NY TIMES: Solitary wastes lives, money, and sanity.

Abolishing solitary confinement as we know it can be done, people, and work out for the better for all of us - if Mississippi can do it, so can Arizona. The vast majority of prisoners do return to their communities after all, and we would be wise not to destroy their sanity and humanity while "rehabilitating" them beforehand. 

This state, unfortunately, is constructing 500 more Supermax beds as we speak, however - no public hearings, no way to stop them...what a waste of precious resources. No one at the ADC seems to know what "evidence-based practice" means or why they should study up on it. For that reason, crime in this state will never really be impacted by the rate at which we incarcerate people - all the state is doing is setting people up to repeat again.

Our state facility for the seriously mentally ill

SUPERMAX in Florence, AZ

------------from the New York Times-------------

 Prisons Rethink Isolation, Saving Money, Lives and Sanity

CHANGED ATTITUDES Christopher B. Epps, Mississippi's commissioner of corrections, said he used to believe that difficult inmates should be locked down as tightly as possible, for as long as possible. “That was the culture, and I was part of it,” he said.

By ERICA GOODE

Published: March 10, 2012

PARCHMAN, Miss. — The heat was suffocating, and the inmates locked alone in cells in Unit 32, the state’s super-maximum-security prison, wiped away sweat as they lay on concrete slab beds.

Kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours each day, allowed out only in shackles and escorted by guards, they were restless and angry — made more so by the excrement-smeared walls, the insects, the filthy food trays and the mentally ill inmates who screamed in the night, conditions that a judge had already ruled unacceptable. 

So it was not really surprising when violence erupted in 2007: an inmate stabbed to death with a homemade spear that May; in June, a suicide; in July, another stabbing; in August, a prisoner killed by a member of a rival gang. 

What was surprising was what happened next. Instead of tightening restrictions further, prison officials loosened them. 

They allowed most inmates out of their cells for hours each day. They built a basketball court and a group dining area. They put rehabilitation programs in place and let prisoners work their way to greater privileges.

In response, the inmates became better behaved. Violence went down. The number of prisoners in isolation dropped to about 300 from more than 1,000. So many inmates were moved into the general population of other prisons that Unit 32 was closed in 2010, saving the state more than $5 million. 

The transformation of the Mississippi prison has become a focal point for a growing number of states that are rethinking the use of long-term isolation and re-evaluating how many inmates really require it, how long they should be kept there and how best to move them out. Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Ohio and Washington State have been taking steps to reduce the number of prisoners in long-term isolation; others have plans to do so. On Friday, officials in California announced a plan for policy changes that could result in fewer prisoners being sent to the state’s three super-maximum-security units. 

The efforts represent an about-face to an approach that began three decades ago, when corrections departments — responding to increasing problems with prison gangs, stiffer sentencing policies that led to overcrowding and the “get tough on crime” demands of legislators — began removing ever larger numbers of inmates from the general population. They placed them in special prisons designed to house inmates in long-term isolation or in other types of segregation. 

At least 25,000 prisoners — and probably tens of thousands more, criminal justice experts say — are still in solitary confinement in the United States. Some remain there for weeks or months; others for years or even decades. More inmates are held in solitary confinement here than in any other democratic nation, a fact highlighted in a United Nations report last week. 

Humanitarian groups have long argued that solitary confinement has devastating psychological effects, but a central driver in the recent shift is economics. Segregation units can be two to three times as costly to build and, because of their extensive staffing requirements, to operate as conventional prisons are. They are an expense that many recession-plagued states can ill afford; Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois announced plans late last month to close the state’s supermax prison for budgetary reasons. 

Some officials have also been persuaded by research suggesting that isolation is vastly overused and that it does little to reduce overall prison violence. Inmates kept in such conditions, most of whom will eventually be released, may be more dangerous when they emerge, studies suggest. 

Christopher B. Epps, Mississippi’s commissioner of corrections, said he found his own views changing as he fought an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over conditions in the prison, which one former inmate described as “hell, an insane asylum.” 

Mr. Epps said he started out believing that difficult inmates should be locked down as tightly as possible, for as long as possible. 

“That was the culture, and I was part of it,” he said. 

By the end of the process, he saw things differently and ordered the changes. 

“If you treat people like animals, that’s exactly the way they’ll behave,” he now says. 

A Very Costly Experiment 

 

James F. Austin held up the file of an inmate in Unit 32 and posed a question to the staff members gathered in a conference room at the Mississippi Department of Corrections headquarters in Jackson. 

“O.K., does this guy really need to be there?” he asked. 

It was June 2007, and the department was under pressure to make court-ordered improvements to conditions at Unit 32, where violence was brewing. Dr. Austin, a prison consultant, had been called in by the state. As the discussion proceeded, the staff members were startled to discover that many inmates in Unit 32 had been sent there not because they were highly dangerous, but because they were a nuisance — they had disobeyed orders, had walked away from a minimum-security program or were low-level gang members with no history of causing trouble while incarcerated. 

“He started saying, ‘You tell me what kind of person needs to be locked up,’ and it wasn’t near the numbers that we had,” said Emmitt L. Sparkman, deputy commissioner of corrections. By the time they were done, the group had determined that up to 80 percent of the 1,000 or more inmates at Unit 32 could probably be safely moved to less restrictive settings. 

Like many such prisons, Mississippi’s supermax, opened in 1990, owed its existence to the fervor for tougher punishment that swept through the country in the 1980s and 1990s. 

“There was an incredible explosion in the prison population coupled with a big infusion of gangs,” Dr. Austin said. “Riots were occurring. Prison officials were literally losing control.” 

Some states built special units to isolate difficult prisoners — “the worst of the worst,” prison officials said — from the general prison population. Others retrofitted existing prisons or established smaller units within larger facilities. The federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., was locked down in 1983 after the murder of two prison guards, its inmates confined to cells 23 hours a day and then kept that way permanently. In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, a remote town near the Oregon border, specially designed to control inmates in conditions that minimize human interaction.

By 2005, 44 states had supermax prisons or their equivalents. In most, inmates were let out of their cells for only a few hours a week. They were fed through slots in their cell doors and were denied access to work programs or other rehabilitation efforts. If visitors were allowed, the interactions were conducted with no physical contact.

And while prisoners had previously been sent to isolation for 10 or perhaps 30 days as a temporary disciplinary measure, they were now often placed there indefinitely.

Asked to explain the purpose of such confinement, prison wardens surveyed in 2006 by Dan Mears, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, cited “increasing safety, order and control throughout prison systems and incapacitating violent or disruptive inmates.”

But beyond that, said Dr. Mears, who called the rise of supermax prisons “a big, very costly experiment,” the goals seemed murky. Who exactly were “the worst of the worst”? How many people really needed such harsh control, and for how long? And how should the effectiveness of the prisons be judged, especially when measured against the costs of building and operating them?

Dr. Mears said there were no clear answers; indeed, he said, it is virtually impossible to determine how many inmates are in supermax prisons in the United States because there is no national tracking system and because states differ widely in what they call segregation units. “I don’t know of any business that would do this, not something that costs this much, with so little evidence or clarity about what you’re getting,” Dr. Mears said.

With no precise definition of who belonged there, prison systems began to send people to segregation units who bore little resemblance to the serial killers or terrorists the public imagined filled such prisons.

“Certainly there are a small number of people who for a variety of reasons have to be maintained in a way that they don’t have access to other inmates,” said Chase Riveland, a former head of corrections in Colorado and Washington State who now serves as an expert witness in prison cases. “But those in most systems are pretty small numbers of people.”

Mr. Epps, who is president-elect of the American Correctional Association, likes to say prison officials started out isolating inmates they were scared of but ended up adding many they were simply “mad at.”

‘The Real Damage’ 
 

In 1831, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where prison officials were pioneering a novel rehabilitation method based on Quaker principles of reflection and penitence. They called it solitary confinement.

“Placed alone in view of his crime,” de Tocqueville wrote in a report to the French government, the prisoner “learns to hate it, and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.”

But for many prisoners, isolation was as likely to produce mental illness as remorse, and by the late 19th century, enthusiasm for the approach had flagged. In 1890, deciding the case of a death row inmate held in solitary confinement, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller of the Supreme Court wrote that many prisoners fell, “after even a short confinement, into a semifatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still committed suicide.”

