Prisoners Protest in California
By Farooque Chowdhury
10 July, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Prisoners' protest in California reiterates the old, but seldom ignored fact: in cases, there is no difference between center and periphery in terms of prison condition. And, prison, a tool to rule, mirrors ruling political arrangement.
The New York Times reports:
“Thousands of inmates at prisons throughout California have been refusing state-issued food in a mass hunger strike to protest conditions at the state's highest-security prisons, where some inmates are kept in prolonged isolation.
“The protest was organized by inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison's security housing unit, where prisoners are kept in isolation more than 22 hours a day. They stopped eating on July 1, and prisoners around the state have imitated their campaign. About 1,700 prisoners in all were continuing to refuse at least some state-issued meals on Thursday, down from a peak of 6,600 last weekend…” ( July 7, 2011 )
“On July 1, prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at … Pelican Bay State Prison started an indefinite hunger strike to protest the cruel, inhumane…conditions of their imprisonment.” ( FightBack!News , July 9, 2011 )
A rally was held in front of the State Building in San Francisco on July 8 to support hunger striking prisoners.
The maximum security Pelican Bay prison is designed to keep the “worst of the worst” prisoners in long-term or permanent solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation that many consider torture. Political prisoners are often sent to similar prisons to isolate them and their ideas from the rest of the prison population. The overcrowded prison with capacity for 2280 prisoners now holds over 3100. ( FightBack!News , July 9, 2011 )
The hunger striking prisoners' demands include abolition of group punishment, administrative abuse, and debriefing policy; modification of active/inactive gang status criteria; compliance with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement; provide adequate and nutritious food; expansion of constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU status inmates (ibid.).
“The prison system in the U.S. is the most expansive and sophisticated … in world history, with over 2 million people currently locked up. This is a higher rate than any other country… Large scale protests by U.S. prisoners against their extreme treatment are becoming more common in recent years. Just last December, Georgia saw one of the largest prisoner work stoppage protests in history (ibid.).
John Rudolf reports:
Inmates in the Pelican Bay Prison “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 group of prisoners expressed their “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 … 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 prisoners cited a 2006 report by a group of attorneys and law enforcement professionals that determined long-term solitary confinement practiced in the US prisons can create “torturous conditions that are proven to cause mental deterioration.”
The prisoners also called for an end to a policy allowing indefinite detention in the isolation unit. 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. ( Huffington Post , July 9, 2011 )
The NYT report said:
Todd Ashker, one of the Pelican Bay inmates who organized the strike, said in a statement conveyed through a lawyer: “We believe our only option of ever trying to make some kind of positive change here is through this peaceful hunger strike. And there is a core group of us who are committed to taking this all the way to the death if necessary.”
The report said:
“Most of the prisoners who remain on hunger strike are in security housing units like the one at Pelican Bay , where they are kept alone in windowless, soundproof concrete cells. To communicate, they have to yell from one cell to the other, although prisoner-rights activists in contact with the prisoners did not know if this was how they had organized the strike.
“A federal judge appointed a court monitor in 1995 to oversee changes at the security housing unit, including the removal of mentally ill prisoners from the block and an end to the use of excessive force.
“About 2,000 inmates are being medically monitored, with nurses conducting cell-to-cell rounds. At Pelican Bay , most prisoners have refused to meet with doctors.”
On May 23, 2011 , a report by Adam Liptak in the NYT said:
“Conditions in California 's overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.
“Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision … described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced ‘needless suffering and death.'
“The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as ‘telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets' used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state's prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was ‘an uncontested fact' that ‘an inmate in one of California 's prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.'
“Monday's ruling in the case, Brown v. Plata, No. 09-1233, affirmed an order by a special three-judge federal court requiring state officials to reduce the prison population to 110,000, which is 137.5 percent of the system's capacity. There have been more than 160,000 inmates in the system in recent years, and there are now more than 140,000.
“Prison release orders are rare and hard to obtain, and even advocates for prisoners' rights said Monday's decision was unlikely to have a significant impact around the nation.
“Justice Kennedy … said there was ‘no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis,' in light of the state's financial problems.
“‘A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society,' Justice Kennedy wrote on Monday.” 
An editorial of the NYT headlined “ California 's Prison Crisis” said:
“
Three photographs are part of Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion … Looking at the photos, there should be no doubt that the conditions violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
“…The third photo shows man-sized cages in which prisoners needing mental health treatment are held until a bed opens up. One inmate, Justice Kennedy writes, was found standing “in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic.”
“In their ruling, the panel noted that 12 years after the first suit was brought — and despite 70 court orders for remedies — conditions had continued to deteriorate horribly. A special master appointed by the panel studied suicides in California prisons and found the rate was almost twice as high as the national average for prisons. Almost three-fourths of the suicides were ‘probably foreseeable or preventable' because they involved ‘some measure of inadequate assessment, treatment or intervention.'
“But as Justice Kennedy reminds, if the Supreme Court did not impose a limit on California 's prison population, there would be an ‘unacceptable risk' of continuing violations ‘with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer.' And that would defy the Constitution.” ( May 23, 2011 )
The long quotes from The New York Times tell a reality, which is a well known fact in many states also. Probably, someday, some mainstream novelist will create a novel that will reflect prison reality in the most advanced capitalist country.
Hannah Holleman, Robert McChesney, John Bellamy Foster and R Jamil Jonna discussed the prison reality in the US in their article “The Penal State in an Age of Crisis”. “The United States ”, they wrote, “accounts for 5 percent of the world's population, and almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. It is number one with the proverbial bullet when it comes to locking up its own people. No thug dictator, no psychopathic madman, anywhere in the world can touch the United States in this regard.” “Already, in 2009, there are cracks in elite opinion that has been quiet heretofore on the prison crisis, though they still remain on the margin with Jim Webb.” ( Analytical Monthly Review , Kharagpur, West Bengal , India , June 2009)
It will not be an irrational hope that lessons will be learned in other lands also.
Dhaka-based freelancer Farooque Chowdhury contributes on socioeconomic issues.
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