Hunger Strikes and the Incarcerated Credible Messenger: A Lived Perspective on Solidarity, Labeling, and Resistance in California Prisons

On July 1, 2011, approximately four hundred prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison began a sustained hunger strike. Most of these prisoners had been in total solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation, for five or more years; a few had been in isolation for more than twenty years. The prisoners vowed to refuse food until five core demands were met. These demands were poignantly simple, including provision of warm clothes for their one hour per day of outdoor exercise in the “dog run,” permission to make one phone call per week, a supply of adequate food, and the possibility that indefinite assignment to total solitary confinement might be reviewed after some number of years. The first phase of the strike lasted three weeks, until correctional officials promised to reconsider the state’s segregation policies. Drawing on previously unavailable videos of negotiations between the strike leaders, published media interviews and correspondence with hunger strikers and correctional administrators, and contemporary news reports of the events, this article examines the history, tactics, and implications of the massive hunger strike that took place in California’s highest-security prison (a supermax) in the summer of 2011. The article argues that the strike embodies a legitimacy paradox. Although the history of prison organizing in California, and of hunger strikes around the world, suggests that prisoners willing to die to protest prison injustices also undermine the legitimacy of the system inflicting those injustices, the 2011 California prisoners on hunger strike repeatedly invoked the broader legitimacy of the US prison system. Indeed, the article argues that, although prisoners drew on an international dialogue about basic human rights and appropriate tactics of resistance to rights violations, the US supermax context limited the reform conversation to small, mundane debates about the language of rules and the slight adjustments in privileges provided to prisoners. But that very conversation ultimately highlighted the extremity of the conditions in supermax confinement, driving unprecedented and sustained media and legal attention to the use of supermaxes, across the United States and internationally, and inspiring another larger (thirty thousand prisoners participated at the peak) and longer (sixty days) hunger strike in 2013.

When a Social Security recipient reaches the age of 50 years, he or she is classified as "closely approaching advanced age." Todd Ashker is passing this tipping point at Pelican Bay State Prison in California, a supermaximum security facility. My wife and I have corresponded with Mr. Ashker for more than half a dozen years. Although I cannot verify the details of his account, we believe that his representation of facts is generally reliable. He is one of the spokespersons for prisoners who conducted two hunger strikes in 2011 protesting conditions of their confinement. Another, sixty-day hunger strike took place in 2013. Thus, what follows is a story of resilience as well as victimization.

The Carceral Universal and the Prison Particular

This essay explores the militarization of everyday life in the United States today, following decades of unresolved cycles of wars fought at home (e.g., the war on drugs) and abroad. A “continuum of violence” is established, through which the tactics of war and war crimes gradually seep into domestic civilian life as the new norms. The gross abuses of presumed enemy combatants in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay come back to haunt us, as war crimes abroad impact behavior at home. The expansion and deformation of US prison culture—isolation, solitary confinement, and other dehumanizing practices—illustrate the militarization of US society. The mimetic recycling of war- and peacetime crimes is complete when the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantánamo Bay finds its parallel in the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Pelican Bay prison in California. The normalization of the abnormal and the militarization of everyday life appear in the proliferation of armed and dangerous gated communities, the presence of the invisible de rigueur house gun or house arsenal, invisible surveillance, and civilian passive acquiescence to stop-and-frisk encounters as well as in the mass incarceration (without mass protest) of “dangerous populations,” almost any young black man, Latino gang members, and small-fry neighborhood drug dealers. The normalization of long-term solitary confinement in Security Housing Units (SHUs) in US prisons crosses over into the realm of torture and crimes against humanity.

Between 2011 and 2013, prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay Prison launched three collective hunger strikes protesting long-term solitary confinement. At the height of the third strike, 30,000 prisoners across the state refused food, ultimately forcing California to alter and limit its use of solitary confinement. Collective resistance of this scale is rare in prison, especially in supermax facilities, which attack prisoners’ subjectivity and condition expressions of agency that are harmful to self and others. Through a rhetorical analysis of the imprisoned activists’ accounts of cross-racial coalition building, I argue that prisoners found means to survive and resist social death by restoring a discursive space across cells and by claiming control of their bodies through regimes of self-discipline. I conclude by considering implications for mainstream prison reform discourse.

