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Monday, September 9, 2013

California Prison Hunger Strike Ends



Inmates leading California’s largest prison protest – a hunger strike that had gone on for months – complaining about lengthy solitary confinement for gang members, called an end to it on Thursday without winning major concessions, but with the promise of legislative hearings on the issue.  (Earlier coverage here). 



The LA Times reports that the strike, which began with 30,000 inmates refusing meals, and which ended with about 100 men in near starvation, and subject to a court order to require forced nutrition on the orders of a prison doctor, drew international attention to California’s use of prolonged prison isolation. The system-wide protest was orchestrated by a few inmates in isolation at Pelican Bay prison near the Oregon border.

By Thursday, when the strike ended, prison medical workers sought to move four of the most frail inmates to a medical ward, but those inmates refused to go.


Inmate leaders, as they agreed to resume eating, said they had “suspended” their protest.

Inmates and their advocates have filed two federal lawsuits saying that their conditions amount to torture. Lawmakers who oversee California’s prisons have vowed to hold hearings that would result in proposals for policy changes. The inmates main demands is an outer limit to the time they can be kept in isolation (five years is their demand), and an end to the promise that inmates can be let out of solitary if they inform on others in confinement – which the inmates claim leads to false accusations.  This is a legitimate gripe. Such an incentive system is obviously ripe for abuse.

Reportedly, 9% of California’s prisoners are in some form of isolation, which is a huge percentage and double the rate of other states, resulting in over 10,000 people held in isolation 23 hours a day in California.  It adds to the list of other problems in California’s prison system, which has been under court orders to decrease its prison overcrowding, which is long-standing and shocking.  


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