Hunger strike in California prisons escalate |
|
Jesse
Strauss Last Modified: 20 Aug 2013 16:17
http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/08/20138209616810482.html |
|
Risk of organ failure, disruption of all metabolic
function, loss of at least 18 per cent of initial body weight and
potential death are the health risks associated with going 42 days
without food, according to California Correctional Health Care Services - a
government agency tasked with handling medical care for the state’s
133,000 prisoners.
Sunday, August 18, was day 42 for scores of prisoners,
and the reforms being demanded in their hunger strike continue to be
met with a refusal to negotiate by prison authorities.
According to the most recently available information
from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)
from Friday, August 16, 190 prisoners are on strike at seven prisons
throughout the state.
That number is down from the initial 30,000 who started
the protest on July 8, five months after a group of prisoners calling
themselves the Pelican Bay Human Rights Movement called for protest action last February.
As scores of prisoners’ bodies break down, potential for
meaningful negotiation plays out outside the SHU cells in a war of
ideas: Prisoner advocates want the CDCR to negotiate and accept
significant reforms along the lines of strikers’ demands while prison
authorities refuse to acknowledge the strike as a legitimate form of
protest.
“The department [CDCR] is very concerned about these
inmates and their health and well-being,” CDCR spokesperson Terry
Thornton told Al Jazeera. “There are numerous ways for inmates to have
their concerns raised or addressed. This is not a productive way for
them to do that,” Thornton said, referring to lawsuits and a complex
web of state and federal oversight of prisons as alternatives.
Judicial precedent
One recent case that went through the US Supreme Court
took more than 10 years to resolve, and a lawsuit on behalf of
California’s striking prisoners by the national Center for
Constitutional Rights has been moving through court procedures.
Meanwhile, prisoners continue to live in conditions they call torture.
“The hunger strike is the only tactic available to
prisoners,” Azadeh Zohrabi, a prisoner rights lawyer, said. “The 602
process [which gives a legal route for prisoners to bring grievances
directly to the prison] is completely ineffective and Kafkaesque. The
litigation will take years to bring results and CDCR keeps stalling.
Even if we win the lawsuit, CDCR has shown that they don't follow court
orders - not even the [US] Supreme Court.”
Zohrabi was referring to the recent court order by the
government’s highest court that gave California Governor Jerry Brown a
slap on the wrist for not being quick enough to reduce the state’s
prison population after the court ordered him to do so due to
overcrowding.
As imprisoned strikers amplify conditions in the most
isolated parts of California prisons, those who run the system that
administers those conditions steer the debate away from what those
prisoners are dying for.
“There is no solitary confinement in California
prisons,” Thornton told Al Jazeera. “I ask a lot of people: ‘How do you
define solitary confinement?’ And I get a different answer from
everybody…there is no consensus on what solitary confinement is.”
Prisoner advocates disagree and say Thornton and the
CDCR are reaching for ways to delegitimize legitimate demands that are
part of a legitimate struggle.
“Of course CDCR won't admit that solitary confinement
exists because the practice has been widely condemned as torture and
they are currently being sued for it,” Zohrabi said, citing the UN
Rapporteur on Torture’s definition: "The physical and social isolation
of who are confined to cells for 22-24 hours a day."
Solitary confinement
Indeed, prisoners housed in isolation cells, called
Security Housing Units (or SHU), are kept there for more than 22 hours
each day, and their time outside their cells consists of solitary
workout time in a cement room and behind-glass visits with lawyers or
family members. Visitation can be quite a commitment, as Pelican Bay
prison, where the strike started, is in the northernmost part of
California - more than a 12-hour drive from Los Angeles County, where
many prisoners housed in the Pelican Bay’s SHU are from. Most prisoners
housed in the SHU have no physical contact with people other than
guards for their entire SHU term. According to the undersecretary of
the CDCR, from a statement in 2011, the state’s average SHU term is 6.8 years.
“Of course the officers talk to the prisoners, and the
prisoners can yell within earshot of other prisoners, so they are not
100 percent isolated,” Terry Kupers, a clinical
psychiatrist who studies the psychological effects of solitary
confinement, told Al Jazeera. “But it is disingenuous for
the CDCR to claim this means they are not in solitary [confinement],
since that ‘talk’ occurs in the several seconds it takes to pass a food
tray through a slot in the metal door, and yelling at people one cannot
see does not exactly constitute meaningful human communication.”
The current hunger strike comes two years after the same
prisoners coordinated similar actions in 2011. As they readied
themselves for the current round of strikes, prisoner organizers said
that while the prison system did engage some reforms as a result of
their earlier action, the reforms have not been meaningful.
“Our decision [to strike] does not come lightly,” they
wrote, in a letter published on June 20 of this year. “For the
past (2) years we’ve patiently kept an open dialogue with state
officials, attempting to hold them to their promise to implement
meaningful reforms, responsive to our demands. For the past seven
months we have repeatedly pointed out CDCR’s failure to honor their
word… and what they need to do to avoid the resumption of our protest
action.”
Thornton, the CDCR’s spokesperson, responded to this
prompt by describing the ambiguity of the demand for meaningful
reforms: “How do you define ‘meaningful’?”
