Day 20: Support The California Prisoners' Hunger Strike

(Note: This is my third essay in support of the California prisoners on hunger strike. The first is here. The second is here. OPOL’s wonderful treatment of the situation is here. The take away: California prisoners on hunger strike for almost 3 weeks have requested your support in their struggle to end long term, 23 hour a day solitary confinement in California’s Special Housing Units. I urge you to support their struggle to be free from torture.)

Today is day 20 of the prison hunger strike. This may be the most significant act of prisoner resistance in 40 years, since the Attica Uprising in 1971.

This morning’s LA Times Editorial calls for an end to the embargo the State has imposed on news of the strike:

Conditions in California prisons are so bad that a panel of federal judges ruled that they violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, but until recently the ensuing protests came mainly from lawyers rather than the inmates themselves. That changed on July 1, when thousands of inmates at one-third of the state's prisons started a hunger strike.


A core group of at least 400 inmates in four prisons continues to refuse food, protesting the way the state treats prisoners deemed to be gang members. The strike began in the Special Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, where 1,100 inmates are isolated in soundproof cells for 22 1/2 hours a day. Their sole reprieve: one hour a day outside in a small area with high concrete walls.

Prison officials say this treatment is necessary to discourage membership in prison gangs, to obtain information on gang activity and to prevent "shot-calling" — the passing of orders from gang leaders to members in other prisons or out on the streets. Moreover, they say the hunger strike is being organized by gang leaders, and some strikers who would rather not participate are being coerced. Prisoner advocates, meanwhile, say such prolonged isolation leads to mental illness and is tantamount to torture.

So who's right? We might have a better handle on that if prison officials weren't refusing requests by The Times to interview striking inmates. Oscar Hidalgo, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told Times staff writer Jack Dolan that media weren't being allowed into Pelican Bay "due to security and safety issues." We'd be more inclined to believe that, and not that prison officials were trying to avoid adverse publicity, if California's prisons didn't have such an extraordinary history of shoddy medical care and inhumane conditions. As it is, we think the public has a right to firsthand accounts of what goes on behind the barbed wire.

That’s where you come in. The walls are keeping the prisoners in, yes, but they are also keeping you, your eyes, your ears, your nose, your heart and most important, your conscience out. This puts the prisoners at even greater risk because it fosters prison officials’ ability to act with impunity to break the strike however they choose, to force feed prisoners in secret and to impose even more excessive, even more punitive conditions to break the strike.
Permitting prison officials to control all of the information about the strike encourages further abuse by a prison system that the Supreme Court has already held imposes cruel and unusual punishment on its prisoners.

There is a story that when Oscar Wilde was first transported to prison, he looked out the train window and said, “Well, if that’s how the queen treats her prisoners, she doesn’t deserve to have any.” How true of California. A rightwing, conservative, ideologically driven Supreme Court ruled that conditions in California’s prisons denied the prisoners freedom from cruel and inhuman punishment. Conditions were that horrible. But the Court did not focus on California’s widespread use of long term solitary confinement. Or its insane policy of holding alleged gang members in solitary confinement for six years or longer if they did not snitch and/or renounce gang membership. And it did not consider the damage to prisoners’ bodies, minds and souls from unremitting isolation from other people. No. The prisoners themselves had to bring that to our attention. And they did so in the only way they possibly could: by starving themselves. This reminds of Bobby Sands. The prisoners had no other choice. And they knew when they began that they had little chance of forcing changes in the barbaric conditions of their confinement unless you, that’s right, you get involved and stand with them and support their struggle to be free from barbaric treatment.
In recognition of this, prisoners at Corcoran have specifically requested your assistance:

“Our indefinite isolation here is both inhumane and illegal and the proponents of the prison industrial complex are hoping that their campaign to dehumanize us has succeeded to the degree that you don’t care and will allow the torture to continue in your name. It is our belief that they have woefully underestimated the decency, principles and humanity of the people. Join us in opposing this injustice without end. Thank you for your time and support”

This is not about whether prisoners should be released. It is not about whether prisoners should remain in confinement. It is not about frivolous demands for country club treatment. this is not a general debate about correctional policy. This is about the torture of brutal, long term, unremitting solitary confinement. We could understand that when we opposed it in Gitmo. We could understand that when we opposed it in “Black Sites” and Bagram. We could understand it when we opposed it for Bradley Manning. The task now is to recognize that these prisoners, too, deserve to be free from the torture of long term solitary confinement. And to take whatever steps we can to oppose it in California, just as we would anywhere else in the world.

