Listen to the entire program<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/p>\n![\"pelican](\"http:\/\/voiceofdetroit.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/Chained-prisoners-make-their-way-to-library-at-Pelican-Bay1.jpg\")
Prisoners of the Secure Housing Unit – called SHUs at California’s Pelican Bay Supermax Prison are on a hunger strike to protest their living conditions. Over a dozen prisoners are participating in the action, planned since April when a group of inmates in isolation issued a set of changes they wanted implemented. The 5 demands include an end to indefinite detention in “shoes”, changes to the criteria used to send and release prisoners from isolation, adequate food, and one phone call a week. Inmates can spend years and sometimes decades in solitary confinement, granted only 90 minutes a day outside of their cell, alone. The Prison Law Office has come out in support of the hunger striker’s demands. The California nonprofit public interest law firm calls the conditions at Pelican Bay “inhumane, deplorable, and intolerable” and is currently suing to end race-based group punishment, which prisoners say is used to prolong detention in the secure housing unit. The hunger strike has drawn attention for being organized across racial lines, and it comes amid national scrutiny of the California Prison system. In May the Supreme Court ordered California to take immediate measures to end prison overcrowding, ruling present conditions constitute cruel and unusual punishment. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Pelican Bay was designed to hold 2,280 adults. It currently houses 3,461 inmates, has a staff of 1,627, and an operating budget exceeding $180 million. <\/p>\n
Yesterday, a coalition of human rights advocates and community members gathered at the Regan Building in Downtown LA for a speak-out in support of the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay. Martina Steiner filed a special report for Uprising. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prisoners of the Secure Housing Unit – called SHUs at California’s Pelican Bay Supermax Prison are on a hunger strike to protest their living conditions. Over a dozen prisoners are participating in the action, planned since April when a group of inmates in isolation issued a set of changes they wanted implemented. The 5 demands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}