California prison inmates engaged in a nearly two-week-long hunger-strike say that jailers are beginning to retaliate for what has become an item of embarrassment for state officials.
At least 1,457 inmates across the state of California remained
engaged in an act of civil disobedience on Thursday as a historic
hunger-strike aimed to raise awareness of deplorable prison
conditions approached its twelfth day. That number has dwindled
down from 30,000 in 33 jails just a few days ago, however, and
allegations made by prisoners about the guards’ efforts to
persuade inmates against protesting could provide an explanation
why.
Attorneys for the inmates say prison officials have retaliated in
hopes of ending the hunger-strike that started off on-track to be
the largest the state has ever seen. According to lawyers,
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation guards
are blasting ice-cold air into the cells of inmates, confiscating
legal documents and ever barring some attorneys from making
contact with their clients.
“The CDCR wants to cut off communications between prisoners
and the outside world, but we are not going to let that
happen,” attorney Marilyn McMahon, who represents an inmate
at Pelican Bay State Prison, wrote in a statement issued
Thursday.
Inmates across the state are protesting the prison system’s
tactic of isolating detainees who have been determined to be
involved in internal gangs. Those prisoners are locked up in
small, solitary cells until they volunteer to detail gang
activity to investigators. No rule exists limiting how long those
inmates can be held in isolation, and some have lived like that
for years, even decades.
“Our indefinite isolation here is both inhumane and illegal,
and the proponents of the prison industrial complex are hoping
that their campaign to dehumanize us has succeeded to the degree
that you don’t care and will allow the torture to continue in
your name,” inmates at Corcoran State Prison said in a
statement issued earlier this month.
The inmates want the state to adopt a maximum isolation term of
five years, as well as provide education and rehabilitation
programs and the right to make monthly phone calls. But despite
raising awareness across the country in under two weeks through
the stunt, guards are apparently retaliating in an attempt to
weaken the movement.
“They are the upping the ante in terms of cold. It’s clearly a
tactic to make everything uncomfortable and in essence retaliate
for the hunger strike,” civil rights attorney Anne Weills
told the Guardian after a recent visit to Pelican Bay. “They
are freezing, these men. I could see them shivering in front of
me. I had two sweaters on and I was freezing.”
“They are suffering,” she said. “This puts them at risk
of hypothermia.”
But while CDCR spokesperson Terry Thornton insisted to the
Guardian that the temperature within the prisons are at a normal,
appropriate level, attorneys say the CDCR is deploying even more
sinister tactics to try and break down the strike.
McMahon said she has been cut off from one of her clients, and
suggested that this and other actions “are consequences for
engaging in disruptive behavior and a mass hunger strike is
disruptive behavior.”
“It’s an incredible violation of client-attorney
privilege,” added Wells. “It’s unconscionable.”
Strikes at Corcoran, Pelican Bay and more than 30 others have
been underway July 8. A similar hunger-strike that was waged two
years ago in California with more than 6,000 participants
prompted a class-action lawsuit which is still being deliberated
today. The latest action also comes amidst a handful of other
local scandals that have marred the CDCR involving issues of
overcrowding and the mass sterilization of female inmates.
Republished with permission from: RT