Stop SHU torture: California prisoners fight for their lives

Judy Greenspan WW photo: John Parker

Excerpted from a talk given by San Francisco Workers World organizer, Judy Greenspan, at the Workers World Party National Conference on Oct. 8-9 in New York City.

Ho Chi Minh, the beloved and well-known revolutionary comrade, wrote that when the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out. Ho, leader of the Vietnamese people’s struggle against imperialism, knew a great deal about the inside of prisons and suffered his share of torture and isolation.

The conditions inside California’s prisons have created their own legacy of dragons. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of George Jackson, a revolutionary prisoner who was so dangerous to this system that he was set up and murdered inside San Quentin Prison.

It is also the 40th anniversary of Jonathan Jackson’s courageous attempt to free revolutionary Black prisoners from California’s dungeons. The California Department of Corrections and the state of California responded to the growing radicalization of California’s prisoners by building Security Housing Unit prisons — lockdown units that would house radicals, nonconformists, community activists and others in endless isolation. Today, more than 12,000 California prisoners are on a hunger strike to oppose the conditions in these lockdown prisons.

On July 1, thousands of prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison and other maximum-security lockdown units in California went on a hunger strike to demand an end to the endless lockdown and torture of SHU prisoners. They demanded greater access to human necessities like mail, food and visits by their loved ones.

The Pelican Bay prisoners also called for an end to the gang-labeling of prisoners and the snitch-or-die policy that currently keeps thousands of predominantly African-American, Latino, and Native American prisoners in 6 by 10 foot cells, 23 and one-half hours a day, with little or no human contact.

Once a prisoner is named as a gang member, he or she will remain locked down until they snitch or supply other names to the CDCR. Many prisoners have spent between 20 and 40 years locked down for their refusal to participate in this unjust, illegal and inhumane policy. Ruchell Magee, charged along with Angela Davis in the San Rafael, Calif., courtroom escape case, and Hugo Pinell, one of the San Quentin Six, have each served about 40 years in the SHU. By the end of July, the CDCR had promised to look into the demands of the hunger strikers and to begin to make long overdue changes in SHU conditions and policies. At that time, the prisoners suspended their hunger strike, and many prisoners were in a weakened and vulnerable medical state.

However, true to its anti-prisoner legacy, the CDCR did not move to change the conditions within the SHU units at Pelican Bay. On Sept. 26, the prisoners resumed their hunger strike and since then have faced escalating intimidation and retaliation for their actions. This time around, rather than negotiating with the prisoners’ appointed mediators, the CDCR has banned two of the activist attorneys from visiting prisoners at Pelican Bay. Very recently, visitors who came to see the men on hunger strike were not allowed into the prison. Prison officials are threatening those on hunger strike with long-term SHU confinement and gang labeling for their activism.

California, long known as the prison state, is pouring millions of dollars down the drain to continue the racist, unjust, inhumane incarceration of poor people from oppressed communities, while at the same time it is cutting millions of dollars from the education budget. Prison is a more profitable business than preparing children to succeed in life.

Every struggle today must link itself to the life-and-death fight for survival being mounted by California prisoners and others around the country. Our prisons are filled with powerful dragons who must be returned to the community so that we can work together to tear down this draconian system of incarceration, racism and war, and build socialism. Stop SHU torture. Tear down the walls. Victory to the hunger strikers!