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(photo: Image by Rashid Johnson (Red Onion Prison in Virginia) in support of CA hunger strikers)
Prisoners engaged in a hunger strike at Pelican Bay supermax prison have been on strike for more than fifteen days now. With a growing group of supporters on the outside, the strike against solitary confinement and other conditions in the prison has spread to at least thirteen other prisons. But, those providing support for the prisoners are concerned about the deteriorating physical conditions of the prisoners and whether the prison will be able to provide the prisoners with proper medical care.
Carol Strickman, staff attorney for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and staff to the mediation team representing the hunger strikers, reports medical protocol is not being followed. They are supposed to be doing “daily assessments after two days and that includes weighing, physical condition, emotional condition, vital signs (such as blood pressure) and hydration status.
“We know that these things are not happening, either at all or sporadically,” says Strickman.
Scales for weighing prisoners are not synchronized and sometimes the prison staff weighs prisoners with chains and sometimes without chains. So, the accuracy of information is questionable right now. Additionally, the doctors are supposed to be performing physical exams. Strickman reports, instead of providing physical exams, “The medical staff is doing what I have been told are called drive-by exams, where they stand outside the door with no physical contact and just ask if people are okay, which is basically saying, ‘Are you alive?’”
Strickman further reports “medications are being eliminated entirely or reduced.” Multivitamins and salt tablets were to be provided to prisoners. Prisoners were given a sheet of medical advice on what to do during the strike. Yet, none of the prisoners have been provided with any tablets.
There are reports of weight loss as high as twenty-five to thirty-five pounds. There are also reports of untreated blood pressure, a prisoner falling off a bunk and hitting his head and diabetics being put on IV drips.
A number of prisoners have signed an “advanced directive form” indicating when they can no longer communicate they would like to not be resuscitated.
“Many of these prisoners are older and have pre-existing conditions such as advanced lymphoma, congestive heart failure, hypertensive disease, debilitating muscle disease and so on,” Strickman explains. “So for all these reasons every day the situation is becoming more critical.”
News of deterioration of prisoners’ health may lead one to suggest that is what a prisoner gets for engaging in hunger striking or prisoner resistance activity. That may be true, but there is a callousness and inhumanity to such a statement. The prisoners have five core demands and, according to Molly Porzig, Critical Resistance representative in the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, they are asking for “incredibly standard” and “basic” adjustments to prison policy.
“The changes in policies and procedures that the prisoners are demanding are standards in other supermax prisons, like Florence, Colorado, and in Ohio,” explains Porzig. “Or, they refer to policy change that have already been recommended, promised or offered but never actually implemented.”
These five core demands, for those unaware, are the following: end group punishment and administrative abuse, abolish the “debriefing” process [the practice of offering up information about fellow prisoners in return for better food or release from the SHU] and modify active/inactive gang status criteria, end long-term solitary confinement and comply with US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations, provide adequate and nutritious food and expand and provide constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU status inmates.
On how organizing in support of the prison began, Porzig shares in the spring prisoners contacted prisoner advocacy organization in the Bay Area to form a coalition. They wanted people to do “widespread media and legal visits,” a coalition that would amplify the voices of prisoners during the hunger strike.
Porzig details some of the challenges faced thus far:
Some challenges so far to [organizing support] have obviously been the prison system itself. And, there are many obstacles with the extreme surveillance of information. But, for the most part, we’ve been getting our information from friends and loved ones who have been visiting during weekend visits and also some legal visits. Most of the legal visits have been happening at Pelican Bay.
Porzig says that how this has spread across thirteen prisons has been great but organizers have been incapable of providing support to the twelve other prisoner strikes now going on in solidarity.
Yesterday, a major demonstration took place outside of California Deparment of Corrections and Rehabilitation headquarters in Sacramento. Hundreds of people showed up to confront CDCR, which has engaged in some mediation with representatives of the prisoner strike but not offered anything meaningful that would lead prisoners to abandon the strike.
The prisoners were given a draft of a proposal for a settlement last week. They decided the suggestion of being willing to do a review of prison policy was not substantial enough and that CDCR was not acting in good faith. CDCR has said it does not negotiate prisoners, according to prison solidarity organizers. It has indicated it is intent on breaking the strike and even consulted with an individual from Pennsylvania, Jeffrey Beard, who has a history of cracking down on prison activists in correctional facilities.
Jeff Kaye and this author have pointed out how prisoners in Pelican Bay are subjected to a prison regime that is similar to the regime detainees face at Guantanamo Bay.
Guantanamo Bay prisoners have engaged in hunger strikes before and have been broken by force-feeding prisoners—a brutal tactic for breaking resistance that is tantamount to torture.
Strickman says on the possibility of prison staff employing this brutal tactic to end the strike:
CDCR does not seem to be gearing up for force-feeding. They are saying that this is a question of choice and has distributed two forms seeking people to state their choice. I think CDCR is fine with them dying.
However, Strickman says she fears:
…people who are requesting “medical care” if they become unconscious, which means “force feeding” — (method is liquid fed through nasal tube) but itcannot be done in Pelican Bay SP because the small clinic is not licensed to do it. CDCR has told us they will transport prisoners who need significant medical care to Corcoran, which is many hours away. They say they have lined up buses. But will the unconscious prisoner who wants to be given food in this way get there in time?
CDCR is already doing many things to break the strike: special meal on 7/4, spreading lies that the strike is over, talking to prisoners one by one to persuade them to end their own individual fast, trying to persuade leaders to call an end to the strike, trying to persuade the mediation team to tell the leaders to end the strike, withholding medication because of not eating, preventing information from getting into the prison via mail, radio, threatening to ship leaders out of PB, etc.