The chapter explores how memorial constructions of George Jackson’s resistance against California’s prison system provide a discursive symbol of prisoner liberation that stretches across time and space. Writing between traditions that have both excoriated Jackson as criminal and celebrated Jackson as an intellectual, the chapter takes up Jackson’s activism within the framework of his lived experience as a California prisoner whose choices were always restricted by prison’s bondage. To break free of prison’s metaphorical and physical walls, Jackson’s activism was rooted in a transnational struggle for Black Liberation that equated the prisoners’ plight alongside Marxist movements for national revolution and independence in Vietnam, Cuba, South Africa, and South America. After his 1971 death at the hands of California prison guards, Jackson became a cultural martyr and a palimpsest as a memorial and symbolic inspiration to future abolitionist and protest campaigns against carceral regimes. Drawing on the transnational cultural memory of Jackson as ardent prison abolitionist, the chapter discerns a new era of prison protest where California’s prison hunger strikes in 2012 and 2013 share Jacksonian inspiration with the first-ever national prison work strike in 2016.

This article underscores Black radicalism as an underacknowledged but pivotal motivation of the 2011 and 2013 California prison hunger strikes. Originating from long-term solitary confinement, the strike expanded across thirty-four prisons amassing over 30,000 hunger strikers. It was a cross-racial effort led by a small collective of leaders at Pelican Bay State Prison who understood the racialising and racist segregationist forces of solitary confinement, and deliberately worked across difference to form a united front against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The author emphasises the political – rather than legal – motivations and aspirations of the hunger strikes, so as to argue that Black radicalism was central to strikers’ political consciousness. This article is the result of extensive oral history interviews with one of the strike leaders, as well as archival and public document research, and shows how discourse on the strike has been white-washed through the reproduction of the prison’s racialised gang classification systems. Black radicalism is, according to the author, foundational to understanding the political importance of the strike and its still-emerging political horizons.

DOI 10.1515/cjpp-2013-0009 Calif. J. Politics Policy 2013; 5(2): 146–167 Keramet Reiter* The Origins of and Need to Control Supermax Prisons Abstract: Supermaxes are prisons designed to impose long-term solitary con- finement. Supermax prisoners spend 23 h or more per day in windowless cells. Technology, like centrally controlled automated cell doors and fluorescent lights that are never turned off, allows prisoners to be under constant surveillance, while minimizing all human contact. California built two of the first and largest supermaxes in 1988 and 1989. Corcoran State Prison and Pelican Bay State Prison, which together house more than 3000 prisoners in supermax conditions, were two of 23 new prisons built in California during the late twentieth century era of rapidly increasing incarceration rates and prison capacities. This article will address three stages of supermax operation in California: (1) the early, tumul­tuous years of total administrative discretion and egregious abuses; (2) the middle years of controlled expansion and entrenchment of supermax use; and (3) the recent events and reforms initiated following a hunger strike in California’s segregation units in the summer of 2011. The history of California’s use of supermax prisons reveals both the role of administrative discretion in shaping the initial design and day-to-day operation of the institutions, as well as the perverse incentives that made these institutions increasingly invisible and decreasingly governable. Supermaxes, then, serve as an important piece of the story of mass incarcera- tion in California, a microcosm of the larger trends in administration, law, and politics, which have created the social and economic behemoth of a state prison system facing Californians today. Keywords: California prison system; correctional institutions; penology; prisons; solitary confinement; supermax. *Corresponding author: Keramet Reiter, Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and of Law, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA, e-mail: reiterk@uci.edu They had sent me up there saying that I was a gang member, that I was a shot caller, that I was involved in violence . . . I’ll never forget that day . . . I remember go[ing] up on a bus, and it took forever to get there . . . I’m just looking at trees, birds. And you see it’s a beautiful coast out there . . . the big old pelicans and I’m trying to get every[thing] I can because I know that it’s over . . . There’s rumors, Lord . . . They say that you are 24 hours a day in your cell. That’s what they were bragging about the place – it’s the worst of the worst. It’s the new Alcatraz . . . Then

A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes

A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes

This article seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory materials of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment, exclusion, and extermination. The prison is now the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden from sight, it defines our society in profound ways. Concentrating on the recent hunger strikes in the security housing units (SHUs) of Pelican Bay and throughout the California prison system, this essay reflects on the long reach and myriad forms of law in our penal archipelago. The new global order of justice not only focuses on those accused of criminal acts but also targets the racially suspect, the poor, the expendable. Why should we—those of us inside the privileged circle of life, free of police power, secure in our jobs, still in our homes—fear encountering the long arm of “The Patriot Act” or “The Military Commissions Act”? Why should we fear the political expediency of “preventive detention” for those considered threats to order and to the American way of life? What kind of life is this—life lived on the edge, in the shadow of legal outlawry?