one another. Now they have resumed their hunger strike, demanding that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation meet their demands.

Gabriel Reyes, a plaintiff in the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit, is challenging long-term solitary confinement.

For the past 16 years, I have spent at least 22.5 hours of every day completely isolated within a tiny, windowless cell in the Security Housing Unit at California's Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City (Del Norte County).