by Margaret Prescod

It never rains but it pours. In the last weeks, two major mobilizations against racist injustice burst out. Most people were outraged that on July 13 Zimmerman walked away from having shot teenager Trayvon Martin dead. The police did not even arrest Zimmerman until his family led a national campaign which marched and lobbied for Justice for Trayvon. And the prosecutor, according to at least one juror, did not make the factual case that would have enabled them to find Zimmerman guilty.

On July 8, 30,000 prisoners across California stopped eating and went on work strike for a number of demands central to which was an end to long-term solitary confinement (called Secure Housing Units or SHU as small as 6’ x 7’ windowless cubicles) for months, years, even decades. Some strikers have been refusing even water, and a week ago one prisoner, Billy Michael Sell, who asked for and was denied medical help, died in Corcoran SHU. (Prison officials say he killed himself.) California is one of 19 states that use long-term, often indefinite, solitary confinement and has by far the largest numbers of prisoners in solitary — over 10,000.

The thousands of prisoners who acted despite all kinds of restraints, including individual isolation, are even more amazing since they have come together across racial, religious and other divisions. This unity is hard to find outside and was developed inside beginning with the Georgia prisoners’ hunger strike in 2010, which was state-wide, and repeated in the California prisoner hunger strike in July 2011, when at least 1,035 of the SHU’s 1,111 inmates refused food. That strike spread to thirteen other state prisons and involved at least 6,600 people throughout California.

The third hunger strike, in September 2011, spread to twelve prisons in California as well as prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma that housed men from overcrowded California prisons. By the third day, nearly 12,000 people were participating. The strike ended after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) promised a comprehensive review of all SHU prisoners accused of being gang members or associates – the handy grounds, of which no proof is needed, that condemns men to years of the torture of being without society.

Click here for the full article.