By ERICA GOODE
Published: September 29, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO — Corrections officials in Sacramento said Thursday that they would discipline inmates who participated in a renewed hunger striketo protest conditions in the state’s highest-security prisons, where some prisoners have been held in virtual isolation for decades.
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More than 4,200 inmates at eight prisons have been refusing state-issued meals since Monday, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The hunger strike, the second this year, is the latest problem to face state prison officials, who are under a Supreme Court order to reduce the state’s prison population by more than 30,000 people.
A memo was distributed to prisoners at the state’s 33 correctional institutions warning that if they took part in the hunger strike, they would be subject to disciplinary action that could include confiscation of canteen items like food they had bought.
Prisoners identified as leaders of the strike would also be removed from the general population and “placed in an administrative segregation unit,” according to the memo.
A hunger strike in July, which involved 6,600 inmates at its peak,ended after the department agreed to consider adjustments in the way inmates are assigned to the state’s three security housing units, where they are held in tightly controlled conditions that minimize human contact.
Scott Kernan, the under secretary of operations for the department, said that after the strike in July, the department “determined there was some validity to what the inmates’ concerns were.” The department is reviewing its procedures, he said.
But on Monday, inmates resumed the strike, saying that the department had not yet fully addressed their demands.
Those demands included modifying the practice of sending prisoners to security housing units for indefinite periods based on the judgment that they were involved in gang activities, and also abolishing the practice of “debriefing,” in which inmates are encouraged to gain release from the unit by renouncing their gang affiliations and providing information about them.
At Pelican Bay State Prison, in a remote northern region of the state, the average length of confinement for the 1,111 inmates in the security housing unit is 6.8 years, according to the department. Most inmates in the unit are confined in windowless cells, 7.6 feet by 11.6 feet, for 22 hours or more a day.
Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office in Berkeley, which provides free legal services to prisoners, said that given the standoff between the inmates and the prison officials, “I don’t really see how this can end happily or without tragedy.”
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