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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