Roughly 200 people gathered at United Nations Plaza, July 9, in solidarity with thousands of California prison inmates holding an indefinite hunger strike to protest what they say are inhuman and torturous conditions.
The unified message of the small, dedicated crowd was clear: If the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation doesn’t find a way to satisfy the five core demands of the strikers, who have been refusing food for 13 days at press time, people are going to die.
“Let’s talk about why anyone would opt to starve to death,” said Barbara Becnel, a member of a mediation team facilitating communication between the strikers and the CDCR. “They say that they are slowly dying under the conditions of torture, and it is torture. That is not hyperbole, that is not rhetoric; it is torture.”
An anonymous member of the Pelican Bay medical staff has stated that over 200 striking prisoners are exhibiting critical health problems.
“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,” the source said.
“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.”
At press time, CDCR was still declining to comment on the medical condition of the strikers or make any official statement concerning their political action.
Organizers outside the prison say the prison guards and staff are using the lack of communication between prisoners to spread disinformation about the strike being over and the demands already being met to discourage further prisoner participation.
By the CDCR’s own estimates, over 6,000 prisoners participated in the strike over the
4th of July weekend, with that number dropping to just over 2,000 a few days later.
Organizers say this drop is due to prisoners who were only participating in solidarity and that the core strikers are still on indefinite hunger strike.
Jerry Elster, an organizer with All Of Us Or None, a prisoner’s rights advocacy group, has experienced the conditions in the SHU firsthand and said he “couldn’t lock an animal up” in the conditions he was subjected to there.
“You look at the five demands; these are practices that should have been done away with years ago,” he said. “They use ‘group punishment’ to divide prisoners along racial lines; if a white person does something, all white people get punished…it’s divide and conquer.”
He added that the policy of “debriefing,” or providing information in exchange for release from the SHU is ludicrous.
“They’re asking you to incriminate yourself. So, you might get out of the SHU, but you’ll never get out of prison.”
The core participants were joined by a contingent of roughly 100 from the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition near the end of the rally.