18 Comments
Looks like the prison staff at Pelican Bay has decided to let the prisoners die. Apparently, from their perspective, that’s an ideal solution to prison overcrowding.
Pretty obvious that the staff should be ones doing hard time.
Looks like some of the prisoners have decided to die. Why are they signing DNRs for high blood pressure and CHF? Those aren’t normal at all. Neither is a terminal disease.
Ah yes, more american “exceptionalism” or what passes for it now days.
How bad do things have to get, in a prison of all places, when the prisoners decide they would rather die than go back to the conditions they had before?
My God, we are monsters.
How bad do things have to get, in a prison of all places, when the prisoners decide they would rather die than go back to the conditions they had before?
Answer that, and you have your answer.
I know the answer, the question was rhetorical.
In the state of California, a doctor’s signature is also required to write a DNR, and the illness involved is supposed to be terminal. Neither high blood pressure (hypertensive disease) nor Congestive Heart Failure (CHF, scarring of the heart tissue due to previous MIs) are terminal. Taken together with the demands of the protesters and the situations described by the lawyers, the DNRs should constitute clear evidence of torture with respect to the solitary confinement and interrogation policies at the prison. It clearly indicates severe psychological pain and/or dislocation of the psyche by treatment administered under color of law. A copy of the DNR should be forwarded with a description of the situation under which it was written and an explanation of California law regarding them to the Committee Against Torture at the UN. At least, there’s a good justification for doing so.
Is that clear enough for you?
wow, take it easy. no insult was meant.
I actually like your idea very much. Thank you for elaborating.
NO INSULT WAS OR IS MEANT.
No harm. Sorry.
Peace.
When injuries are self inflicted and there is no evidence of mental impairment, then people should be allowed to cause themselves injury. This is the basis for the right to die political position, which I am in favor of. people should be permitted to die by starvation or other means if that is their wish.
Where did you get that idea? Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in an area. There’s no causal relationship. Blood pressure specifically is not leading prisoners to sign DNRs.
Do you know what hypertensive disease is?
My edit time has expired, and I don’t want to be too cryptic again and hurt feelings, Kevin. Hypertension is high blood pressure. Hypertensive disease is chronic high blood pressure, it’s considered a form of heart disease. CHF (congestive heart failure) despite the dire sounding name, isn’t a heart attack, it’s scarring of the heart tissue that makes the heart pump inefficiently, causing usually exercise intolerance, or pulmonary edema or edemas in the extremities (depending on where the scarring is) when there is too much exertion, or chest pains.
That’s why I said that neither one is considered terminal.
DNRs last for a year here, and they do require a physician to write out. The reason I’m familiar with them is that we are required to read them and make sure they are valid and un-expired before complying with them and they drill that into us as EMTs during refreshers and other trainings (CPR, etc.). They are one form of advanced directive, but from the description that you gave, that’s what kind of directive you were talking about.
And what would you consider evidence of mental impairment? Especially what would you consider evidence of mental impairment in a SHU? Have you ever read this document, written specifically for expert testimony in a court case about the Pelican Bay SHU about 20 years ago?
I’m not contesting your belief. I’m just worried that you might be letting someone die who’s reason for dying is that they’ve been successfully tortured to death already, and the attending physician to their DNR isn’t exactly their patient advocate.
One might want to at least bear witness to that, first.
I put in a call, left message, to Legal Services for Prisoners with Children querying why no State official -like Atty.General Harris- is not getting involved with this travesty. If someone knows why the State isn’t taking action on this situation, please let me know.
It isn’t evidence of mental impairment that’s at issue. It is the absence of it. I fully believe in the right to control one’s own body and that includes the right to die. i understand that others do not believe in it, look what the repubs did to that family of the poor young woman who was braindead but had expressed a wish to die should she ever be in the situation she was in. Is it really the governments decision as to whether someone who wants to die shold be allowed to do so? Do you want the government making that decision for you?
Right. No, the prison is not forcing prisoners to sign DNRs. Prisoners are choosing to die in this struggle for basic reform of prison conditions.
When I find any information like that out, you’ll see a post on it here at this blog.
And in the state of California, a doctor must make that decision with them. If the doctor is truly their advocate, I’m with them, if the doctor is fully informed of the conditions expressed in Stuart Grassian’s document. I’ll also call to your attention Bill Owen’s friend’s statement at UT.
For backgrounder, Bill Owen worked in the Canadian prison system for many years and has extensive experience and documentation on the effects of solitary confinement there and opposed it there.
Just be careful that you’re backing informed consent and real protest, not enobling a murder to silence. I don’t trust all doctors, and I don’t trust everyone to be a patient’s advocate unless they’ve been brought to the prison with that intent, in this one. Doctors testified in the Siddiqui trial from both Carswell and Brooklyn who damned her to a living hell, and they were her doctors, bound by Hippocratic oath, bound by patient-doctor relationship, supposed to be her advocates. That’s all I’m asking.
I’m a supporter of the right to die and of the prison strike, and have written a lot against solitary confinement, both in the context of the Aafia Siddiqui case and in other contexts, or just by itself, and here. I’m on your side. I just don’t trust anyone at that prison after hearing Jeff Kaye say that the Madrid v. Gomez restraints had been lifted. Anyone. Including the doctors.
In the 1970s, they used Napa as a threat and a punishment to keep the prisoners at San Quentin in line. Ditto for Bridgewater and Charles Street in Massachusetts. Have you ever seen Titticut Follies? It’s possible for an entire prison staff to be stark raving mad and act totally personable to people from the outside.