[icffmaj] SIGN THE PETITION FOR THE PELICAN BAY PRISON HUNGER STRIKERS!

[ckaihatsu]

[icffmaj] SIGN THE PETITION FOR THE PELICAN BAY PRISON HUNGER STRIKERS!



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California Prisoner Hunger Strike Starts July 1st!

Sign the Online Petition!

Sign this petition and pass it on to your friends to support the prisoners demands! We will be sending the petition to the Warden at Pelican Bay, the Secretary of the CA Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and Governor Jerry Brown on June 28th.

http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=ko9ntucab&et=1106003808031&s=11331&e=001YqEw5l9Cawo57lLX9A0gbsAi_e_NCqTvVhDRx2FD1RMri r_ettxh1kEANvWJvrFfxTMc5v68gi5x4bxGia8boLCwrPCX2Mx _RBNigIcB1N14E9QwIFquvURX3-q3HU72g7EzwAGwCX2Tsl6ozHVWvsV_j51wjC1kWeNhO8dBw38=


Stay Informed & Spread the Word!

Pass the blog on to everyone you know!

Check out the facebook page and share with your friends!

Write letters to people you know in prison and their family members to make sure they know about the hunger strike!

Attend Solidarity Demonstrations, Events and Actions!

Solidarity Actions & Events are happening in the US & Canada during the strike!

Check out our blog for more info on when and where
Organize a Solidarity Event, Demonstration or Action!

Don't see an action or event near you? Organize one!

Click Here for more info

Dear Friends,

On July 1st, prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California will begin an indefinite hunger strike to protest the tortuous, inhumane and cruel conditions of their imprisonment. The hunger strike is spreading, with prisoners in the SHU at Corcoran State Prison joining the strike in solidarity with those at Pelican Bay.

The hunger strikers need your support to make sure their voices are heard!

http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=ko9ntucab&et=1106003808031&s=11331&e=001YqEw5l9Cawo57lLX9A0gbsAi_e_NCqTvVhDRx2FD1RMri r_ettxh1kEANvWJvrFfxTMc5v68gi5x4bxGia8boLCwrPCX2Mx _RBNigIcB1N14E9QwIFquvURX3-q3HU72g7EzwAGwCX2Tsl6ozHVWvsV_j51wjC1kWeNhO8dBw38=


Help Publicize this Action!

Image by Rashid Johnson at Red Onion Prison (VA)


when Georgia prisoners in prisons across the state went on a work strike in December 2010, mainstream media barely covered it.

We need to make sure that as many people as possible know about the Pelican Bay hunger strike!

Click here to read their demands!

Please spread the word far and wide to your friends, families, and networks, all over the US and internationally. You can refer people to the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity blog, a place for updates on organizing efforts inside and outside the prison; a location for research, history and analysis relevant to the strike; and a hub for ways people can be in solidarity.


Supporting the Strike, Building an Abolitionist Movement for Liberation

Attica Uprising, 1971

This courageous action of the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay falls within a undying legacy of prisoner-led resistance throughout the world, inside both men and women's prisons in the US, and throughout the world. As such, these struggles are connected to global struggles for liberation and self-determination.

Supporting prisoner-led resistance in prisons across the country is about supporting those who are living and fighting through the most expansive and sophisticated prison system in world history. The fact that people can resist from inside US prisons, let alone from withing Security Housing Units, is a testament to the struggle of life against the forces of death and disappearance. This deserves our solidarity, dedication and support.

We understand that supporting the Pelican Bay prisoners is to be connected across the prison walls that are meant to disappear so many of our loved ones, friends and neighbors. We understand our support to be connected to the fight against the devastation of communities from which so many prisoners are rounded up and imprisoned. We understand our support to be connected to combating the violence of policing. We see our support connected to the struggle for affordable housing, more jobs, better education, relevant and empowering programs for youth and formerly incarcerated people, sustainable health-care, and overall community self-determination.

Together, our support of the Pelican Bay prisoners is part of building a movement to abolish the prison industrial complex in its entirety, and in so doing creating the world we want and need.

In Solidarity & Struggle,

Critical Resistance





Contact Info! For more information, contact Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity at [email protected]
or call Critical Resistance: 510.444.0484





Critical Resistance | 1904 Franklin St #504 | Oakland | CA | 94612

[Whit86]

Thanks for sharing this info & please check out: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com for updates & ways to show support from the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition--these folks are in contact w/ prisoners on a weekly basis & working to build support for prisoners at Pelican Bay and Corcoran. We're also organizing international solidarity actions on July 9th--check the site for more info!


In Struggle,

Whit

[ckaihatsu]

[icffmaj] CRUEL & INHUMAN PUNISHMENT FOR A POLITICAL PRISONER! NORBERTO GONZALES CLAUDIO





Letter from prison by Norberto González Claudio

A Fathers' Day Visit:

"And grandfather, why can't I be there with you?