To recap:
The core demands of the prisoners are here with a petition in support of the strikers. I urge you to read the demands, all of which are designed solely to protect prisoners’ from being harmed by abusive solitary confinement, and to sign the petition.

Please call and/or write the Governor and the Commissioner to support the striking prisoners:

Secretary Matthew Cate, Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 1515 S Street, Sacramento, CA 95814, Telephone: (916) 323-6001

Governor Jerry Brown, State Capitol, Suite 1173, Sacramento, CA 95814, Telephone: (916) 445-2841

Please speak up for the striking prisoners. Put their struggle on your blog. Put their struggle on facebook. Tweet it. Tell others about the strike. You, if you are reading this, understand the magic of the Internet and its ability to spread important information far and wide. The striking prisoners need you to do that for them. They need you to open your eyes and hearts and mouths and stand against domestic torture. They need your compassion.

Only your support can bring their struggle to a safe and humane solution.

The Arthur Kill Debate

Today's NY Times has a story about the victorious Arthur Kill Correctional Facility Debate Team. Writes the Times:

The two debate teams sat across a large room on Thursday night waiting for their face-off to begin. On one side were the visitors, four undergraduates at the New School, and their equally young coach poring over documents and comparing last-minute notes. Across the room the home team, four men in their 30s and 40s, leaned back in their seats, pictures of poise, their neatly arranged index cards at the ready but untouched.

The students from the Eugene Lang College of the New School were nervous because their team had lost here the previous year; in fact, the opposing team was undefeated in its two-year history, besting opponents like St. John’s University and New York Law School. The students were nervous because they were young and earnest and, as one of them put it, “afraid of offending someone.”

And they were, as one put it, “meta-nervous,” perhaps because they had to argue that the government should not finance higher education in prisons, right there at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, against a team of incarcerated men who could be seen as Exhibit A for the opposing view.

So the Arthur Kill team had the home-turf advantage, plus passion, not to mention direct personal experience — of the four debaters, three are currently special students at the New School, as are many of the two dozen inmates who were on hand to watch. Then there’s the advantage of general life experience, on the outside and in.

A spoiler: Arthur Kill won the debate. One wonders, how could they not? The prisoners clearly know a lot more about the need for education in prison than the undergrads they debated. And the undergrads had spiraled off into the world of Foucault, a world so ethereal, so theoretical that they couldn't have the resources to use it effectively. But I digress.

Arthur Kill is holding more than the four members of the debate team. In fact, it is a remote corner of Staten Island and has about 900 prisoners, who are classified "medium security." It's a prison. And it's not an educational institution. It has no aspirations to become an educational institution. How could it? New York claims to be in its worst budget crisis in decades, and despite the shortsightedness of it, cutting prison programs is a way to save money that does not create instant street demonstrations. Or angry lobbyists. Or strong public relations campaigns and denunciations. If New York can propose cutting funds from schools, how much easier is it to cut from prison programs?

Prisoners, lest one forget, are disenfranchised. They don't have an alumni association. Their loss won't be front page news. The front page is reserved for the corners of the prison gulag that succeed not because of programs, but despite the stringency of captivity.

Quietly Sanctioning Prison Beatings

Clarence Thomas may not have spoken in oral arguments at the Supreme Court in more than four years, but this morning Linda Greenhouse writes in the New York Times about Thomas's consistent, twice repeated argument that the Eighth Amendment does not proscribe "harsh treatment", including beatings of prisoners. You read that correctly. Prison beatings, according to Justice Thomas, aren't forbidden by the Eighth Amendment. And presumably, neither are stress positions, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture. And as if that position were not repulsive enough, Thomas apparently wants it to be adopted by the new majority of the Supreme Court.

