Prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) are isolated for at least twenty-two and a half hours a day in cramped, concrete, windowless cells. They are denied telephone calls, contact visits, any kind of programming, adequate food and, often, medical care. Nearly 750 of these men have been held under these conditions for more than a decade, dozens for over 20 years. This treatment has inflicted profound psychological suffering and caused or exacerbated debilitating physical ailments.
Ostensibly, these men are in the SHU because they associate with gang members and isolating them is necessary to prevent gang activity and racially motivated violence. But in the summer and fall of 2011, these men, joined by other SHU prisoners throughout California, showed this claim to be the lie that it is. Organizing across racial lines, more than 6,000 SHU prisoners went on hunger strike for several weeks to protest their conditions. That’s right – men who have been isolated for over a decade and deprived of basic human rights because they are allegedly connected to racially divided gangs worked together to demand basic rights and constitutional protections for themselves and one another. Now they have resumed their hunger strike, demanding that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation meet their demands.
Read the Series:
Pelican Bay Two Years Later: Those Still Buried Alive Vowing Hunger Strike “Till the End”
Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers’ Stories: Richard Wembe Johnson
Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers’ Stories: Gabriel Reyes
Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers’ Stories: Todd Ashker
Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers’ Stories: Luis Esquivel
Past Truthout Coverage of Pelican Bay
Pelican Bay Prison: One Year Later, Policy Remains “Debrief or Die”
California Prison Hunger Strike Ends, Conditions of “Immense Torture” Continue
Republished with permission from: Truth Out