It was the last time the nation’s highest court would address the psychological effects of solitary confinement directly. But lower courts in some states have acknowledged the stress that isolation puts on inmates who are already mentally ill, prohibiting their being placed in solitary except in urgent circumstances.

When Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and expert on the effects of solitary confinement, toured Unit 32 for the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, he found that about 100 of the more than 1,000 inmates there had serious mental illness, in many cases improperly diagnosed. Some were actively hallucinating. Others threw feces or urine at guards or howled in the night.

In turn, the mentally ill inmates were mistreated by corrections officers, who had little understanding of their condition, Dr. Kupers said.

In a report filed to the court, he described the case of James Coffield, a mentally ill prisoner who had demonstrated “a long history in Unit 32 of bizarre and disruptive behaviors” that prison psychiatrists “characterized as merely ‘manipulative’ and which security staff punished with increasingly harsh force, including repeated gassing with chemicals.”

Mr. Coffield eventually tried to hang himself but failed and ended up in a vegetative state.

Many states continue to house inmates with mental illness in isolation. Some inmates appear to function adequately in solitary confinement or even say they prefer it. But studies suggest that the rigid control, absence of normal human interaction and lack of stimulation imposed by prolonged isolation can cause a wide range of psychological symptoms including insomnia, withdrawal, rage and aggression, depression, hallucinations and thoughts of suicide, even in prisoners who are mentally healthy to begin with.

A study of prisoners in the Pelican Bay supermax, for example, found that almost all reported nervousness, anxiety, lethargy or other psychological complaints. Seventy percent said they felt themselves to be at risk of “impending nervous breakdown.”

“Worse still is the fact that for many of these men, the real damage only becomes apparent when they get out of this environment,” said Craig W. Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert on the effects of solitary confinement, who led the study.

In fact, some research has found that inmates released from supermax units are more likely to reoffend than comparable prisoners released from conventional maximum-security prisons, and that those crimes are more likely to be violent. In Colorado, said Tom Clements, executive director of corrections, it turned out that about 40 percent of inmates held in long-term isolation were being released directly to the community with no transition period.

The psychological research has drawn attention, not least from the international community. In a report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, Juan E. Méndez, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture and other abuse, called for a ban on solitary confinement except in limited situations and singled out the United States for its reliance on the method.

In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights blocked the extradition of four terrorism suspects from Britain, saying it wanted to study whether imprisonment at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., violated a ban on inhuman or degrading treatment.

Yet for states, economic and practical arguments may prove more persuasive than humanitarian concerns.

“It’s just exceedingly expensive to hold someone in a segregation bed,” said Angela Browne, a senior fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit policy and research group, and head of the institute’s segregation reduction project, which works with states to find alternatives to segregation.

Several states, citing economic reasons, have converted supermax units to more conventional prisons, and a few have closed the prisons altogether. Unit 32 was closed in 2010. The increased costs are largely a result of the staffing required to deliver food and other services to cells and escort prisoners when they are let out.

In 2010, for example, Virginia reported that it cost $89.59 per day to keep a prisoner at Red Onion State Prison, a supermax unit with 399 employees, compared with $60.04 per day at Sussex II State Prison, a maximum-security facility that houses almost 500 more inmates but has a staff of 353.

Gambling on Change 
 

Roy Harper, serving time for armed robbery, kidnapping and other charges, used to wake in his cell at Unit 32 seized with anxiety every morning. “You never know what the day is going to bring,” he said recently.

Sometimes it was flooding from malfunctioning toilets. Sometimes it was inmates setting fires or cutting themselves — two prisoners cut off their own testicles in the time he spent there, he said — and sometimes it was just the sense of isolation he felt, “like being alone in the world.”

Mr. Harper was a prisoner in Unit 32 from the day it opened to the day it closed, 20 years later. But the summer of 2007, he recalled, was worse than most. When the killings began, prison officials first cracked down, taking away the inmates’ fans — the only relief from summer temperatures that approached 100 degrees and, according to an environmental expert who filed a report on the conditions, could feel like 120 or more. They kept prisoners in their cells around the clock, not even allowing them out for exercise, he said.

Mr. Sparkman, the deputy corrections commissioner, viewed the situation as so critical that in July he moved from his home in Jackson to Parchman, where Unit 32 sits on the grounds of the state penitentiary. It was clear that a different approach was needed, he said: “What we were doing, the 23-hour lockdown, was not working.”

But the shift had to be made carefully.

“It was gradual, and it was very controlled,” Mr. Sparkman said. “We started out with one building, identifying those groups that we could let out, and we let some of them out. Some of them we were able to transfer completely out.”

A few guards rebelled at the new orders and resigned in protest. A few others were fired. But by the end of six months, most prisoners were spending hours a day outside their cells or had been moved to the general population of other prisons. A clothing warehouse was turned into a group dining hall, and a maintenance room was converted to an activities center. The basketball court filled with players.

Mr. Harper did not benefit immediately from the changes. He remained in 23-hour lockdown until he worked his way to greater privileges. But he was elated at what he saw, he said, with inmates “working again, walking without chains, going to the yard, going to the chow hall.”

The A.C.L.U. continues to monitor conditions in other prisons in the state. But Margaret Winter, the lead lawyer for the A.C.L.U. in its lawsuit over Unit 32, said she watched the transformation there in wonder, especially as two men who at the beginning of the process seemed deeply entrenched in their views shifted direction. The change, she said, was “stunning.”

Mr. Sparkman said the new approach went against everything he had been trained to do. “If you’d come to me in 2002 and told me I was going to do something like that, I’d say, ‘You don’t know me,’ ” he said. “I’d have probably locked them down for anything that squeaked.”

Mr. Epps looks back at the decision as a nerve-racking gamble.

“Was it scary? Absolutely,” he said. “But it worked out just fine. We didn’t have a single incident.”

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 14, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the position of Christopher B. Epps, Mississippi’s commissioner of corrections, in the American Correctional Association. He is president-elect, not president. (Daron Hall is the current president; Mr. Epps takes over in 2013.)

Fathi: Solitary Confinement in Arizona's state prisons

Click here for the story of what solitary confinement in Arizona 
did to one young man...

 

----------From the ACLU Blog of Rights---------

Solitary Confinement in Arizona: Cruel and Unusual

Posted by David Fathi, 

ACLU-National Prison Project 

March 6, 2012 at 1:09pm 

A class action lawsuit filed today by the ACLU, along with the Prison Law Office, the Arizona Center for Disability Law, and the law firms Jones Day and Perkins Coie, alleges that the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) houses thousands of prisoners in solitary confinement conditions so harsh they violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. While other states also use solitary confinement, Arizona has added features that seem designed to gratuitously increase suffering. The cells in that state's supermax Special Management Units (SMUs) were deliberately constructed with no windows to the outside, so prisoners — many of whom have no means of telling the time — become disoriented and confused, not knowing the whether it is day or night. The cells are often illuminated 24 hours a day, making sleep difficult and further contributing to prisoners' disorientation and mental deterioration.

Some prisoners in solitary spend all but six hours a week alone in their cells. Their only respite occurs when they are taken to a slightly larger windowless cell, with no equipment, for "exercise." Many prisoners refuse to go, because the cell is so small that it doesn't allow meaningful exercise, and because prisoners are placed in restraints and strip-searched when going to and returning from the cell. And in a final cruelty, ADC reasons that because prisoners in solitary don't get much exercise, they don't need much food — some receive only two meals a day.

It's long been known that solitary confinement is extraordinarily damaging to mental health, often inducing mental illness in previously healthy prisoners. But it's particularly damaging to those with pre-existing mental illness. For these prisoners, solitary poses a grave risk of psychiatric injury, self-harm, and even suicide. Deprived of the social interaction that is essential to keep them grounded in reality, many prisoners with mental illness experience catastrophic and often irreversible psychiatric deterioration.

Courts have ruled that prisoners with mental illness suffer such grievous harm in solitary confinement that it violates the Eighth Amendment to house them there. One court compared putting a person with mental illness in solitary to "putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe." As a result, many states that use solitary confinement exclude the mentally ill. But not Arizona — even prisoners whom ADC itself has classified as "seriously mentally ill" are held in solitary.