Thornton’s question is an assertion that regarding the
hunger strike, it is the prison authorities that wield power over the
reform process. The reforms instituted after the 2011 strikes are
meaningful enough to the CDCR, regarding the grievances that strikers
continue to raise.
“All we’re asking from inmates is to refrain from
criminal gang behavior and get along with other people,” Thornton said,
in line with her department’s latest public challenge in the hunger
strike’s war of ideas. “That’s all society asks of humans.”
Framing the strike through criminality in this way is
the most recent of CDCR’s media strategies in the war of ideas.
“We believe that the real purpose behind
this hunger strike is for these gang leaders to get themselves out into
the general population where they have more access to running their
gang business, both in the prison and in our communities,” CDCR
Secretary Jeffrey Beard was quoted as saying earlier this month.
Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, a strike leader housed in Pelican
Bay’s SHU, cites he and other leaders’ history of organizing for the
exact opposite reasons.
“We called for an end to hostilities to eliminate giving
prison guards an excuse to kill prisoners,” Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, a
striker housed in Pelican Bay’s SHU, said, referring to a document he and other leaders
published in the summer of 2012. “We realize nothing productive can be
done to change the current state of our situation, our prison
environment, unless we end the hostilities between prisoners and end
all racial and gang violence within the CDCR.”
Members of the mediation team that advocates for the
striking prisoners told Al Jazeera, that in a closed-door meeting on
March 15 of this year, the CDCR admitted that violence in the prisons
has decreased since the agreement to end hostilities was issued.
A set up?
Beard’s statements also coincided with the unsealing of
a legal document that names one of the hunger strike leaders, Arturo
Castellanos, as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a variety of illegal
violent acts and narcotics sales with the Mexican Mafia gang. The
document says that Castellanos gave orders to gang members outside the
prison through coded phone conversations and personal visits, all
coordinated from his isolated SHU cell that is built to keep people
outside the SHU safe from the wrath of those inside.
Castellanos calls the indictment and the timing of its
release a setup.
“Behind that 2006 indictment, this prison in August of
2008 severely restricted all my incoming and outgoing correspondence,”
Castellanos wrote in a letter from his 38th day without food.
“Just one week after my restrictions was officially lifted [on May 23,
2013], I began to receive letters from total strangers who claimed they
were from my childhood area and they were clearly asking me for
permission to conduct illegal activities.”
Kupers says the newly public charges have ulterior
motives: “First, that is ridiculous and disingenuous on
the face of it - 30,000 prisoners have participated in the hunger
strike, the majority having nothing to do with gangs - but secondly
this obvious and desperate attempt to villainise the hunger strikers
ignores the very reasonable and just demands of the striking prisoners.”
Thornton, on the other hand, maintains that the
indictment is part of the regular rule of law: “That’s the result of a
three-year long investigation. That means that that inmate was engaging
in organized criminal gang behavior during the last three hunger
strikes…While some of these inmates are alleging all of this
abuse…they’re still engaging in criminal gang behavior.”
But striker advocates say that what is labeled “gang
behavior” by the CDCR is a political tool rather an attempt by these
prisoners - who, again, have publicly called for an “end to
hostilities” and gang violence.
“This is about human rights, not gangs,” Zohrabi told Al
Jazeera. “I got a letter from a hunger striker that said ‘if IGI [the
gang investigation unit] hears you fart they will try to decode it for
gang messages.’ The bottom line is that CDCR has already made up its
mind that these guys are gang members and anything they do will be
construed as gang activity.”
More than 42 days into the protest, the state’s refusal
to meet striking prisoners’ demands is being held up as strong as
protesters’ determination to achieve them. All parties realize that
without either prisoners or the CDCR ceding battle, the imprisoned will
start to perish.
They all say they fear the impending deaths - coming
closer and closer by the hour – but with no clear negotiations in site,
that next hurdle in the conflict will be far more damning than any
slant or spin in the war of ideas.
“I don't know what will make [the hunger
strike] effective,” Zohrabi told Al Jazeera. “I hope it’s not the death
of the hunger strikers.”
On Monday, August 19 - day 43 of the strike a federal judge approved a request by state and federal prison
authorities to engage the controversial practice of force-feed striking
prisoners.
"If an inmate gets to the point where he can't tell us
what his wishes are, for instance if he's found unresponsive in his
cell, and we don't have a [Do Not Rescusitate order], we're going to
get nourishment into him,” said Joyce Hayhoe, a spokesperson for the
federal receiver who controls inmate medical care. "We'd take any and
all measures to sustain their life.
On the other hand, prisoners say that they have been demanding
precisely that: measures to sustain their life including an end to
“torture” and violations of human rights.
“This order violates all international laws and
standards and gives the medical director of each prison authority to
violate human rights laws instead of reasonably negotiating with
prisoners,” Claude Marks of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity
Coalition said.
"This approach, much like Guantanamo, sets the US apart
from all related international human rights standards." |
--
Freedom Archives
Freedom Archives
Questions and comments may be sent to claude@freedomarchives.org
--
SIGN THE JERICHO COINTELPRO PETITION!
Free All Political Prisoners!
www.jerichony.org
No comments:
Post a Comment