The visit by some of my children, grandchildren and my wife should have been one of beautiful sharing, of beautiful family sharing. And it was that way, to some extent . . .

My girlfriend, wife, lover and comrade (my favorite young person) and more to my daughters and sons, arrived from the Puerto Rican Nation, to visit a husband, father and grandfather to an imperialist prison: Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility. And, do you know what happened? That already the grandfather, father, husband, comrade, Political Prisoner, has been condemned – without trial, without due legal process and without committing any infractions in that prison – in fact I arrived to go directly to solitary confinement – and treated like a complete "criminal" that has to be shut away and isolated for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a solitary jail cell. In absolute solitude! In absolute solitude! But I am strong and combative even under these conditions. Long live love! Long live life! Long live the class and freedom struggle of our Puerto Rican working class!

In a solitary cell, in solitude and combative. We talked about Fathers' Day. Between 9:30 and 10:00 in the morning, the prison guards came to tell me that I had visitors – in fact, they congratulated me for being a father – they handcuffed me and we went to another cell where they removed my handcuffs and shackled my feet. I sit in a chair, pick up the telephone and in a small computer monitor my family appears. They have to take turns to be able to see me and for me to be able to see them and speak with them.

"And grandfather, why can't I be there with you?" This is the question that my small grandson asks me in his pure and childlike innocence. It is likely that this question reflects the dehumanizing and cruel nature that characterizes the current system in the United Sates. A visit that should have been one to raise the spirits of a prisoner – that hasn't been tried or condemned – can become another form of torture. And that's the way it is, yet another form of torture, cruelty and insensitivity. It is this type of behavior that one is referring to when you explain or say that the U.S. Empire is cruel, brutal, bloody and dehumanizing. It is clear that we do so without forgetting the invasions, deadly bombings against other nations and the looting and ransacking of these.

"And grandfather, why can't I be there with you?" This points out clearly the insensibility and cruelty of these invaders and abusive imperialists.

When I informed my "counselor" Devonis that on the weekend my family would come to visit and asked if something could be done for me to be able to see my family more closely, the response – cutting and clear – was that nothing could be done.

That it how you live and die in the nation of supposed great democracy and civil and human rights of the first order. Or, who knows, if it's second or third order . . . Democracy or the falsehood of democracy? Civil and human rights or the falsehood of civil and human rights?

A human being that is accused but not convicted is in solitary or as we say out there, in the hole. Without being convicted but being simply accused. YES, SIMPLY FOR BEING ACCUSED! For being a POLITICAL PRISONER! FOR BEING A PO-LI-TI-CAL PRI-SO-NER!
It's astounding! THE EMPIRE'S STENCH! IT STINKS AND SEEKS TO MAKE US INSIGNIFICANT AND SMALL . . . IT BRUTALIZES AND TRIES TO DRIVE US MAD!

That is how you live and die in a dehumanizing empire at its hands and at all costs. An empire of terror, of lies and deceit. An empire whose days are already numbered to the benefit of all human beings and for the benefit of humanity and the good of the Planet Earth, OUR LARGER HOME!

May peace, love and wisdom always accompany us! ALWAYS!

Norberto González Claudio, 09864-000
Husband, father, grandfather, comrade to many men and women workers and POLITICAL PRISONER.

WE WILL SEE ONE ANOTHER SOON!

English Translation by Frank Velgara, ProLibertad Freedom Campaign, Socialist Front of Puerto Rico.

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Free All Political Prisoners! Free the Land!

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SIGN THE JERICHO COINTELPRO PETITION!

Free All Political Prisoners!
[email protected] • www.jerichony.org

[ckaihatsu]

[icffmaj] SUPPORT PELICAN BAY PRISON HUNGER STRIKE SAT JULY 9, 1-2 pm, HARLEM STATE OFFICE




Support Pelican Bay State Prison Hunger Strikers!

Solidarity Picket – Saturday, July 9
1-2 PM
Harlem State Office Building - NYC
(corner 125th Street & Adam Clayton Powell Blvd., Harlem)

Join prisoner solidarity activists in the Bay Area, Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere for a national day of action in support of hunger strikers at Pelican Bay State Prison in California. The indefinite hunger strike will start July 1, 2011, and is an organizing effort initiated and led by prisoners against torture and imprisonment. In the Spring of 2011, prisoners inside Pelican Bay State Prison contacted prisoner-rights and anti-prison activist organizations announcing 50-100 prisoners would be beginning a rolling hunger strike on July 1st, and that they needed support making sure their voices and demands were heard and acted on outside prison walls.

Prisoners are going on a hunger strike to protest the cruel, inhumane and tortuous conditions of their imprisonment and have been organized by prisoners in an inspiring show of unity across prison-manufactured racial and geographical lines. They have developed five core demands which include ending the way allegations of gang activity are used to deny prisoner rights, ending long-term solitary confinement and extreme physical deprivations, and providing adequate food, programming and privileges (see below for complete list.)