In recent years, states as diverse as Mississippi, Colorado, and Maine have reduced their use of solitary confinement, generating substantial cost savings and experiencing no adverse effects on public safety. But Arizona remains an enthusiastic practitioner, with four large prisons devoted chiefly or exclusively to holding prisoners in solitary.

Last month Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn announced plans to close Tamms Correctional Center, that state's supermax prison. Tamms has long been criticized for its harsh conditions of solitary confinement — a federal judge found that it inflicts "lasting psychological and emotional harm" on prisoners — and the per-prisoner cost of Tamms is three times the state average. Arizona should follow Illinois' example. It would be a victory for fiscal prudence as well as human rights.

Take action today: go here to sign our pledge against solitary.

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STOP SOLITARY: ACLU toolsite for activists.

Here are some resources on ending the abuses of solitary confinement from the ACLU National Prison Project:

Stop Solitary - Advocacy Campaign Tools

The ACLU, together with our state-based affiliates, scholars, activists, mental health experts, and faith-based organizations around the country, is engaged in a campaign to challenge the use of long-term solitary confinement – in the courts, in the legislatures, in reforms of correctional practice, and in the battle for public opinion. The goal of the Stop Solitary campaign is to limit and abolish the use of long-term solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers.

• Stop Solitary – Quick Facts
• Stop Solitary Briefing Paper
• Getting Started – Collecting Corrections & Other Data in Your State
• Campaign Dos and Don’ts
• Model Social Networking Language
• Model Stop Solitary Legislation
• Model Fiscal Analysis Memo
• Checklist for a Visit to a Supermax Facility

• International Advocacy Tools
  
  
  • ACLU's Human Rights Council submission re: solitary confinement in US Prisons and Jails
  • NRCAT's request to the Special Rapporteur on Torture to investigate solitary confinement in the U.S.
  • Expert Report by Prof. Richard J. Wilson, K.C. v. Townsend, No. 6:09-CV-012, (N.D. Tex. August 31, 2009) (Customary International Law Applies and Supports U.S. Law to Bar or Limit Use of Certain Disciplinary Measure Taken Against Girls at Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Complex)

From Solitary Watch

(the best blog on Solitary Confinement there is)

Pelican Bay: Resisting the Cruel and Unusual.

Here's a comprehensive recap of the hunger strike and on-going struggle for human rights this year at the infamous California Pelican Bay prison, from the SF Bayview...

---------------------------------

Hunger Strike Recap: California prisoners show the way!

In: SF Bay View
September 14, 2011
by K. Kersplebedeb


This spring, the news started going around that a hunger strike was being planned in the Security Housing Unit at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP). Prisoners at the SHU had apparently united across racial lines and promised to hungerstrike to the death if need be, starting on July 1.

Initially most of the attention paid to the planned strike came from a small collection of organizations, mostly based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a clear mandate to support prisoners’ struggles and resist the prison-industrial complex. While much of the left ignores prison issues or considers them at best a peripheral symptom of more fundamental social dysfunction, these groups recognized the potential importance of prisoner-led resistance in Pelican Bay’s SHU, California’s flagship torture unit.

Isolation torture in the USA

Pelican Bay was built in 1989, on the remote northern edge of California, in the economically depressed town of Crescent City. One section of the new prison was designated the “Security Housing Unit” (SHU) – essentially a control unit, in which people are condemned to conditions of solitary confinement. The Pelican Bay SHU was just one of many such facilities built around this time, an indirect consequence of the United States’ ongoing mass incarceration policies.

As eloquently described by Michelle Alexander in her recent book “The New Jim Crow,” mass incarceration began as a ruling class response to the Black Liberation Movement in the 1960s, the result of the so-called “war on drugs,” crafted so as to replicate many of the effects of segregation but without the embarrassing bigoted rhetoric. Forty years later, the result is over two and a half million people in U.S. prisons, a majority of them people of color.

Units like the Pelican Bay SHU were partly a result of the “law and order” ideology that accompanied and supported mass incarceration; partly they were intended to neutralize any resistance from those who were now slated to spend their lives behind bars. As Manuel La Fontaine of All of Us or None and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition has explained, “The minute one becomes politically engaged inside, and you begin to challenge the conditions of confinement or begin to organize others to look beyond themselves and to focus on the things that led to their incarceration, such as social, political and economic oppression here in America and throughout the world, is the minute you’re deemed a candidate for the SHU.”1

People have spent years – in some cases decades – buried alive in the Pelican Bay SHU and similar facilities. Cells have no windows, just fluorescent lights which are never turned off. Prisoners spend 22-23 hours a day thus confined; when they are allowed out, it is to be brought – alone – to what is euphemistically called an “exercise yard” – in fact, just a larger enclosed space with grating instead of a roof. Prisoners are fed substandard food, they are punished collectively for issues involving individuals, and their indefinite SHU sentences only end if they agree to “debrief,” that is to say, to snitch.

Violence from guards is commonplace, as detailed by Keramet Reiter:

“In Madrid v. Gomez, a federal court case evaluating the constitutionality of the conditions at Pelican Bay, Judge Thelton Henderson recorded myriad staff abuses of prisoners at the institution. The most memorable: Vaughn Dortch, a mentally ill African-American prisoner, whom guards forced to take a ‘bath’ in near-boiling water. One guard said, as he was holding Dortch down in the water: ‘Looks like we’re going to have a white boy before this is through.’ Dortch sustained third-degree burns over half of his body; guards waited more than an hour after the conclusion of the bath before taking Dortch to a hospital for burn treatment. Judge Henderson ordered numerous reforms to the policies and practices at the institution, including better staff training and diversion of mentally ill prisoners from the SHU. However, Judge Henderson stopped short of declaring the physical structure of long-term solitary confinement unconstitutional.”2

The main excuse used to send prisoners to the SHU is “gang ties,” and yet a majority have never been convicted of any such thing. Being “validated” as a gang member is an administrative decision, with no real possibility of appeal, even though the result can be years or even decades of solitary confinement.

To give just one example: in the 2009 court ruling Lira vs. Cate, it was found that former prisoner Ernesto Lira had spent years in the SHU because of a sketch he had allegedly drawn, an anonymous tip, and a report from a prison guard that was mis-transcribed. The court found that as a result of his time in the SHU, Lira now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression, and that throughout his incarceration, despite his objections that he was not a gang member, he was never provided with any meaningful review of his “validation.” Lira’s case is far from being exceptional; sadly, it is typical of those who end up in America’s supermaxes.3

Long-term isolation has been described as “clean torture,” for it is designed to inflict grave psychological and even physical harm, but without leaving any visible wounds. As Craig Haney of the University of California at Santa Cruz has noted, “There is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which nonvoluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days, where participants were unable to terminate their isolation at will, that failed to result in negative psychological effects. The damaging effects ranged in severity and included such clinically significant symptoms as hypertension, uncontrollable anger, hallucinations, emotional breakdowns, chronic depression, and suicidal thoughts and behavior.”4

A family member of a Pelican Bay SHU prisoner describes conditions as follows:

“[T]he warden took calendars away in December 2010. Now they have to make calendars to keep track of which day it is. They lose touch with family as they are not allowed phone calls ever (unless they debrief), the trip by car from Southern California is about 14 hours each direction, by plane the cost to fly into Crescent City with plenty of advanced notice is $440 per person, the accommodations are $87 per night for the cheaper hotel and more for 3-4 people. The visiting is behind glass with one phone. […] They are deprived of all natural light, food, warmth – sweats and night caps are not allowed even though the prison is located on the coast in the mountains. They never turn on the heat so the concrete walls keep the cells cold as freezers. Milk will stay cold in a cell for days. The food looks like vomit, and when refused the guards will say I don’t blame you.”

The prisoners live at the mercy of their captors. For instance, as part of a labor action in the midst of California’s perennial budget crisis, guards recently denied prisoners what little comforts they normally receive, and this for months on end. As the above writer noted:

“They were locked in the cells for almost 2 months straight – no ‘yard’, no showers, no packages or books passed out. It was to say we will do nothing until we get the 3% raise. They did and 3,500 teachers were laid off but the guards did start pushing a button for showers … yes a button.”