Greenhouse points out that during his confirmation hearing, Thomas expressed his empathy for prisoners:

During his Senate confirmation hearing, he had claimed a certain empathy for prisoners. He described looking out the window of his chambers at the Court of Appeals and watching prisoners being loaded into buses to be taken back to their cells. “I say to myself every day, but for the grace of God there go I,” he told the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Those sentiments, however, must have been added solely to manipulate the listeners. They must have been just another sleight of hand attempt to cast himself as a victim. Why do I say that? Because in 1992, four months after he assumed his seat on the Court, Thomas dissented in Hudson v. McMillan. Keith Hudson, if he believed what Thomas said during the confirmation hearings, must have been happy to have him on the Court to hear his case. Hudson "had been kicked and punched by three guards while he was handcuffed and shackled. He suffered bruises, swelling and loosened teeth, injuries that a federal appeals court, in dismissing his lawsuit, deemed so minor as to be beneath the notice of the Eighth Amendment." The Supreme Court reversed and reinstated the suit. In behalf of a 7-judge majority Judge Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, “When prison officials maliciously and sadistically use force to cause harm, contemporary standards of decency always are violated.” Put another way, the Eighth Amendment forbids malicious and sadistic beatings of prisoners.

And what did Thomas (and Scalia) find objectionable with this ruling? Greenhouse puts it this way:

The new justice said that the Constitution’s framers “simply did not conceive of the Eighth Amendment as protecting inmates from harsh treatment.” The Eighth Amendment dealt with only the actual sentence, he maintained, and not with conditions inside a prison or deprivations that were not a formal aspect of the sentence. He said the Supreme Court had taken a wrong turn in the 1970’s when it adopted a more expansive view, and he added, “The Eighth Amendment is not, and should not be turned into, a National Code of Prison Regulation.”

Isn't that wonderful? Guards have always beaten prisoners. The Constitution, and particularly the Eighth Amendment proscription against cruel and unusual punishments, according to Thomas and Scalia, doesn't apply in any fashion to these myriad beatings. The Constitution is silent about post sentence events, including beatings and torture and excessive solitary confinement and lack of medical care and brutality in all forms during a sentence. So prisoners have no recourse in federal court, when they are beaten or otherwise brutalized. So much for empathy. Long live hypocrisy.

Unfortunately, that's not the end of the story. Eighteen years later, in a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court relying on stare decisis followed Hudson in Wilkins v. Gaddy. Jamey L. Wilkins claimed that a guard had answered his request for a grievance form by slamming him onto the concrete floor and then punching, kicking and choking him until another guard pulled the attacker off. Thomas and Scalia concurred in the result in a separate opinion, in which Thomas sought to solicit a case in which he and others in the new Supreme Court majority might overrule Hudson and advance the argument that the Eighth Amendment permits guards to beat prisoners who ask for grievance forms. Greenhouse writes,

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, concurred only in the judgment, not the court’s opinion. “I continue to believe that Hudson was wrongly decided,” he said. But noting that “no party to this case asks us to overrule Hudson,” he said that he was going along with the majority because as long as the precedent was on the books, it clearly required the result the Supreme Court had reached.

Justices do not casually note that “no party has asked us to overrule” a particular precedent. It is an invitation to send the court just such an invitation, and it is a technique that Justice Thomas has used before to good effect. Concurring in a 1997 decision, Printz v. United States, which struck down a federal background check for gun purchasers on states’-rights grounds, Justice Thomas observed that no one has asked the court to look at the case through the lens of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. “Perhaps at some future date” the court would have the opportunity to consider the scope of the Second Amendment, he added, helping to initiate a project that came to fruition in the Heller decision in 2008.

I am horrified, but not surprised by Thomas's views. And to the rest of the world, these views make the United States appear to be a band of brutal barbarians. But, of course, there is really nothing that can be done about this. Thomas and Scalia were appointed for life. One has to wonder aloud how judges with such aberrant and bizarre views of the Constitution have been confirmed.

