Vol. 75/No. 32      September 12, 2011

Ending long-term solitary confinement and punishment of prisoners for refusing to inform on fellow inmates were two key demands of the strikers.

Earl Fears, who spent time in the SHU at Corcoran State Prison, opened the hearing. He described the mental and physical toll on prisoners in solitary, where they are kept in windowless 8x10 cells more than 22 hours a day, without any human contact except guards.

Scott Kernan, undersecretary of operations for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, defended the SHUs. Kernan said they are necessary to segregate violent gang members, “who are involved in terrible assaults on inmates and staff.”

Speaker after speaker responded to Kernan. They cited examples of family members or friends condemned to the SHUs not because of violent acts, but based on being “validated” as gang members by prison authorities. Among the “evidence” used are tattoos, possession of Aztec drawings, speaking or exercising with a gang member, being fingered by another prisoner, or even by having a book by George Jackson, the Black inmate at San Quentin who exposed inhumane conditions and was killed by guards in 1971.

“Prison staff are free to condemn a prisoner to the SHU for an indeterminate sentence at will,” said Virginia Gutierrez Brown, whose husband has been in the Pelican Bay SHU for 22 years.

In response to questioning by state legislators, Kernan said the corrections department plans to continue “debriefing,” the code word for pressuring prisoners to finger others as gang members in return for better treatment or release from the SHU. Ending this practice was a major demand of the hunger strikers. It divides inmates and serves as a means of control over those it turns into informers, the strikers explained. Prisoners in the SHUs have been kept there, in some cases for decades, simply because they refuse to make up or provide information that will do harm to others.

Ron Ahnen, who works with California Prison Focus, a magazine featuring prisoners’ articles and letters, emphasized that inmates validated as gang members are often “those who stand up for themselves, who stand up for other prisoners.”

“The SHUs are not primarily about gang activities any more than the ‘war on drugs’ is about drugs,” James Harris of the Socialist Workers Party said at the hearing. “They are attacks on the working class as a whole. They are meant to terrorize us out of activity and put fear in our hearts.” The hunger strike, he said, shows “these prisoners are not just victims, but are capable of organizing themselves to fight.”

Protesters gathered on the steps of the capitol the morning of the hearing for a rally sponsored by the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Committee. Meredith Drennan from Santa Rosa said her son lost 30 pounds in the hunger strike. “What impresses me most,” she said, “was how they organized across racial lines. The prison authorities impose their will by divide and conquer. The thing they fear most is unity.”  
 
 
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