In these conditions, kept isolated from one another and tortured for years on end, some SHU prisoners managed to get word out about their strike. The organizers were all from D Corridor – known as the “short corridor,” this is where prisoners are subjected to the most restrictive conditions – and they became known as the Short Corridor Collective. They reached out to other prisoners, and there was talk that dozens would go on strike, perhaps as many as a hundred.

Their demands were detailed in a Formal Complaint, and summarized as follows:

1. Eliminate group punishments. Instead, practice individual accountability. When an individual prisoner breaks a rule, the prison often punishes a whole group of prisoners of the same race. This policy has been applied to keep prisoners in the SHU indefinitely and to make conditions increasingly harsh.

2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria. Prisoners are accused of being active or inactive participants of prison gangs, using false or highly dubious evidence, and are then sent to longterm isolation (SHU). They can escape these tortuous conditions only if they “debrief,” that is, provide information on gang activity. Debriefing produces false information (wrongly landing other prisoners in SHU, in an endless cycle) and can endanger the lives of debriefing prisoners and their families.

3. Comply with the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to longterm solitary confinement. This bipartisan commission specifically recommended to “make segregation a last resort” and “end conditions of isolation.” Yet as of May 18, 2011, California kept 3,259 prisoners in SHUs and hundreds more in administrative segregation waiting for a SHU cell to open up. Some prisoners have been kept in isolation for more than 30 years.

4. Provide adequate food. Prisoners report unsanitary conditions and small quantities of food that do not conform to prison regulations. There is no accountability or independent quality control of meals.

5. Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates. The hunger strikers are pressing for opportunities “to engage in self-help treatment, education, religious and other productive activities.” Currently these opportunities are routinely denied, even if the prisoners want to pay for correspondence courses themselves. Examples of privileges the prisoners want are one phone call per week and permission to have sweatsuits and watch caps. Often warm clothing is denied, though the cells and exercise cage can be bitterly cold. All of the privileges mentioned in the demands are already allowed at other supermax prisons in the federal prison system and other states.

The Short Corridor Collective requested people on the outside organize to amplify their voices and coordinate communication through the walls. In response to this call, a Prisoner Hunger Strike Support Coalition was set up in San Francisco, including a number of the key organizations working to support prisoners in California: All of Us or None, California Prison Focus, Critical Resistance, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the Prison Activist Resource Center, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the American Friends Service Committee, BarNone Arcata and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. A media team was established to make sure the prisoners’ voices would be heard in the public arena. Similarly, a mediation team was set up, with a mandate to support the prisoners in their dealings with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) once the strike began.

The strike

On July 1, news started coming in from throughout California that there were people in many prisons, not just Pelican Bay, refusing food. From PBSP itself, word arrived that not only was almost everyone in the SHU participating, but that those in general population were also on board. It suddenly looked like the strike might have mobilized not hundreds but thousands – an order of magnitude greater than anyone had dreamed.

Indeed, although CDCR claimed at the time that fewer than two dozen were on strike,5 within a few days it admitted that in fact over 6,000 prisoners had joined in refusing meals on July 1. At least 13 of California’s 33 prisons were affected. Some strikers were accepting liquid food, some were eating food from the canteen, but many were refusing any and all sustenance.

The Short Corridor Collective had called on other prisoners to strike in solidarity for as long as they felt comfortable, even if they were not willing to go to the death, and that is clearly what was happening, involving numbers that no one had anticipated. The thousands of striking prisoners were joined by individuals on the outside who also began fasting to support their demands. During the first week, solidarity demonstrations were held in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Seattle and Montreal. Press coverage in this first period was mainly limited to California mainstream media, and various progressive blogs and news websites.

By definition, hunger strikes are difficult on those who engage in them. Humane medical care is to be hoped for, but often prison doctors and nurses work not to protect the strikers’ health, but to help the administration break the protest. This is what happened in some California prisons; there were numerous reports in the first week of strikers simply not being monitored and of doctors refusing them their prescription meds. While clearly punitive, CDCR framed this as the system being overwhelmed by the scope of the strike and wary of the dangers of prescribing medication meant to be taken with food.

This medical neglect prompted 40 healthcare providers from across North America to quickly sign an open letter expressing their “grave concern.” As they noted, “If it is true that CDCR medical staff are refusing prisoners their medications, either as punishment for being in the SHU or else as punishment for being on hunger strike, this is not only unethical, but also illegal under California Penal Code Section 673. This would be an act of deliberate indifference to a patient’s serious medical needs, and as such would constitute a violation of prisoners’ Eighth Amendment Constitutional rights.” The healthcare professionals called upon CDCR “to ensure that no prisoner on hunger strike be disciplined or threatened with the denial of medical care” and demanded that “all medical professionals uphold their code of ethics and maintain the highest standards of care for all their patients – be they incarcerated or not.”6

Medical neglect was just one of the ways CDCR pressured strikers to resume eating. At Pelican Bay, prisoners were given an “Information Sheet” which – under guise of informing them of their rights – was essentially meant to impress upon them that there would no negotiations, and that there was only one possible final outcome if they persisted: “Since refusing food will eventually lead to increased illness and death, you will be asked to find a suitable person to ensure your wishes are followed once you cannot express them for yourself […] It is also encouraged that you consider your decision to refuse food may be very difficult for your close family and friends.”

In some facilities, prison officials sent general population strikers into segregation – i.e. solitary – and denied them the right to visit with family members. At others, they simply resorted to lies to break the strike. For instance, at Calipatria prison, located in the hot desert on the Mexican border, guards announced on July 7 that CDCR had agreed to all five demands and that the strike was over. This worked, and everybody started eating again. Several days later word was received that this had been a trick, and many prisoners resumed their fast.

Despite these pressure tactics, two weeks into the strike, thousands were still refusing food.7 Such a show of solidarity, across “racial” lines, in prisons across California, had not been seen for generations. This alone constitutes a major achievement.

Meanwhile, on the outside, demonstrations were held in cities across California and throughout the United States. While the numbers attending were small – the largest attracted less than 200, most brought out dozens, and some less than that – these were growing, as were the numbers of family members who were joining, and becoming increasingly prominent speaking to media and facilitating communication with those on the inside.

Why the small numbers? It is an automatic reflex when evaluating any disappointing lack of activity around any issue to point to the left’s ongoing weakness; this is obviously a (or even “the”) factor, but it’s not one that will be solved tomorrow, and it doesn’t explain why other issues attract more people. It makes more sense to see the poor turnout at these protests as a consequence of the fact that there has not been a strong movement inside the prisons for many years, and that the state’s perpetual propaganda offensive keeps many people – including people from oppressed communities – wary of supporting “criminals.”

Furthermore, even those organizations that have been doing important work around prisons have a limited ability to mobilize on the streets and escalate quickly in a crisis, which is what an indefinite hunger strike represents. There is no denying the importance of building capacity, putting down roots and pursuing long-term community-oriented strategies; that said, conflicts are also decided by speed and initiative, and these are underdeveloped qualities even on the radical left.

Nobody had expected thousands to engage in this hunger strike, and many of those organizations which should have been involved from day one were taken by surprise, left trying to catch up with events – and sadly, it must be said, some simply didn’t bother. Nevertheless, as the importance of what was taking place in California became clear, many groups did begin to orient themselves accordingly.

As a sign of this, two weeks into the strike the San Francisco solidarity coalition held a mass conference call, with over 140 people representing a variety of organizations participating. It is clear that every day the strike continued, new groups and new cities were getting involved. As already mentioned, more and more family members were participating in support activities, bringing their own capacities and experiences into the mix. Had the strike lasted longer, this growth could have led to a qualitatively different level of struggle on the outside.

The prisoncrats’ response was twofold. First, they continued to insist that there would be no negotiations; in the words of Nancy Kincaid, spokeswoman for Receiver Kelso, who is in charge of California prison health care, “They have the right to choose to die of starvation if they wish.” Second, officials argued that the strike’s very success proved the value of the SHU and other forms of long-term isolation. According to CDCR spin doctor Terry Thornton, “This goes to show the power, influence and reach of prison gangs. Some people are doing it because they want to do it, and some are being ordered to do it.”8

Medical crisis

Not surprisingly, health issues remained a serious concern for the duration of the strike. Prisoners were being advised to take multivitamins and salt tablets – and yet these were often not available. CDCR insisted that everyone was being monitored, but there were reports that this “monitoring” consisted of someone standing at a cell door asking if the prisoner was feeling all right. Prisoners were supposed to be weighed daily, but this was sometimes done while they wore chains, sometimes not, making the entire exercise somewhat pointless.

