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Hundreds of California prison inmates continue their hunger strike, now more than a month after they started. The conditions they are protesting are akin to torture according to international human rights organizations.

Even the United States Supreme Court has pointed out the harshness of this state’s prisons and ordered overcrowding to be eased.

But, Jeffrey Beard, the head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in an attempt to sway public opinion over this third hunger strike since 2011, has asserted that the strike’s main organizers are dangerous gang leaders who are using the strike in an attempt to consolidate their power inside and out of prison.

In a recent op-ed in the LA Times, Beard asserted, “The inmates calling the shots are leaders in four of the most violent and influential prison gangs in California: the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and the Black Guerrilla Family. We’re talking about convicted murderers who are putting lives at risk to advance their own agenda of violence.”

Beard also went on to assert that since the last hunger strike CDCR has greatly improved conditions inside the prisons, changed the criteria by which prisoners can be moved into solitary confinement, and ended the practice of indefinite solitary.

But our guests take issue both with the improvements Beard cites, and his claim that the strike is about gang activity.

GUESTS: Ron Ahnen, with California Prison Focus, a member of the solidarity coalition and who is on the mediation team. Ron is also an Associate Professor at St. Mary’s College of California, Jerry Elster, an organizer with All Of Us Or None, a grassroots civil rights organization fighting for the rights of formerly- and currently- incarcerated people and their families

Click here to read the Guardian article about the prisoner hunger strike.