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Inmate hunger strike expands to more California prisons By Sam Quinones, Los Angeles Times July 6, 2011 Inmates in at least 11 of California's 33 prisons are refusing meals in solidarity with a hunger strike staged by prisoners in one of the system's special maximum-security units, officials said Tuesday. The strike began Friday when inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison stopped eating meals in protest of conditions that they contend are cruel and inhumane. "There are inmates in at least a third of our prisons who are refusing state-issued meals," said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The number of declared strikers at Pelican Bay — reported Saturday as fewer than two dozen — has grown but is changing daily, she said. The same is true at other prisons. Some inmates are refusing all meals, while others are rejecting only some, Thornton said. Some were eating in visitation rooms and refusing state-issued meals in their cells, she said. Assessing the number of actual strikers "is very challenging," Thornton said. Prison medical staff are "making checks of every single inmate who is refusing meals," she said. More than 400 prisoners at Pelican Bay are believed to be refusing meals, including inmates on the prison's general-population yard, said Molly Poizig, spokeswoman for the Bay Area-based group Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity. The group had received reports on the strike from lawyers and family members visiting inmates over the weekend, she said. The group's website claims that prison officials attempted to head off the strike by promoting a Fourth of July menu that included strawberry shortcake and ice cream. According to the website, the wife of a Security Housing Unit inmate said her husband had never had ice cream there and "has never seen a strawberry." Inmates at Calipatria State Prison — with more than a thousand prisoners — were among those reported to be refusing meals, Poizig said. Prison officials could not be reached for comment. But Thornton acknowledged that inmates at the prison were refusing to eat state-issued meals. The strike was organized by Security Housing Unit inmates at Pelican Bay protesting the maximum-security unit's extreme isolation. The inmates are also asking for better food, warmer clothing and to be allowed one phone call a month. The Security Housing Unit compound, which currently houses 1,100 inmates, is designed to isolate prison-gang members or those who've committed crimes while in prison. The cells have no windows and are soundproofed to inhibit communication among inmates. The inmates spend 22 1/2 hours a day in their cells, being released only an hour a day to walk around a small area with high concrete walls. Prisoner advocates have long complained that Security Housing Unit incarceration amounts to torture, often leading to mental illness, because many inmates spend years in the lockup. Gang investigators believe the special unit reduces the ability of the most predatory inmates, particularly prison-gang leaders, to control those in other prisons as well as gang members on the street. Prison administrators are meeting with inmate advisory councils to discuss the inmates' complaints, Thornton said. But "I have not heard there's been any decision" to modify policies governing the Security Housing Unit, she said. "A lot of those policies have been refined through litigation." sam.quinones@latimes.com
Thousands of Calif. inmates refuse food in protest By Liz Goodwin A group of inmates in a high-security California prison have started a hunger strike to protest their near-solitary confinement. Since the protest began on July 1, it has spread to thousands of inmates throughout the state prison system. At its peak, 6,600 prisoners in 11 prisons were refusing food, but officials told the New York Times that number was down to 1,700 yesterday. A handful of inmates who live in Pelican Bay State Prison's windowless, sound-proof 6-foot-by-10-foot isolation cells say they are ready to remain on the hunger strike until they die, or until officials at the facility agree to their demands. Gang members in the prison are often placed in the isolation wing so they can't influence the rest of the inmate population. Once they're sequestered in the high-security cells, the gang members are asked to turn over information on other gang members, in a procedure called "debriefing." The prisoners say they want debriefing to end, and they also want an end to long-term solitary confinement. "They think the debrief process is illegal--that we pressure them to get out of gangs--but I'd say we encourage them to do so," state prisons spokeswoman Terry Thornton told The San Francisco Chronicle. "Being in a gang is not good for them, and it's not good for the public safety, either." The Supreme Court ruled in May that California's prisons are so overcrowded that they violate inmates' constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Inadequate medical care produced "needless suffering and death," the justices said. The court ordered the system to shed one-fourth of its prisoner population over the next two years.
California Prisoners Join Hunger Strike To Protest Solitary Conditions Prison Hunger Strike Posted: 7/8/11 07:36 PM ET Nearly 1,500 inmates at six California prisons have joined a hunger strike by prisoners confined in one of the state's harshest isolation units, prison officials said Friday. The hunger strike began a week ago and was organized by prisoners confined in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, a maximum security facility located near the Oregon border. Inmates there are held in windowless isolation cells for more than 22 hours a day and can have little or no contact with other prisoners for years and even decades at a time. A core group of prisoners at Pelican Bay said they were willing to starve to death rather than continue to submit to prison conditions that they call a violation of basic civil and human rights. "No one wants to die," James Crawford, a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and robbery, said in a statement provided by a coalition of prisoners' rights groups. "Yet under this current system of what amounts to intense torture, what choice do we have?" The hunger strike comes only weeks after the Supreme Court ordered California to dramatically lower its prisons population, because severe overcrowding was exposing inmates to high levels of violence and disease. California prison conditions were so poor as to be "intolerable with the concept of human dignity," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. The hunger strike is not a protest against overcrowding, however, but against the treatment of offenders who are segregated from the general population due to gang affiliations or crimes committed in prison. In June, the Pelican Bay inmates provided prison officials advance warning of their intent to begin a hunger strike and made six key demands, including that the prison reform its policies on long-term solitary confinement. The prisoners cited a 2006 report by a group of attorneys and law enforcement professionals that determined long-term solitary confinement practiced in U.S. prisons can create "torturous conditions that are proven to cause mental deterioration." State and federal courts have rejected prisoner lawsuits seeking to alter such policies, however. Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said that prisoners in the Pelican Bay isolation unit were held there due to their known affiliation with prison gangs or for violent acts committed in prison. "The purpose of the Security Housing Unit is to remove gang members' influence over other inmates and to keep our prisons safe," she said. The prisoners also called for an end to a policy allowing indefinite detention in the isolation unit for inmates suspected of continued involvement in gang activity. Gang-affiliated prisoners can be released from the unit if they "debrief," or provide information on other gang members. Those who choose not to "debrief" must serve a minimum of six years in the solitary unit and can be held there indefinitely if they engage in any activity that prison officials deem gang-related. |