As stated by Dr. Corey Weinstein, a private correctional medical consultant and human rights investigator with 40 years experience providing health care to California prisoners:

“Given my long history of working with California prisoners, I have grave doubts about the Department of Corrections’ ability to adequately carry out their own guidelines and protocols even during this urgent and public moment. Reports such as prisoners with very low blood sugar levels and lack of urination for 3 days should not be coming from the prison. These are men who require hospital care under prison protocols. We should ask why do they remain at the prison?”9

On July 12, supporters became particularly alarmed, as they received reports that some prisoners were suffering from severe dehydration, had lost consciousness, and/or were on the verge of renal failure. Dehydration is a major risk when on hunger strike, and it is imperative that one drink a lot of liquids when fasting. It remains unclear whether the dehydration was the result of some prisoners having escalated to a thirst strike, or if it was due to the guards having provided them with inadequate fluids. Severely weakened strikers had to be brought to the prison infirmary, where they were rehydrated intravenously.

At about this time, rumors began circulating that a prisoner had died. This turned out to be false, partly the result of people misunderstanding a strongly worded letter from Corcoran prisoners where a striker losing consciousness was described as having “gone down,” and partly par for the course in a heavy life-or-death struggle where information was always so highly restricted by the prisoncrats.

One of the reasons the state developed isolation prisons was to cut prisoners off from their communities and, amongst other things, this is intended to make solidarity work more difficult. Luckily, the support coalition was able to confirm that this rumor was false before mobilizing around the claim, which would have constituted an embarrassing public relations setback.
Negotiations and pressure tactics

In this dire situation, there was a breakthrough on Thursday, July 14, as CDCR announced that it was meeting with the hunger strikers’ representatives. The prisoncrats – who had claimed just hours earlier that they would rather see people die than negotiate – were now agreeing to discuss their demands. In and of itself, this was an unprecedented victory.

Nevertheless, the next day, the Short Corridor Collective unanimously rejected CDCR’s initial offer, a vague promise to “effect a comprehensive assessment of its existing policy and procedure.” As prisoner negotiator George Franco has explained, “Mr. Scott Kernan was very demanding and disrespectful towards us therefore, the negotiators went ‘nowhere’ we explained to our mediation team what occurred and what to do as a result of this meeting.”10

Support on the outside now accelerated. Along with weekly pickets in Oakland, there were daily protests in Los Angeles and the first demonstration in Sacramento. In Montreal, there had been weekly pickets outside the U.S. consulate from week one, and now these were joined by regular events in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities across the United States. At the same time, plans were announced for two pickets in London, England, marking the first spread of protests overseas.

By this point, close to a hundred organizations, from the ACLU to the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, had come out in support of the prisoners demands. On July 17, the New York Times ran an op-ed critical of CDCR and sympathetic to the strikers,11 which was followed the next day by a positive editorial in the San Jose Mercury News12 and the day after that by an editorial in the LA Times criticizing CDCR for not allowing journalists into Pelican Bay.13

As a consequence of the prisoners’ refusal to end their strike on July 15, and keenly aware of the mounting support from the outside, CDCR attempted to buttress its position by threatening and further isolating the prisoner representatives. SHU prisoners are normally not permitted phone calls but, given the extraordinary circumstances, they had been allowed to phone the support coalition’s mediation team on the 15th to explain why they were refusing CDCR’s offer.

As a result of this initial refusal, it was made known that there would be no more such calls. Then, at 5:30 a.m. on July 18, 17 prisoners from Pelican Bay – including three members of the prisoners’ negotiating team – were transferred to Corcoran prison, apparently due to the severity of their condition and the fact that the Pelican Bay infirmary was now full beyond capacity.

That same day prison officials attempted to resume negotiations – but given that morning’s transfer to Corcoran, there were no New Afrikan prisoner negotiators left at Pelican Bay. It took another day for the warden to agree to allow another New Afrikan prisoner representative to join the negotiating team and another two days after that for Scott Kernan to return to the table.

July 20, as negotiations resumed, CDCR Secretary Matthew Cate announced that he would seek a court order allowing prison officials to force-feed striking prisoners – including those who had signed advance medical directives indicating that they did not wish to receive any such life-sustaining measures.14

While California is one of three states where the courts have ruled that prisoners can in some circumstances refuse medical care, nationally judges have more often ruled in favor of force-feeding hunger striking prisoners.15

In some of these cases the courts specifically differentiate between individuals choosing to starve themselves for personal reasons – depression, sickness etc. – and political hunger strikes, i.e. those in which some kind of redress was being demanded. The latter, characterized as “manipulative hunger strikes,” have been deemed “detrimental to the effective administration of the prison system,”16 and this might have provided the legal opening for Cate’s gambit.

Force-feeding is the state’s trump card when dealing with political hunger strikes. It is intensely painful, especially when the patient resists, and is often used as an excuse for physical violence from guards and other staff. Indeed, force-feeding has itself been described as a form of violence. At the same time – despite the fact that prisoners have died while being force-fed, and that the World Medical Association prohibits the practice – in the public’s eye the procedure often reduces the urgency of a strike, because people incorrectly believe that the health of a person being force-fed is no longer at risk.

What Matthew Cate was doing, essentially, was threatening a new form of torture. It remains unclear whether this was used as a pressure tactic during the day’s negotiations or if it was being prepared as a fall-back position lest negotiations continued to bear no fruit.

These were the circumstances in which CDCR renewed negotiations with the Short Corridor Collective. With hundreds of prisoners having gone almost three weeks without food, and with this new threat looming, CDCR offered to accede on a few small points right away. It was stated that this was simply meant as a tangible gesture of good faith in support of an assurance that all of the prisoners’ other issues would receive real attention, with meaningful changes being implemented over time.

In fact, the impression the negotiators were left with was that CDCR had agreed to work towards meeting all five demands. CDCR promised to send representatives back to Pelican Bay within a few weeks to provide the prisoners with a progress report in this regard.

So it was that, on July 20, the prisoners accepted CDCR’s offer, and the strike was suspended. Arrogantly, CDCR Undersecretary Scott Kernan contacted the support coalition and told them the strike was over, expecting them to then announce this on his say so. This would of course have been out of the question under any circumstances, but especially given that prison officials had already been caught lying earlier in the strike.

In the end, Kernan had to allow the Short Corridor Collective a phone call to the outside mediators to inform them that the strike had indeed ended. This call was placed on July 21. This was just the beginning of the delays in communication, as the task at hand now became checking in with other prisoners across the state – most of whom had not been in direct contact with the support coalition and many of whom were in segregation or other supermaxes. This process would have taken even longer if not for the initiative of family members, who arranged to get the word in that the strike had indeed been suspended. Nevertheless, it was several days before almost all prisoners had resumed eating, and there were reports of hold-outs as much as one week later.

There was an understandable reticence within the support coalition to publicly announce the strike over in this situation, when it was known that other prisoners continued to refuse food. Nobody could be sure that the Short Corridor Collective’s decision would be accepted by prisoners across the state – it was unclear if those still fasting were doing so because they had not heard it was over or if they intended to continue the strike on their own.

As a result, even after the mediation team had been contacted, supporters around the world were unsure whether the strike had been called off or if this was one of CDCR’s tricks, and nobody on the outside seemed able to provide clarity on this question. This confusion was compounded by the fact that journalists had been denied access to the prisoners, and so news stories often recycled information from one another for days after the fact.

