We has seen the abuse at Corcoran prison in CA. Shameful. Someone can be there for a drug charge or petty theft or being at the wrong place at the wrong time. the conditions in US prison is horrific and inhumane. Pelican Bay and Corcoran could compete with Guantanamo. We are a very sick nation.
Even with a Democrat Gov, lt Gov, Legislature, and Attorney General.. they are allowing the prison to decline negotiating with the hunger strikers and to allow them to starve to death in a very inhumane way.
Please sign the petition
http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/take-action/For two weeks now, prisoners in California have been on hunger strike, protesting inhumane conditions there and demanding some very minimal changes to their living conditions.
Make the calls:
http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/take-action/cdcr-and-california-elected-officials-contact-informaion/ http://www.truth-out.org/california-prison-hunger-strikers-health-declines-state-will-not-negotiate/1310667736At a news conference Wednesday in San Francisco, supporters of the hunger strikers said the health of some inmates had deteriorated to critical levels.
Doctors will not force-feed striking inmates, all of whom reserved the right to refuse meals and medical treatment, she said.
"They have the right to choose to die of starvation if they wish,"
"They're human beings, too," Irma Hedlin said. "They made their mistakes in life, and they're paying for it. But just because they're there, you just can't throw them into a hole and forget about them."
It’s been two weeks since a group of inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit stopped eating. Their hunger strike was launched to protest conditions in solitary confinement in California’s oldest and largest supermax, where they spend at least 22 1/2 hours a day locked down in their cells, and the remaining time alone in concrete exercise yards. Many have been in the SHU for years or even decades, with little hope of ever leaving it alive–an extreme situation that, to their minds, called for extreme measures.
According to the coalition, a ”source with access to the current medical conditions who prefers to be unnamed” said: “The prisoners are progressing rapidly to the organ damaging consequences of dehydration. They are not drinking water and have decompensated rapidly. A few have tried to sip water but are so sick that they are vomiting it back up. Some are in renal failure and have been unable to make urine for 3 days. Some are having measured blood sugars in the 30 range, which can be fatal if not treated.”
The hunger strikers’ list of five “core demands” is far from radical. In large part, it is based on the recommendations of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons, which in 2006 called for substantial reforms to the practice of solitary confinement.
Asked to comment on the strike, David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, said: ““It’s testimony to the suffering caused by solitary confinement that some prisoners are apparently willing to starve themselves to death rather than continue to live under those conditions.”
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It is beyond me why we as a people are letting this happen. Have you called the yet? Please do so.
letter from one on the inside:
It should be clear to everyone that none of the hunger strike participants want to die, but due to our circumstances, whereas that state of California has sentenced all of us on Indeterminate SHU program to a “civil death” merely on the word of a prison informer (snitch).
The purpose of the Hunger Strike is to combat both the Ad-Seg/SHU psychological and physical torture, as well as the justifications used of support treatment of the type that lends to prisoners being subjected to a civil death. Those subjected to indeterminate SHU programs are neglected and deprived of the basic human necessities while withering away in a very isolated and hostile environment.
Prison officials have utilized the assassination of prisoners’ character to each other as well as the general public in order to justify their inhumane treatment of prisoners. The “code of silence” used by guards allows them the freedom to use everything at their disposal in order to break those prisoners who prison officials and correctional officers (C/O) believe cannot be broken.
It is this mentality that set in motion the establishing of the short corridor, D1 through D4 and its D5 though D10 overflow. This mentality has created the current atmosphere in which C/Os and prison officials agreed upon plan to break indeterminate SHU prisoners. This protracted attack on SHU prisoners cuts across every aspect of the prison’s function: Food, mail, visiting, medical, yard, hot/cold temperatures, privileges (canteen, packages, property, etc.), isolation, cell searches, family/friends, and socio-culture, economic, and political deprivation. This is nothing short of the psychological/physical torture of SHU/Ad-Seg prisoners. It takes place day in and day out, without a break or rest.
The prison’s gang intelligence unit was extremely angered at the fact that prisoners who had been held in SHU under inhuman conditions for anywhere from ten (10) to forty (40) years had not been broken. So the gang intelligence unit created the “short corridor” and intensified the pressure of their attacks on the prisoners housed there. The object was to use blanket pressure to encourage these particular isolated prisoners to debrief (i.e. snitch on order to be released from SHU).
The C/Os and administrative officials are all in agreement and all do their part in depriving short corridor prisoners and its overflow of their basic civil/human rights. None of the deliberate attacks are a figment of anyone’s imagination. These continuous attacks are carried out against prisoners to a science by all of them. They are deliberate and conscious acts against essentially defenseless prisoners.
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Urge CDCR & CA Elected Officials to Honor the Prisoner’s Demands!!
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