{"id":50736,"date":"2013-07-16T15:49:40","date_gmt":"2013-07-16T14:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/starving-for-change\/50736\/"},"modified":"2013-07-16T15:49:40","modified_gmt":"2013-07-16T14:49:40","slug":"starving-for-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/starving-for-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Starving for Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u201cIt is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u2022 Nelson Mandela who spent six of his 27 prison years in solitary confinement<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins\u2019s\u2019 prison movie\u00a0The Shawshank Redemption<\/i>\u00a0is one of the most popular repeats on cable. The story is set in the 1940s. When Robbins, the convicted wife-killer, screws up he\u2019s thrown into solitary confinement, a dark dungeon, for only a couple of weeks, which is seen as very brutal punishment. All through the \u201cprison cycle\u201d of movies in the 30s and 40s, from\u00a0Each Dawn I Die<\/i>\u00a0to\u00a0Brute Force<\/i>, solitary is relatively brief before the misbehaving prisoner is released into the \u201cgeneral population\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the past few days, in the largest prison protest in California\u2019s history, nearly 30,000 inmates have gone on hunger strike in the country\u2019s largest prison system.\u00a0\u00a0Such near-insurrections are not unusual in America\u2019s prison-industrial complex.\u00a0\u00a0Last year\u2019s\u00a0\u00a0\u201cstarve for change\u201d strike in Georgia lasted 36 days before it was broken.\u00a0\u00a0All across the country correctional authorities always respond with the same Pavlovian scenario: first, a news blackout; second, flat-out denial of the obvious; third, official press releases acknowledging a strike but downgrading numbers; fourth, mass punishment by withdrawal of privileges and, away from media\u2019s glare, beatings by guards on militants.<\/p>\n

California officials have followed this protocol almost to the letter.\u00a0\u00a0As of today, 7600 prisoners remain on hunger strike at 23 of California\u2019s 33 prisons.\u00a0\u00a0The
\"OR<\/a>Department of Corrections and (!) Rehabilitation refuses to acknowledge the strike is a political protest, calling it a \u201cmass disturbance\u201d.<\/p>\n

The prisoners\u2019 core issue is the use of \u201cno human contact\u201d solitary confinement in special \u201ccontrol cells\u201d or the infamous SHU, segregated housing unit. California holds 4500 inmates in solitary. Basically it means that, for example in Pelican Bay prison, you\u2019re cooped up in a tiny, 7-by-11-foot windowless cell, sometimes without radio or TV, 23 hours a day. You cannot make or receive phone calls or have contact visits with family or friends. \u00a0You have no access to rehab programs and cannot attend religious services. \u00a0The average inmate stays in isolation for over seven years, and in some cases much longer. \u00a0The Catholic Conference of bishops, not your standard liberal group, has called for a change in \u201cthis inhuman form of punishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

You qualify for solitary either because you\u2019re a real threat (killing another prisoner or guard) or unsubstantiated gossip that you belong to, or are \u201caffiliated with\u201d, \u00a0a gang such as Mexican Mafia or Crips. \u00a0Evidence of a gang \u201cassociation\u201d is possession of books like Sun Tzu\u2019s \u201cArt of War\u201d or Machiavelli\u2019s \u201cThe Prince\u201d \u2014 or using words like\u00a0tio<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0hermano<\/i>\u00a0– Spanish for uncle and brother.<\/p>\n

SHU can be a bloody killing field.\u00a0\u00a0A few years ago CBS reporter Mike Wallace found that in Corcoran State prison in northern California the guards routinely staged inmate fights in the Segregated Unit, wagering on the outcome, and if fights got out of control shooting the inmates involved.\u00a0\u00a0Scores of inmates have been shot and eight killed in these fights.\u00a0\u00a0When Wallace returned to Corcoran to follow up he found that guards, now wary of shooting prisoners, retaliated by encouraging the inmate-on-inmate rape.<\/p>\n

We in California like to think of ourselves as more progressive and tolerant than the rest of America.\u00a0\u00a0The underfunded, overcrowded, guards-union-tyrannized prison system is a huge exception because of how we handle our inmates female as well as male.\u00a0\u00a0The Sacramento Bee, Los Angeles Times and Center for Investigative Reporting has revealed that from 2006 to 2010 nearly 150 female inmates were pressured to undergo sterilization via tubal ligation. (Shades of the infamous \u201cTuskegee experiment\u201d where hundreds of poor Alabama blacks were mistreated as lab animals by the U.S. Public Health Service.) \u00a0iOne of the California prison doctors is quoted that sterilizing women or removing their ovaries provided \u201can important service to poor women\u201d, and that the money spent on sterilizing them isn\u2019t \u201chuge\u2026compared to what you save in welfare paying for the unwanted children\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if you\u2019re the Devil himself \u2014 and some of these imprisoned guys have done horrendous crimes \u2014 nobody deserves inhuman isolation that, in some cases, can go on not for weeks or months but for many years. In the past, solitary was a temporary punishment. Today it\u2019s a life sentence of psychological torture. Who wouldn\u2019t go crazy?<\/p>\n

California prisoners in isolation account for 5% of the total prison population but account for nearly half the suicides.<\/p>\n

MSNBC, the \u201cliberal\u201d network, airs \u201cLockup\u201d on weekends which probably gets higher ratings than the same networks\u2019 Rachel Maddow. This prison-reality show is designed to scare us by interviewing zombie-like psychopaths who can\u2019t wait to tell the camera how they chopped the head off their cellmate.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s gripping, disgusting TV. They\u2019ve convinced me I don\u2019t want these bloodthirsty creeps ever released to roam around my neighborhood. But I also don\u2019t see much point in killing their souls with endless solitary.\u00a0\u00a0You can sometimes get out of solitary by telling the warden you\u2019ve left the gang; the problem is, once you\u2019re back out on the yard you\u2019re known as a snitch worth murdering.<\/p>\n

Of the 160,000 prisoners in California, two-thirds are African-American and Latino.\u00a0\u00a0The feds, under Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder, both African American, refuse to intervene.<\/p>\n

Being a prison guard \u2014 even though you have the backing of an awesomely powerful union \u2014 is shitty work. Being the politician in charge of it all \u2014 hey, Gov Jerry Brown! what happened to your Jesuit ethics? \u2014 is even shittier.<\/p>\n

Clancy Sigal<\/strong>\u00a0is a screenwriter and novelist. His latest book is\u00a0Hemingway Lives<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u2022 Nelson Mandela who spent six of his 27 prison years in solitary confinement Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins\u2019s\u2019 prison movie\u00a0The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-50736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}