Eventually, though, it became clear that everyone who had been participating had indeed recommenced eating. California’s historic hunger strike of July 2011 seemed to have come to an end, after having united thousands of prisoners, garnering support from organizations across America and internationally, and forcing CDCR to the negotiating table.
Aftermath

As prisoners transitioned back to eating, many of the issues that had arisen during the hunger strike continued. Some family members found that they were being denied visits with their loved ones who had been on strike, many of whom received 128B forms, “informational chronos,” which go into their records permanently. These chronos threatened “progressive discipline … in the future for any reoccurrence of this type of behavior.”17

Even now that the strike had been suspended, medical protocol during this transitional period was in some cases simply not followed. For instance, on July 21 one visitor met with a prisoner who had gone three weeks without food, and yet as she explains:

“When the announcement of the end of strike was made on the day before, he tried to eat from the dinner tray, but could not keep it down. The following day’s breakfast he could not keep down either. When he became very weak/dizzy during our interview and asked for water, the guard would not let us buy him water nor give him any, just offered ending the interview. […] He should have been offered a transition to solid food. I am not sure whether he did later, but not on the day we were there.”

Indeed, it was reported that the day after the strike ended, one prisoner had a heart attack while transitioning to food. This turned out not to be the case, but what had happened was that he had to be hospitalized after having major seizures which affected his heart’s ability to regulate its pulse. According to the prison medical staff, this was due to an electrolyte imbalance caused by the 20 days without food. After five days of treatment, he was returned to the Pelican Bay SHU.

Reaction to the strike ending has been mixed. The Short Corridor Collective and many other prisoners see it as a large step forward, declaring it a provisional victory. Some prisoners, however, have expressed disappointment that an agreement was reached with CDCR committing itself to so little in return.

Commenting on the strike being suspended, the Prisoner Hunger Strike Support coalition noted:

“While the concessions may seem too small to claim a victory, it’s important for people outside prison to understand the weight for prisoners who have been held in the SHU for decades of now being able to stay a little warmer, and to be able to keep track of time since they have no windows and the fluorescent lights are on 24 hours of every day. More so, worldwide support and momentous courage of thousands of prisoners to risk their lives effectively pressured the CDCR to sit at the same table and look prisoners in the face and offer a deal, after refusing to negotiate for weeks and insisting prisoners are less than human.”18
Prisoner representatives Mutope Duguma and George Franco have both stated that CDCR committed to meeting all five demands and that if it fails to do so then the strike will resume.

One thing everyone agrees on is that the strike must be seen as only the first step. Without ongoing pressure, CDCR will certainly refuse any meaningful changes. Early on, San Francisco Representative Tom Ammiano and the state Assembly’s Public Safety Committee agreed to hold hearings to examine conditions in the Pelican Bay SHU. These hearings were set for Aug. 23, and in the weeks following the strike’s suspension the outside coalition focused on mobilizing for this date.19

On the inside, prisoner representatives have stated that if progress is not quickly forthcoming, the struggle will continue: “We’ve drawn the line on this and should CDCR fail to carry out meaningful changes in a timely fashion, then we will initiate a class action suit and additional types of peaceful protest. We will not stop until the CDCR ends the illegal policies and practices at SHU!”20

Indeed, prisoner representatives Mutope Duguma and George Franco have both stated that CDCR committed to meeting all five demands and that if it fails to do so then the strike will resume.21
How it came to be

Just organizing a hunger strike involving thousands is incredible – and more than most left groups on the outside could accomplish. Adding the fact that so many of the prisoners are in solitary confinement to the equation and have no easy way of communicating directly with one another simply makes it all the more impressive.

Security Housing Units are sites of frequent and regular abuse, and so it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between retaliation and business as usual. For instance, in the lead up to the strike, some suspected strike organizers had their cells tossed, and there was at least one instance of the so-called “potty watch” being inflicted – an intentionally silly-sounding name for what is in fact a form of physical torture. As attorney Carol Strickman has explained:

“That’s a very cruel procedure where people are restrained for three days, put in diapers and unable to move their arms sometimes, or forced to stand, or strapped down. The rationale is that the prisoner has swallowed contraband and we are going to see it. We’re going to wait for three days and monitor their bowel movements and find the thing they’ve swallowed. But, it’s used for other reasons. It’s used as punishment even if they know that there is nothing there. This shouldn’t be used even if they think that there is something that the prisoner has swallowed. It’s painful, people can’t sleep. They can’t move their arms. I heard that sometimes their arms are put in a plastic pipe. It’s really horrible. We heard of that happening to one or two people before the hunger strike started in Pelican Bay.”22

Again, given the fact that such demeaning and cruel procedures are not unusual in the SHU, it is difficult to separate out preemptive retaliation from everyday abuse. Less ambiguously, announcements were made just prior to the strike that a special Fourth of July menu would include ice cream and strawberries – foods which many prisoners had not seen in all their years behind bars.


The actual mechanics of how prisoners communicated with one another and arranged to send out word regarding the strike remain unknown, but not unimaginable. Beyond this technical proficiency, the success of the July 2011 hunger strike was facilitated by its location on an arc of increasing struggle within prisons in the United States. Specifically, two previous prisoner strikes during the preceding seven months had already helped prepare the ground the Short Corridor Collective’s July initiative: the December 2010 Georgia prisoners work strike, and the January 2011 Lucasville 5 hunger strike.

In Georgia, for six days in December, thousands of prisoners had refused to work or leave their cells or buy anything at the prison store. A work strike constitutes a direct challenge to the prison system, for without prisoners’ labor the prison system cannot function. Prisoners clean the floors, cook the food and perform every other task not related to custody – as well as being exploited by corporations which make super-profits from their labor.

The Georgia prisoners were demanding better educational opportunities, more nutritious food, access to their families and, most importantly some kind of payment for their jailhouse labor – in Georgia it is mandatory for prisoners to work for “Prison Industries,” a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Corrections, making prisoners the single largest workforce in the state. Furthermore, their labor is completely unpaid.

At least 30 prisons were affected, with thousands participating. The Georgia authorities retaliated by turning off the heat and hot water in the prisoners’ cells. Violence was used – guards beat several striking prisoners; one was so badly hurt he ended up in the ICU of a civilian hospital.23 This reign of terror continued even months after the strike had ended.24

Nevertheless, and although none of the prisoners’ demands were met, the Georgia prisoners’ strike was a major inspiration simply for having happened. It has been described as “a roadmap of what must come.”

The second example in this arc of protest occurred just weeks later, at the state penitentiary in Youngstown, Ohio. On Jan. 3, 2011, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Bomani Shakur and Jason Robb went on hunger strike to protest the severe isolation conditions they had suffered for 18 years. The three men are part of the Lucasville 5 – the other two were not healthy enough to participate – who helped negotiate a peaceful resolution to the 1993 uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility but were subsequently framed for murder and sentenced to death. Since then, they have been subject to extreme isolation; the demand of their hunger strike was simply to be granted the same living conditions as other death row prisoners.

After 12 days, the prison administration agreed to meet the demands of the Ohio hunger strikers.

Besides these two previous inspiring acts of resistance, a third external factor worth keeping in mind is the decision rendered by the Supreme Court in the case of Brown vs. Plata in May. This confirmed an earlier court ruling that conditions in California’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and ordered the state to reduce its prison population by approximately 32,000 over the next two years.

A lower court in the case had already found that it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies”25 – a fact that was cited in the Short Corridor Collective’s Formal Complaint.26

How CDCR will comply with Plata is unclear. There are indications that Gov. Jerry Brown will try to transfer prisoners to the counties’ jurisdiction, which would simply shift the problem of overcrowding and potentially lead to people being held in even worse conditions.27

But in terms of the success of the July hunger strike, Plata had already helped expose the horrendous conditions in CDCR’s prisons, and so the department was caught in a vulnerable position. It is difficult to measure what effect this had, but it does play into the overall circumstances surrounding the hunger strike.

Regardless of these external factors, it is clear that the ones who really deserve the credit for the July success are the hunger strikers themselves, those who put their lives on the line to resist torture. All the positive factors in the world may line up, but without people willing to seize the moment, these amount to naught.

Frantz Fanon wrote, “In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.”28 After decades of mass incarceration, the jailer has joined these “instituted go-betweens” as America’s dungeons have become central elements of class and national oppression. The delay with which most established left groups and talking heads responded to the hunger strike is a measure of their own disconnect from these realities.

Just as California built on advances in Ohio and Georgia, it is to be hoped that future struggles will build on this success and that as part of this process new connections and relationships will emerge between those on the inside and those of us on the outside, allowing space for the movement to overcome these shortcomings.

