When a prisoner chooses to end his life by refusing to eat, that should be respected.

It's all the guys in those Supermax cells have to look forward to, death.

Even the British figured that one out and allowed Bobby Sands to die, along with several others, rather than torture them with nasogastric forced feeding, which is just as awful as it sounds.

There should have been a plan in place to get these guys out of solitary confinement a long time ago, by chemical means if none other is available. Compliance with medication would continue their ability to maintain contact with other human beings.

you will realize how unjust it is. It is scientific proof that solitary confinement can cause mental illness very quickly.

GENEVA (23 August 2013) – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan E. Méndez, today urged the United States Government to abolish the use of prolonged or indefinite solitary confinement.

Chemical restraints are just one of them.

TODD ASHKER: Greetings. My name is Todd Ashker, and I am from the Pelican Bay State Prison Short Corridor Collective Human Rights Movement. I am a principal representative of all similarly situated prisoners subject to long-term solitary confinement.
Our core demands are centered on: A, an end to indefinite solitary confinement based on innocuous associational behavior and/or confidential information intelligence from prisoners tortured to the point of serious mental illness and agreement to become state collaborator informants.
Additionally, CDCR’s STG pilot program is not responsive to our demands. It continues to base indefinite SHU solitary confinement upon confidential information intelligence without any requirement for any formal charge being filed and adjudicated for due process due to the California Prison System’s preponderance of the evidence standard.

JOYCE HAYHOE: We’ve heard a lot over the past few days about force-feeding, and this absolutely is not force-feeding. It is introducing nutrition to an inmate that is to the point where they can’t talk to their doctor, where they’re unconscious, and the doctor is just following a normal community standard to keep that inmate alive, absent any directive that the inmate had previously put in place.
RENÉE FELTZ: And just to be clear, even if an inmate did put a directive in place, the judge’s order is saying that that could be overridden at this point?
JOYCE HAYHOE: If it was during the hunger strike, that is correct.
RENÉE FELTZ: What has actually occurred related to the judge’s order?
JOYCE HAYHOE: We wanted to have a proactive directive in place, so we don’t have any indication at this point, although, you know, that could change daily, but right now we’re not using the order to refeed inmates. There are inmates that are voluntarily choosing to come off the hunger strike and are starting to eat again.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to play another part of the interview recorded with hunger-striking prisoner Todd Ashker, when he answers a question—again, it’s hard to understand, it’s through the phone, through glass, but we think that it is very important to hear these voices from behind bars—as he answers a question about how he’s evolved since he went to prison.

TODD ASHKER: Therefore, beginning in 2009, a group of us in the same pod together began considering our litigation strategies and how the challenges to long-term solitary confinement had not been successful.

And over the next two years we all came to the conclusion that we needed to evolve our process of resistance and forcing change to the system.
And during that process of dialogue with these individuals and the material that I was reading, including material about the IRA struggle and Bobby Sands, the Irish hunger striker who united the nation, Che Guevara, Howard Zinn, Naomi Wolf and other—Thomas Paine and other activists and revolutionaries, I became more class-conscious of the prisoner class as a microcosm of the working-class poor in this country, and that it was in our best interest to evolve our strategies and come together and utilize peaceful civil disobedience-type actions, in tandem with litigation, to try to force the changes that were long overdue.

And that is how we came to the point of creating our formal complaint and then moving from there to the peaceful hunger-strike protest as a collective body.


AMY GOODMAN: That was prisoner Todd Ashker speaking to his lawyers recently over a phone line from behind a glass wall. One of the hunger strikers hasn’t eaten since July 8th. Very quickly, Azadeh—we have 10 seconds—the amount of time people are spending—Todd, among the many others who are protesting—the long-term solitary confinement. He was speaking from Pelican Bay. How long have people spent?

AZADEH ZOHRABI: There are people in California who have done 40 years in solitary confinement. That’s 40 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Forty years in solitary confinement. We’re going to leave it there, and I thank you so much for being with us, Azadeh Zohrabi.

It costs more than $50,000 per year to keep one prisoner in Pelican Bay. The prison's entire annual budget is more than $180 million. Surely it would not compromise the coffers of a system that has spent so much on SHUs to allow prisoners one photo in their cells, one phone call a week to their loved ones, and two small packages a year. Basic decency should not be too expensive for Governor Brown, or for California.

If someone is so upset they are are willing to starve themselves, it's usually because they have no other way to resist injustice.

What's happening there is vile. I'm disappointed that nobody seems to care.

the posts don't even get kicks.. except this got one.

I wish DU'rs would call Gov Brown.. so he gets calls from all across the Nation.

Other countries newspapers are reporting on this Hunger strike and of force feeding that might happen like at Guantanamo.

Maybe people think if they are in there, they deserve whatever happens to them.

These are human beings and deserve humane treatment. The intensifying horror of the prison system should be of concern to everyone. A society that treats prisoners like this is a sick society.