TORTURE: ASIAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES | JUNE-AUG 2013
strengthen that weak spot with a patch. What is crime but a reflection of the weakness in the social fabric? Rather that repair the tear, however, the government rips the garment open wider. And when that does not fix the problem they do it again, and so on. The Solution California prisoners are struggling for change. Their first step was to unite all of the prison gangs into a united front. People call this leadership of this front the Representatives. The struggle started in the Security Housing Units (SHUs or solitary confinement) of that state’s prison system. As political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has said “Solitary confinement, especially for extended terms, is quite literally soul damning or the states way of killing without killing. I’ve seen men mutilate themselves, cut their necks, their throats, all because the mind killing boredom drove them out of their skulls. There’s a reason the United Nations special rapporteur calls solitary a form of torture if one is held that way over a few weeks, because it is.” Here we have people held in solitary confinement for decades. The form this struggle against isolation has taken so far is the use hunger strikes (HS); the first of these was initiated on July 1, 2011, and the second in October of that year. During the first HS the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) first said there were only about a dozen prisoners participating in the hunger strike, and then only in only one prison. But very soon they had to admit publicly that there were 6,600 prisoners on hunger strike in 13 prisons. That HS went on for three weeks and had a great deal of outside support from the community. The strike was a major news story, not only in California but across the country. The first HS ended when the CDCR promised to meet the prisoners’ five core demands.
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The CDCR then stalled and procrastinated and manoeuvred in every way it could to keep from implementing the demands. This intransigence by the state led to another Hunger Strike in October of 2011 (HS2). The number of participants in HS2 peaked at nearly 12,000 (11,898 according to the Office of the Special Master, and slightly less than that, 11,619, according to CDCR’s own figures). This second HS lasted for several weeks as well. Each HS ending only after prison officials agreed to negotiate around the SHU prisoners’ five core demands. Never before in known history have so many people gone on hunger strike, let alone it being prisoners who accomplished