As Bomani Shakur, one of the Lucasville 5, stated in an open letter to the California hunger strikers: “The system as it currently exists must change, and this, what you all are doing right now, may very well be the catalyst to bring about that change. Remember that.”29

Indeed, this is something that none of us should forget.

K. Kersplebedeb, a Montreal-based writer and purveyor of political books and pamphlets, maintains several websites, including Kersplebedeb and Sketchy Thoughts, where this story first appeared. He can be reached at info at kersplebedeb.com.

1] “The worst of the worst is not allowing people to be treated as human beings” interview with Manuel LaFontaine, Revolution#239, July 17, 2011.

2] “A Brief History of Pelican Bay,” http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/pelican-bay/305-2/

3] Lira v. Cate, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 91292 (N.D. Cal. Sep. 30, 2009). See also Carbone, Charles “The Jailer Has No Clothes,”California Prison Focus #34, pp. 13-4, accessed at http://prisons.org/documents/CPF-34.pdf.

4] “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement” by Craig Haney, Crime & Delinquency 2003 49, p. 132.

5] “State says prison hunger strike involves fewer than two dozen inmates” by Sam Quinones, Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2011.

6] “Statement of Medical Professionals on the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike,” accessed at http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/july1/medical_letter.pdf

7] “Prisoners Near Death as 1,700 California Inmates Continue Hunger Strike to Protest Appalling Conditions” by Marie Diamond, Thinkprogress website, July 13, 2011.

8] “Calif. sees gang ties in prisoners’ hunger strike; Some inmates getting pressured into participating, state says” by Justin Berton, San Francisco Chronicle, July 14, 2011.

9] “More on Medical Crisis, Need Support Pressuring Immediate Negotiations,” July 14, 2011, accessed at http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/more-on-medical-crisis-need-support-pressuring-immediate-negotiations/

10] http://www.scribd.com/doc/62546906/Pelican-Bay-Prisoner-Letter

11] “Barbarous Confinement” by Colin Dayan, New York Times, July 17, 2011.

12] “California needs to improve prison conditions,” editorial, San Jose Mercury News, July 18, 2011.

13] “California’s hidden hunger strike,” editorial, LA Times, July 19, 2011.

14] “Prisoners on Hunger Strike Show Signs of Starvation, Official Wants to Force-Feed,” KQED News Staff, July 20, 2011.

15] “Testing ‘Cruzan’: Prisoners and the Constitutional Question of Self-Starvation” by Mara Silver, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Nov., 2005), pp. 657-9.

16] Silver, pp. 655-6, 660.

17] http://www.scribd.com/doc/62546906/Pelican-Bay-Prisoner-Letter

18] “Building a Movement to End Solitary Confinement, Against Imprisonment,”http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/, July 27, 2011.

19] See: “Historic California Assembly Hearing on Solitary Confinement” by Sal Rodriguez, Solitary Watch, Aug. 24, 2011, accessed at http://solitarywatch.com/2011/08/24/historic-california-assembly-hearing-on-solitary-confinement/.

20] “Written Statement by Short Corridor Collective,” July 22, 2011, accessed at http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/declaring-a-victory-ongoing-struggle/.

21] “This hunger strike is far from over,” San Francisco Bay View, Aug. 12, 2011. And: http://www.scribd.com/doc/62546906/Pelican-Bay-Prisoner-Letter

22] “The CDCR is using every method they have to try and stop this hunger strike,” interview with Carol Strickman, Revolution#239, July 17, 2011.

23] “Free ‘Em All: Carrying the Legacy of Prisoner-Led Resistance in Georgia,” interview with Eugene Thomas, The Abolitionist, Summer 2011, pp. 6-7.
“Georgia prisoners staged a STRIKE, not a riot or a protest,” David Slavin, San Francisco Bay View, Jan. 21, 2011.

24] “Protest retaliation against Georgia prisoners” by Mary Ratcliff, San Francisco Bay View, Feb. 20, 2011.

25] “Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prisoner Population” by Adam Liptak, New York Times, May 23, 2011, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?pagewanted=all

26] “Formal Complaint” Feb. 5, 2011, accessed at http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/formal-complaint/

27] See for instance “California’s prisoner shuffle” by Lois Davis, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 2011.

28] “The Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon, p. 38.

29] “Letter of support for the hunger strikers from Bomani Shakur of the Lucasville 5 – and other strike updates,” San Francisco Bay View, July 3, 2011.

Extracting ourselves from SUPERMAX.

If Maine Can Do It...

------------------from The Crime Report---------------

Maine's dramatic reduction of solitary confinement

The state’s new governor and corrections commissioner have sharply reduced prisoners in solitary without a rise in violence. They may have shown other states a way out of the supermax morass.

Solitary confinement has become more contentious nationally. First there was the controversy over the isolation of Bradley Manning, the soldier arrested for allegedly giving classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Then, earlier this month, more than 6,000 inmates in California prisons began a hunger strike to protest its use at the Pelican Bay prison's Security Housing Unit or "supermax."

As of Thursday, several hundred California prisoners are still on strike, and the weakening condition of some may soon require officials to choose between allowing inmates to die or force-feeding them.

Surprisingly, on the other side of the country the new conservative Republican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, and his new corrections commissioner, Joseph Ponte, a veteran warden, may be able to show other states a way out of the sad, expensive morass that super-maximum-security solitary confinement has become.

Critics say solitary confinement is inhumane and counterproductive, and it costs two or three times regular imprisonment. Only the United States uses it for massive numbers of prisoners, a practice that has become common over the past 25 years.

Across the country, at least 25,000 inmates are in state supermax facilities — generally, in 23-hour-a-day isolation — and another 11,000 are in federal solitary confinement.

In a matter of weeks this spring, Commissioner Ponte dramatically reformed the Maine State Prison’s supermax, the Special Management Unit or SMU. Like others across the country it had been plagued by inmates "cutting up," by suicides and suicide attempts, hunger strikes, inmate assaults on guards, guard assaults on inmates and, in Maine's case, unexplained inmate deaths.

Like its counterparts elsewhere, Maine’s SMU had been increasingly accused of being a torture chamber, especially for the mentally ill.

Ponte's major reform has been to quickly shrink the number of supermax prisoners by almost 60 percent, from a nearly-always-full 132 cells to, recently, 54.

One immediate result is that the unit is calmer, and no great disruption has occurred from putting inmates back into the prison general population. Although wardens have defended supermaxes as necessary to decrease prison violence, academic researchers say there's no evidence this is so.

Maine's experience so far supports the research.

Shrinking Supermax Numbers

Maine is not the first state to shrink its supermax numbers. In recent years Mississippi reduced its Parchman supermax population by 90 percent, also without upheaval. But reforms there were forced by an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit.

In Maine the reforms came about after a grassroots political campaign — and the appointment of a commissioner willing to listen to reformers.

In this respect, Maine is unique. Although its prison system is small and not fraught with gangs, and the reforms are quite recent, activists in other states and the nation's capital are looking closely at Maine and drawing lessons for their own anti-supermax efforts.

"These reforms, if sustained, will make Maine a national leader in rolling back the excessive and unnecessary use of solitary confinement," says David Fathi, head of the ACLU's Washington, D.C.-based National Prison Project.

"We've followed our colleagues in Maine with admiration, awe and envy," says Laurie Jo Reynolds, organizer of the campaign in Illinois to limit solitary confinement at the Tamms supermax.

Maine's own prison reformers are in a mild state of shock at seeing many of their long-time recommendations adopted. Ponte even appointed two members of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition to a Department of Corrections committee coordinating the reforms.

"For the first time in years we have a good relationship" with the commissioner, Judy Garvey, a coalition leader, told the Republican-dominated legislature's Criminal Justice Committee in May.

Committee members appeared pleased with Ponte's actions. A year previously, many of the same lawmakers had sided with the former corrections commissioner in defending solitary confinement.

The change in thinking about corrections in Maine has been astonishing.

Officials Fired

A 64-year-old turnaround specialist who had straightened out some of America's most violent prisons, Ponte also quickly made personnel changes. In the spring he fired two associate commissioners; and last month he dismissed four Maine State Prison guard captains along with the prison’s controversial security chief, a veteran deputy warden whom prisoners, prison critics and former employees had long accused of dealing harshly with both inmates and staff.

