Prisoner hunger striker demands end to indefinite detentionin Pelican Bay’s supermax cells

By George Chidi
Friday, August 23, 2013 22:51 EDT

 

Legal professionals for a starvation-hanging prisoner in Pelican Bay introduced audio describing the needs of the remaining hunger strikers protesting indefinite solitary confinement in the California jail.

Todd Ashker, a prisoner sentenced to existence for killing an inmate, has been imprisoned in the “supermax” solitary confinement cells of Pelican Bay for years. In the tape, Ashker requires on behalf of the Pelican Bay Condition Prison Brief Corridor Collective Human Rights Movement “an finish to indefinite solitary confinement based mostly on innocuous associational habits and/or private information intelligence from prisoners tortured to the stage of significant psychological sickness and settlement to grow to be condition collaborator informants.”

Ashker has been on a hunger strike for forty seven times, his legal professionals advised Amy Goodman, host of the display Democracy Now! on Friday.

The protest centers on the use of confidential informants and prisoner affiliation to determine when a prisoner may be component of a gang Jack or a “security threat group.” If a jail is designated as a member of an STG, he or she can be isolated from the rest of the gang in supermax solitary confinement for many years with tiny redress, prisoners argue.

The California Office of Corrections and Rehabilitation issued a policy memorandum earlier this thirty day period laying out a pilot program for modifying the guidelines for assigning prisoners to supermax cells, but “CDCR’s STG pilot software is not responsive to our demands,” Ashker stated. “It carries on to foundation indefinite (supermax) solitary confinement on confidential information intelligence without having any need for any formal demand becoming submitted and adjudicated for thanks method because of to the California Prison System’s preponderance of the proof regular.”

View the segment with Goodman and Ashker underneath.