social intro
On July 1, 2011, approximately four hundred prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit (SHU) went on hunger strike. Over the next three weeks, at least sixty-six hundred prisoners across the state joined the Pelican Bay prisoners, refusing food in solidarity (Streeter 2011).1 The Pelican Bay SHU is an archetypal US “supermax,” holding prisoners in long-term and near-total isolation. Most of the prisoners participating in the July hunger strike at Pelican Bay had been in solitary confinement, under conditions of severe sensory deprivation, for five or more years; a few had been in solitary confinement for more than twenty years (Small 2011). (Other prisoners throughout California also protested solitary confinement in other facilities; the state has more than three thousand prisoners in four supermax facilities and an additional eight thousand–plus prisoners in shorter-term isolation units throughout the state prison system.) In isolation, these prisoners experience a bare mini-mum of human contact. They can shout at one another through steel doors, visit their lawyers behind bulletproof glass, and see a doctor in times of medical need, as long as their feet remain cuffed together and their hands remain cuffed to “belly chains” around their waists. Correctional administrators, not judges or juries, decide which prisoners deserve or require these harsh conditions of confinement. Correctional administrators assign most prisoners to the Pelican Bay SHU for indeterminate periods—functionally for the duration of their criminal sentence—on the basis of their status as alleged gang leaders. Sixty percent of prisoners in SHUs throughout California are serving indeterminate periods in isolation because they have been labeled gang leaders; 40 percent are serving determinate (or fixed) periods in isolation because they have violated a specific prison rule (Barton 2013). However, scholars estimate that a higher proportion of prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU (closer to 70 percent or more) are serving indeterminate periods in isolation (Shalev 2009; Reiter 2012a). The July 2011 hunger strikers vowed to refuse food until five core demands were met. Their demands, each tied to the harsh conditions of supermax confinement, were poignantly simple: end group punishment and administrative abuse, abolish the debriefing policy, comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement, provide adequate and nutritious food, and expand and provide constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU status inmates (Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity 2011e). In elaborating on these demands, the prisoners specified examples highlighting the narrowness of the concessions they sought, like warm clothes for their one hour per day of outdoor exercise in the “dog run” and permission to make one phone call per week.