Ponte's reforms go beyond the SMU, changing how discipline is enforced throughout the 915-inmate, all-male, maximum-security prison located in the coastal village of Warren.

In the past, guards threw prisoners into the SMU for small infractions, like getting themselves tattooed. Then, in a vicious circle, as an inmate's rage or mental problems grew because of the isolation, his protests added time to his supermax stay.

If he was driven to throw feces at guards — a common supermax phenomenon — he could have years added to his sentence subsequent to a conviction for assault.

Among other changes, Ponte:

* ordered that inmates not be placed in isolation longer than 72 hours without his personal approval;

* imposed a seven-day limit on supermax stays for inmates being investigated for in-prison crimes (in the past, a prisoner might languish for months as an investigation dragged on without him being charged);

* reclassified and moved out of the supermax many prisoners who simply appeared to be there unnecessarily;

* stopped the once-frequent brutal “cell extractions” of uncooperative and often mentally ill inmates; there have been none since May;

* required guards to use what Ponte calls “informal sanctions” to discipline unruly prisoners, like taking away commissary or recreation privileges, as alternatives to "the hole."

The Model: Success with Juveniles

Heading up the committee overseeing the reforms is Rodney Bouffard, superintendent of South Portland’s Long Creek Youth Development Center, a lockup for adolescents.

Reflecting his background (he has run both the chief state psychiatric hospital and the state center for the developmentally disabled), Bouffard has a psychological-treatment approach to corrections.

"Good treatment is good security," he says.

Bouffard got Ponte's attention because he can point to the low recidivism rate of offenders released from Long Creek.

Since he and his team took charge nearly ten years ago, the Department of Corrections claims a one-year recidivism rate drop from 75 percent to between 15 percent and 20 percent. Moreover, there was a reduction in two years from 419 to 15 annual instances of increasingly brief solitary confinement.

Ponte is using Long Creek as a model for the prison system, even though Long Creek's "residents" are kids.

This choice recognizes that many inmates have mental illness. In the Warren supermax, over half have been diagnosed as seriously mentally ill (16 currently are in a special mental-health unit).

Ponte's choice also recognizes that punishment has "negative results. There's no study ever done that shows a punishment model gets good results," says Bartlett "Barry" Stoodley, associate corrections commissioner for juveniles.

"The punishment is what the court gives, the sentence," Ponte says. "We're not in the business of punishment, but corrections. We've got a lot to learn from the juvenile system."

But, he adds, "It's going to take a philosophical change" in the department.

Quiet and unpretentious, Ponte surprised reformers with his receptivity to progressive ideas because he came to Maine from the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America, which has seen its share of prisoner-abuse scandals. But for most of his career he worked for public systems.

In the 1980s in Massachusetts Ponte cleaned up violent Walpole prison, earning him a Boston Globe accolade as "the boy wonder" of state corrections. In the early 2000s he did the same at Shelby County Jail in Memphis, where gangs had sponsored "Thunderdome" fights among inmates.

He went to Maine recommended not only by his correctional colleagues but also, for fairness and responsiveness, by prisoner-rights advocates.

An aide to Gov. LePage said at Ponte's confirmation hearing in February that Ponte was brought to Maine to fix the prison system's problems. Although LePage is a member of the Tea Party-supported crop of Republican governors, with an agenda that includes reductions in taxes and state spending, he is progressive in sharply condemning the fact that prisons and jails have become de facto asylums.

Not Just the Commissioner

By no means are LePage and Ponte solely responsible for the reforms.

Ponte landed in the state as a rethinking was taking place on the part of corrections and elected officials, newspaper editorial writers, and others. They became more concerned about the humaneness, health effects, usefulness and cost of solitary confinement.

The new ideas had been promoted by a home-grown prison-reform movement that made curbing solitary its top priority.

Ponte and his committee guiding the reforms have as their playbook a bold report commissioned last year by the legislature at the behest of these activists.

The report resulted from a study of solitary confinement that legislators ordered as a substitute for a bill they defeated that had been pushed by prisoner-rights, civil-liberties, religious, and mental-health groups.

The bill would have greatly restricted the use of isolation.

The bill had stirred up a statewide discussion, with the Maine branch of the ACLU and churches affiliated with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) playing major roles.

National and Maine experts testified at the bill’s hearing that extended prisoner isolation deteriorates brains and behavior and, under international law, is increasingly considered torture.

Ed NOTE: For more on this, please see "The Anti-Supermax Battle Broadens," The Crime Report, May 17, 2010.

Although the corrections department had opposed the study, a group of diligently researching supermax incarceration.

Delivered to the state’s Criminal Justice Committee early this year,their report signals a stunning turnaround in official thinking about the Warren supermax and the 22-cell SMU at the medium-security Maine Correctional Center at Windham, near Portland.

The report doesn’t oppose solitary confinement per se, but it offers pull-no-punches recommendations to reduce its use and make both SMUs more humane.

The report fell into receptive hands.

With Ponte, says the head of his department's clinical services, psychologist Joseph Fitzpatrick, "There's not a lot of meetings to talk about change.”

Eyes On Maine

In the only campaign similar to Maine's, the grassroots group Tamms Year Ten has tried for several years to improve conditions in the Illinois supermax.

The group twice had reform bills introduced in the legislature, "which we then dropped after reforms were promised. But the reforms never materialized," according to Laurie Jo Reynolds.

Recently, Tamms prisoners were allowed to make telephone calls, which had been promised "back in 2009 when they installed the telephones," she says.

Despite the slow pace of change in her state, Reynolds sees national consciousness of supermax issues expanding. "Maine is the model” for reform, she says, noting that the state has not only set a template for facing its problems, but included advocates in the decision-making process.

John Humphries, program coordinator for Washington-based NRCAT, says Maine's anti-solitary effort is "providing inspiration to similar efforts emerging in other states" — especially because NRCAT and the ACLU are promoting Maine as a model for political action.

In New Mexico, the legislature this year called for a committee to be established to study solitary confinement's impact on inmates, its effectiveness in "reducing problems," and its cost.

The committee will include representatives of the corrections department, the state psychiatrists' and psychologists' associations, the ACLU, and religious groups. A draft report is due next year.

In Colorado, legislators this year watered down a bill that would have made it harder to put mentally ill prisoners in solitary. The new law instead establishes guidelines for the use of solitary and finances more mental-health programs.

But Humphries says a new corrections commissioner "seems open to implementing reforms." Anti-solitary movements, he says, also exist in Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Virginia.

The Jury Is Still Out

Interviewed at the Maine State Prison, Joe Jackson, vice-president of the NAACP inmate chapter, reports that some guards are not happy with the changes.

Jim Bergin, a Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition member on the supermax reform committee, says the committee is grappling with the issue of how to re-educate guards: It's "probably the biggest problem we’re dealing with.”

Ponte acknowledges resistance among the staff, but “I’m holding all of their feet to the fire.”

With time and training — he has increased guard training — he believes those who oppose what he’s doing will come around.

There are other obstacles. Apprehensive about inmates with isolation-exacerbated behavioral problems being released into the general inmate population, reformers have pushed for more prisoner mental-health care. (Mississippi provided considerable mental-health care for its ex-supermax inmates.)

But providing more mental-health care may bump into a financial obstacle.

Three times as much money is spent annually per-prisoner at Long Creek ($149,000) than at the state prison ($47,000).

Long Creek is a smaller institution and therefore its overhead is higher, but its treatment also involves a lot of psychotherapy, and its many high-school and college courses contribute to its success in maintaining order and improving recidivism numbers.

By contrast, little inmate mental-health care or education takes place at the prison.

With savings from reducing supermax incarceration, Ponte may be able to do more for the mentally ill. And "some things will be at no cost," he says. Plus: "We will use current staff in different roles, and we will see what additional cost remains after we get through that process."

So far there has been no big ramping up of inmate programs and, given a strained state budget, extra money for them would be hard to come by.

Still, the reformers are optimistic.

"It's still early, and the challenge will be to sustain these changes over time," says the ACLU's Fahti of the Maine supermax reforms. "But this is a very promising start."

Lance Tapley is a frequent contributor to The Crime Report and a 2010 John Jay/H.F. Guiggenheim Reporting Fellow. This article draws on reporting done for The Portland Phoenix in Maine. The author welcomes comments from readers.