How To Increase Suffering

The Times Record Herald reports that the New York Prison Guards Union has managed to kill a performance of an inmate musical production. The prisoners, it seems, wrote a play, a musical to be exact, produced it, directed it, and act, sing and dance in it. They were going to show it to prisoners at another, nearby prison.

Why has the production been canceled? Because the guards' union is mad at the Governor because of closings of work release centers in which union member guards are employed, supposedly for budgetary reasons. Not content to fight the Governor directly, not content to picket the Governor, the Union has stepped in to stop the prisoners' showing their play to other prisoners by threatening to picket the performance:

State prison officials have lowered the curtain on an inmate theatrical performance.

A troupe of 18 convicted murderers, robbers and other felons at Woodbourne Correctional Facility had been scheduled to perform an original play Wednesday at Eastern Correctional Facility in Ellenville.

But the state Department of Correctional Services has canceled the show because union workers threatened to picket.

"The commissioner does not want to jeopardize the program or the people in it by putting them in the middle of a statewide labor issue," said DOCS spokesman Erik Kriss.

Great. The guards are angry, so, of course, the prisoners, who have nothing to do with the dispute whatsoever, have to suffer. Is this the guards' reflex, to increase the prisoners' suffering? And is it the state administration's reflex to cave to this kind of pressure? Why is this all so very unsurprising? And how, you might ask, do the Guards explain this, so that it doesn't appear that they're just being bullies and dashing prisoners' hopes for no obvious reason?

In January 2008, inmates began writing and rehearsing their own Broadway-style show about the difficulty of living behind bars and keeping a family. The play, "Starting Over," was funded and supervised by Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce recidivism through arts enrichment programs. The group declined comment on the cancellation, but it forged ahead with a production of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" last week at Sing Sing.

Kevin Walker, regional vice president for the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, said prison farms, annexes and print shops have been useful because they teach skills that can be applied toward a job on the outside. The union saw no value in theater work.

"How many of these medium-security convicts do you think will go to Broadway and get a job?" Walker said. "We believe it's a blatant waste of manpower and funding."

Kriss rebutted that, noting that inmates experienced a range of new emotions and kept busy by learning how to act.

What a joke. And what a disgraceful reason to cancel the prisoners' play. Walker may be an ace union guy (not), but he's a terrible economist, a bad psychologist, and an even worse humanitarian. Is it impossible for prisoners' to do anything just to have a small token of happiness in their day? Apparently not. Not if the guards' union has anything to say about it.

The prisoners, of course, are up a creek on this without a paddle. They don't have an alumni association to stand up for them. And they have virtually no community support-- look what they did before being incarcerated. So they are the ideal targets for the bullies in the Guards Union and the weaklings in the administration.

If there were any justice, the show would go on. Citizens like me and you would insist on it. I'm not holding my breath.

Doing Time

As the holidays approach, I turn as I do every year to focus on those who are incarcerated. This isn't the result of the religious injunction in Matthew 25:44 about visiting those in prison. It's because my business is to defend people charged with serious crimes, and I'm painfully aware that when the defense doesn't work, and it often doesn't, the client pays with with what the Thirteenth Amendment blandly calls "involuntary servitude." That means being a slave of the state. For a long time. A time measured in years. And it's as bad as it sounds.

The 12/31/2007 figures from the Department of Justice reveal the size of the US prison complex and the huge number of people confined in it:

– 2,293,157 prisoners were held in federal or state prisons or in local jails – an increase of 1.5% from yearend 2006, less than the average annual growth of 2.6% from 2000-2006.
– 1,532,817 sentenced prisoners were under state or federal jurisdiction.
– there were an estimated 506 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents – up from 501 at yearend 2006.
– the number of women under the jurisdiction of state or federal prison authorities increased 1.7% from yearend 2006, reaching 114,420, and the number of men rose 1.8%, totaling 1,483,896.

