ashker
Pelican Bay hunger strike leader Todd Ashker, in his own writings and discussions about the strike, specifically relied on a number of examples of national and international hunger strikes. He noted that a small group of Ohio prisoners had successfully achieved improvements in their conditions of confinement through a two-week hunger strike earlier in 2011 and that Irish Republican Army prisoner hunger strikers had achieved sustained media attention (O’Hearn 2013; Carroll 2013). In 2009, Denis O’Hearn, a sociology professor from Binghamton University in New York, mailed Ashker a copy of his own book chronicling the hunger strike and eventual death (after sixty-six days) of Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands. Accord- ing to a Los Angeles Times reporter, “the book made the rounds” of the unit where Ashker and his fellow strike leaders were housed (St. John 2013a). According to a Del Norte County reporter, O’Hearn’s book was especially popular among the notoriously violent Aryan Brotherhood, in which correctional officials allege Ashker is a central leader: “The Aryan Brotherhood began pushing a book about a member of the Irish Revolutionary Army who started a hunger strike in which he and several other inmates died protesting prison conditions” (Skeens 2013). Even as the Pelican Bay prison hunger strike leaders looked to the international community for support, reporters and correctional administrators questioned their motives, characterizing their tactics as gang-based and racialized, echoing characterizations of Jackson forty years earlier.