A Mother Who Wanted to Know When Her Son Would Eat...& a Family Movement Against Solitary Confinement

I'm pleased to announce that my latest piece on Waging NonViolence examines the amazing organizing of family members of people who have spent years, if not decades, in solitary confinement.

At the Security Housing Unit in Pelican Bay State Prison, Johnny spends nearly 24 hours a day locked in a windowless cell. Twice a day, food is shoved through a slot in the door. He exercises alone in a cement yard the length of three cells with a roof only partially open to the sky. He never sees the sun. This has been Johnny’s life for the past 13 years.

The Security Housing Unit, known as the SHU, comprises half of Pelican Bay State Prison in the coastal town of Crescent City, 13 miles from the Oregon border. Prison administrators place people in the SHU either for a fixed term for violating a prison rule or for an indeterminate term for being accused of gang affiliation. Accusations often rely on confidential informants and circumstantial evidence. Hundreds have been confined within the SHU for more than 10 years. Until recently, providing information incriminating others, a process known as debriefing, was the only way to be released from the SHU. Those implicated are then placed in the SHU for an indeterminate sentence. One does not necessarily need to be a gang member to be sent to the SHU; jailhouse lawyers and others who challenge inhumane prison conditions are disproportionately sent to the SHU. Johnny was one of those jailhouse lawyers.

By 2011, SHU prisoners had had enough. They declared a hunger strike, demanding an end to these policies and conditions. Over a thousand people, including Johnny, joined in. Although not the first time SHU prisoners have gone on hunger strike, this particular call came at a time when prison organizing was intensifying. Less than a year earlier, in December 2010, people in a dozen Georgia prisons united across racial lines to go on work strike. Their demands included wages for their labor, educational opportunities, decent health care, nutritious meals and improved living conditions. In Illinois, activists were on the verge of closing the notorious Tamms prison, where men spent years in extreme isolation. Across the nation, lawsuits against inhumane prison conditions were filed — and won. At the same time, an increasing number of people were paying attention to mass incarceration and its effects, questioning the need to lock 2.3 million people behind bars at exorbitant prices. Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow,” which traced the evolution from Jim Crow to today’s drug war policies, popularized the issue.

You can read the entire article, complete with links and photos, here:
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/...