That means that there are more than 3.7 million people who are in prison or jail or under supervision at this minute. So that you can visualize just what these people look like, there's this:

At yearend 2007 there were 3,138 black male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,259 Hispanic male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic males and 481 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males.

Put another way, the prison population is disproportionately male, black and hispanic. We don't need a long discourse to explain this and the obvious racial injustice in the disparity.

But my concerns here are more human than statistical. The walls keep us out. They keep us from thinking about the prisoners. From noticing them. But to be truly human, and to be truly responsible as citizens, we need to be aware of the human side of the imprisonment factory.

How can we conceive of the vast ocean of human misery behind these figures? Is it even possible to describe what long term incarceration is like?

There's a wonderful book by Jarvis Jay Masters, who remains on Death Row at San Quentin, Finding Freedom: Writings From Death Row, that conveys the heartbreaking reality of long term prison in short stories. These stories break my heart.

In one story, a prisoner is finally released after serving decades. His sentence has finally expired. He gives other prisoners all of his belongings, which is a kind of tradition, a statement of solidarity with those who remain behind. A way of saying, "Stay strong." He leaves behind a wrist watch. The person whom he gives the watch thinks it is broken because it does not tick. He cannot hear it ticking. He takes it out on the yard to find somebody who knows how to fix watches, hoping that the watch might be repaired. Only thing is, it doesn't need fixing. He's been locked up for so long that he's missed the change from analog, ticking watches to those with electric clockworks.

Can we feel the isolation and distance and pain of this? Can we understand as well that the job of constantly guarding those the state incarcerates is also frustrating, boring, mind sapping, dangerous work? The prisoners are not alone in suffering in this penal world; everyone in it suffers and aches.

Unfortunately, upon release things aren't always that much better for prisoners. Can we imagine what it's like when someone who endures and survives long term imprisonment is finally released? Can we imagine how strange the world looks? And how frightening? And how dangerous?

Recently, I met a man who was seriously mentally ill. He had served every single day of a 27-year sentence. When he was mandatorily released, his sentence had expired. There was no supervision of any kind. No counselors, no parole officers. Nothing. They gave him a suit, $40, 2 weeks' supply of his psych medications, and they put him on a Greyhound bus to an upstate, New York city. When he arrived, his sister ultimately relented and agreed to take him in. If he behaved. If he took his meds. If he went to look for work. If he behaved himself. Long story short: he didn't refill his prescription. Maybe he didn't want to. Maybe he didn't have money for it. Maybe his Medicaid application was delayed. Nobody's really clear what happened.

One night he finally broke down and in a fit of anger destroyed his sister's kitchen table. She called the cops not to have him arrested but to get him out of the apartment, to get him some help, to get him to a hospital, to calm him down. When the police arrived, he refused to move. They ordered him to put his hands behind his back. He refused. He wouldn't move. At all. They didn't call for a mental health assist, or an ambulance, or a shrink. No. They decided to subdue him because he was not following their verbal commands. A month after his release, a release that came after 27 years, he found himself in jail again, charged with the assaulting officers his sister called to help him. Can we imagine how painful this is?

The stories could go on and on. You cannot see what prison is like in those old grainy movies where the prisoners bang their tin cups on the bars, make license plates, break rocks with a sledge hammer, and steal shards of metal from the mattress factory to make shivs. Or where they cut the grass at the side of the highway. Or where they chop cotton. Modern incarceration isn't like that. It isolates the confined far more thoroughly. It deprives them of all human touch. It deprives of company. It puts cold steel and glass where bars once were.

The walls keep the prisoners in. But they also keep the world out. Inside there's no real education, training, treatment. Outside we don't know what's happening in our names. And we don't really care. The prisons in upstate New York are the only employment for miles in an economy with nothing else. The cities provide the people to be jailed and watched and fed and clothed. We pay the taxes for all of this, but probably have never been inside a real jail or prison, and probably never will be. We just don't know what it's like. And it's oh so easy to forget about all of this.

Oscar Wilde was right to say, when he saw the convicts at Reading, "Well, if that's how the queen treats her convicts, she doesn't deserve to have any."