Why California prisoners press on with hunger strike

George Lavender | The Guardian | 17 October 2011


Solitary plea: California has a prison population of approximately 145,000 in 33 prisons; thousands recently went on hunger strike for the second time this year to protest solitary confinement conditions. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Thousands are refusing food to protest for reform of prison authorities' abusive policy of solitary confinement

"No one wants to die," writes Mutope Duguma, imprisoned in Pelican Bay State Prison, Northern California. "Yet under this current system of what amounts to intense torture, what choice do we have? If one is to die, it will be on our own terms." Mutope was among thousands of prisoners on hunger strike across the state to protest conditions in California prisons. Prisoners at Pelican Bay ended their hunger strike last week, after prison officials agreed to review their policies. The strike continues in other prisons.

Nearly 12,000 prisoners began the hunger strike two weeks ago, according to prison officials. Among them were prisoners from California incarcerated out of state in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma who joined the strike in a powerful act of solidarity. According to Todd Ashker, a hunger strike representative in Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit, or SHU, an important aspect of the protests has been that prisoners have united across racial lines. "When people come together and recognise who the real enemy is, who is really the cause of all their problems, they have a lot of power," he says. Prisoners have five core demands, key among which are the abolition of long-term solitary confinement and the reform of the controversial policy of confining prisoners deemed to be gang members.

Protests started with a three-week hunger strike in July at Pelican Bay SHU, where more than 1,000 people are currently detained. They have called themselves "the buried class". The controversial units are used to "lock down" people in long-term solitary confinement, for years and sometimes decades. California is now holding more inmates in solitary confinement than ever before; approximately 3,238 people are detained in these units across the state. Inside SHU, prisoners are caged for at least 22 hours a day in 8x10ft, windowless cells and have no human contact except when guards put shackles on them. In 1995, a US court held that conditions in SHU "may press the outer bounds of what humans may psychologically tolerate". "There's a notion with many people that the worst of the worst are put in Pelican Bay," says Manuel La Fontaine, an organiser with All of Us or None, "but I've got news for people: the worst of the worst is Pelican Bay."

Isolation is state-sanctioned torture. Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, an expert on the effects of solitary confinement has said, "in some ways, it feels to me ludicrous that we have these debates about capital punishment when what happens in Pelican Bay is a form of punishment that's far more egregious." Pelican Bay is hundreds of miles from home for most people inside the prison, further isolating them from their families, friends and communities. Among the demands of the hunger strike is to be allowed to make a phone call home and send a photo of themselves to their loved ones once a year. That the authorities deny them these rights is indicative of a system that damages not just the person inside prison, but their communities as well.

One of the main reasons prisoners get sent to the units is because prison officials label them as members of a "gang"; this is part of a wider strategy to dehumanise and criminalise members of our communities. The only way to be released from SHU is if a prisoner agrees to give information, or "debrief", about other prisoners or people outside prison, including their own family. Many prisoners are "validated" as gang members with evidence that is clearly false, or fabricated by other prisoners in order to leave SHU themselves. As a SHU prisoner writes, "The only way out is to debrief, die or parole. They want to break us. If this is not torture, I don't know what is." According to figures released by prison officials in August this year, some 500 prisoners in Pelican Bay had spent more than 10 years in SHU confinement and 78 more than 20 years.

The Supreme Court Got it Right on Prison Overcrowding in California

Stephen Yair Liebb, Héctor Oropeza | Fox News Latino | 10 June 2011

The United States Supreme Court’s decision affirming an order placing a population limit on California’s prisons to prevent continued mental and medical health violations does not mean that “46,000 criminals – the equivalent of three army divisions – will be released,” as Justice Alito claimed in his dissent.

His description of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision is an example of the hyperbole and hysteria used by Justices who are required to exercise sound reasoning in deciding cases.

Our perspective comes from having served more than 50 years combined in California prisons, and having witnessed the conditions under which men are confined, and the provision of medical treatment to those in need. We understand, too, that in an economy where many law-abiding citizens are out of work and unable to afford health care for themselves and their families, the lack of mental and medical health treatment for prisoners does not engender much sympathy.

However, the U.S. is still a symbol of freedom across the world. How we treat the most despised of our own citizens is important if we are to have credibility and moral authority in advocating for human rights in other countries. The Court noted that the Constitution protects the “essence of human dignity in each person.”

