30,000 California Prisoners Hunger Strike Against Long-Term Solitary Confinement

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Source: Think Progress

An estimated 30,000 California inmates refused all three meals yesterday, in an announced hunger strike to protest prolonged solitary confinement that can last upwards of a decade.
The strike focuses on practices at Pelican Bay, an infamous facility that one of the American hikers held hostage in Iran called as bad or worse than the treatment he experienced in Iran.

A lawsuit last year alleged that more than 500 inmates have been held in solitary confinement for 10 to 28 year, and that 78 prisoners have been held in solitary for more than 20 years. Overall, recent estimates suggest some 80,000 inmates have been placed in solitary confinement, for as long as 42 years. Since then, corrections officials have begun reviewing isolation determinations and released nearly half of the 400 prisoners reviewed, according to the LA Times.
Confinement typically involves isolation for 23 hours a day in a small, often windowless room with a steel door. When prisoners are let out of the cell for showers at least 3 times a week, they are taken to another small, isolated space where they are sometimes locked for extended periods of time.

In an in-depth exposé for Mother Jones, formerly imprisoned hiker Shane Bauer subjected himself to solitary confinement at Pelican Bay last year, revealing the arbitrary, secret, and virtually irreversible manner in which individuals are placed in solitary confinement by an institutional gang investigator.
A common justification is to isolate those thought to be “associates” in prison gangs, and the types of evidence deemed to prove that fact have included possession of black literature, left-wing materials and writing about prisoner rights as evidence. What’s more, a California court ruled in January that Pelican Bay has been improperly using race as a proxy for gang membership, and subjected different races to varying treatments.

Defenders of the system point out that an internal appeal process exists. But when Bauer asked “for an example of an appeal resulting in a reversal of a gang validation, they couldn’t produce a single case. Gang investigator Barneburg, who has worked at Pelican Bay for 15 years, has never seen a validation appeal succeed either—evidence, he says, of his team’s thoroughness.”

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/07/09/2271221/30000-california-prisoners-hunger-strike-against-long-term-solitary-confinement/