The Supreme Court Declares California's Prisons Overcrowded

Andrew Cohen | The Atlantic | May 23, 2011

Monday's ruling calls for the early release of thousands of the Golden State's inmates

The United States Supreme Court's ruling Monday requiring the early release of tens of thousands of California prison inmates may be, as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his fiery dissent, a "staggering" and "radical" event in the annals of law. But it comes as no surprise to people (in and out of the criminal justice system) who long have been chronicling atrocious prison conditions around the country. And it surely marks a nadir in America's persistently zealous efforts to imprison its citizens: We still lead the world in that category by far.

It was left to Justice Anthony Kennedy, a native of Sacramento and a graduate of Stanford University, to finally do the dirty work that has long needed to be done; to hold accountable lawmakers and prison officials who have tarried for decades in providing state prisoners with a constitutionally acceptable level of care and living conditions. In Brown v. Plata, one of the most important and contentious cases of the term, Justice Kennedy provided the critical fifth vote, the swing vote, to affirm a rare affirmative injunction issued by a special three-judge panel ordering as a last resort some 37,000 prisoners to be released through a variety of measures.

Here, at last, after decades of short-sighted policy, comes the butcher's bill for the war on drugs, the state's dubious three-strikes law, and the magnetizing political pull of victims' rights groups. And it was delivered to the Golden State by the only tribunal in America with the power and the authority to speak on behalf of the nation's last lobbyless constituency -- our nation's prisoners. If this decision is a "slap in the face" to the victims of crime, as so many overheated commentators were suggesting Monday afternoon, it is not a slap delivered by the inmates themselves or even the federal judiciary. Like so much else about modern governance, we see here instead the consequences of the gulf between political promise and budgetary reality; between our short attention spans (lock 'em up, throw away the key) and life's long journey (in or out of a cell).

Do more prisons mean less crime?

By Rina Palta, The Informant, March 28, 2011:

Pew

After 30 years of prison boom in the United States, people are starting to question the usefulness of incarcerating large numbers of people, especially for less serious crimes. In New York, where prison populations skyrocketed after the state passed a series of tough sentencing laws for drug offenders, recent changes have dramatically reduced the prison population. In California, budget woes and federal lawsuits have inspired things like the introduction of non-revocable parole and an expansion in good-time credits for prison inmates–both policies designed to cut down the prison population.

Now, Governor Jerry Brown wants to do more. The current budget calls for less restrictive supervision for a whole host of lower level crimes. That means that fewer crimes carry the penalty of state prison, fewer people getting out go under the strict supervision of state parole, and those that violate parole would likely not go back to prison for the violation.

The Parole Agent Association is starting to push back against these changes–because less parole means the elimination of jobs, but also because parole agents and correctional officers believe in what they do.

In a recent memo to membership, Parole Agent Association of California President Todd Gillam wrote:

According to the Attorney General, California is experiencing the lowest level of criminal activity since the 1980’s. The crime rate is not only low, it is still declining. The entire California criminal justice system, to include CDCR and DAPO, are to be commended for the safety in which Californians live.

It’s an argument we’re likely to hear a lot in the coming months and years as California and states around the nation look to scale back their prison systems. And the timing is hard to ignore: over the past 20 years, as the prison population has skyrocketed, crime has gone down. Does that mean the prison boom and the dramatic rise in incarceration rates have cut crime and kept Americans (at least those not in prison) safer?

The consensus among scholars seems to be that are many factors that contribute to crime levels and its hard to pinpoint any one change as the source of their rise and fall–but that the uptick in incarceration likely accounts for about 25 percent of the nation’s drop in crime.

In 2008, the Pew Center on the States interviewed two preeminent criminologists, Carnegie Mellon’s James Wilson and Pepperdine’s Alfred Blumstein on the impact of incarceration on crime. The interview revealed the reasoning and meaning behind this 25 percent figure.

Blumstein told Pew, “there is little question that incarceration can contribute to crime reduction, but rarely as much as its advocates claim.” The combined factors of deterrence and taking those committing crimes out of commission by locking them up can reduce crime to a point. But that model doesn’t work for crimes that involve market demands, “like theft rings and drug dealing.” If a drug dealer is taken out of commission, they’re simply replaced, Blumstein said, often with someone younger and perhaps less restrained in what they’re willing to do.

Blumstein goes on to say that it’s not so much that incarceration isn’t effective, but that it’s effectiveness has been diluted through over-use. If we were more selective about who is incarcerated he said, we’d have “the highest yield in crimes averted per prisoner.”

Wilson concludes that it’s “too easy to make up a list of all of the things that are true of American society and then attribute changes in the crime rate to them.”

In an era where we extrapolate a lot from what we see–a high profile crime always provokes cries that there are systemic flaws, and we’re constantly looking for broad, sweeping changes that will yield tangible results–both men recommend thinking small: stick to programs and projects that have proved they’ve impacted individuals.