Get involved! Join the Harlem picket on July 9. One NYC activist will also be holding a solidarity hunger strike locally.

Endorsed by (list in formation): Campaign to End the Death Penalty-NYC

Go to http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/ for more info. Contact [email protected] about NYC action and to endorse

Sign the petition! http://www.change.org/petitions/support-prisoners-on-hunger-strike-at-pelican-bay-state-prison

************************************************** ***********************
Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Units Peaceful Protest Hunger Strike Starting July 1, 2011

From James Crowford, Mutop DuGuya (a/k/a Bow Low):

It is important for readers to understand the cruelty of the policy sanctioned by the state that allows the CDCR to place men/women under an indeterminate SHU program only on the word of a prison informer where there is no offense, no violence, nor any gang or criminal activity. Yet prisoners who are held in indeterminate SHU are held, well, indefinitely for the rest of their lives in SHUs and Adjustment Centers across the state, and even on Death Row if validated as a gang member.

The cruelty is a protracted attack against prisoners, their families, friends, and all of their associates who are subjected to investigations for criminal activities. It does not matter if they are into crime or gang activity or not, the objective is to insinuate that they are and to cut off any relationships that may exist with the prisoner. The gang investigation officers manufacture their evidence by using inmate informers to create as assumption of crime to attack our friends and families.

The CDCR's gang investigators understand that the prisoners held in solitary confinement are being subjected to various forms of torture and are nonetheless able to sustain themselves, even in the face of these ongoing attacks. Prisoners have adapted to maintain their sanity. So the gang investigators take it a step further, beyond the prison walls, where they work to intimidate by way of threats and other means our friends and families, be they children, grandparents, sisters, bothers, parents or whomever people who are completely innocent of any gang or criminal activity. They intimidate and incriminate people across the board. They run them off in fear of being prosecuted for a crime that does not exist (other than to say they are under investigation). This kind of attack is not only very intimidating for someone who has never even had a traffic ticket, they are actually cruel to those dear to us.

Since 1990 prisoners have been making complaints against abuses by prison guards. Some of these abuses against PBSP-SHU prisoners were addressed in the Madrid case, where the court agreed that guards were responsible for a number of areas of prisoner mistreatment. Because medical treatment was so bad the federal court put the prisons into receivership and appointed a special master to oversee changes.[1] Many prisoners have suffered mental disorders as a direct result of their placement in the Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Units (PBSP-SHU). The overwhelming majority of these men had not mental illness prior to entering the SHU, but rather lost their sanity as a result of their placement in this facility, as a result of the long-term impact of such confinement.

The Madrid ruling was a failure. Prison guards either ignore the court order altogether or implement token rules they do not follow. Nothing the court did persuaded the guard staff or prison administration to change their abusive behavior. This place is a plantation or a prison colony and we prisoners are the slaves (a status legitimized by the 13th amendment to the U.S. constitution). The guards are free to do with us as they please. They have complete control of our medical care, mail, visits, property, supplies, law library access, laundry, yard, isolation, the lights in our cell, family, friends, lock downs, etc. This is an environment in which the prison guards can torture prisoners both physically and psychologically over extended periods of time. One such attack is the dehumanizing yet widely used "potty watch" which is used under false pretenses not to find drugs, but to humiliate other human beings.

The actual objective or goal of all this is to force every indefinitely held SHU prisoner to "debrief" (to turn rat, snitch, turncoat, however you want do define it). Some SHU prisoners break and give their captors names just to escape the terrible conditions of confinement. These prisoners are rewarded by being placed in Special Need Yards (SNY) where living conditions are better. This has been happening since the 1990s and it continues today. Ninety-five percentof the debriefers lie in order to get out of the SHU and then go on to become lifetime stoolies for the cops.

The CDCR uses every trick they can to force men into debriefing, including every increasing levels of what can only be described at torture. But if you are innocent, or if you are a principled person, they force you to endure every hardship in an effort to break you. It is this ever increasing attack that has forced us prisoners to put aside our historical differences in order to address the protracted attack on our lives and to expose the criminal activities and abuses against all indeterminate SHU prisoners in the state of California.

Effective July 1st we are initiating a peaceful protest by way of an indefinite hunger strike in which we will not eat until our core demands are met. This hunger strike will be carried on by all races, New Afrikans (Blacks), Mexicans (i.e. of all walks), whites and others who realize the we are silently being murdered by CDCR/CCPOAA Union as well as the U.S. judicial system who have turned a blind eye while we suffer a civil death at the hands of profiteers.

Therefore we have decided to put our fate in our own hands. Some of us have already suffered a slow, agonizing death in which the state has shown no compassion toward these dying prisoners. Rather than compassion they turn up their ruthlessness. No one wants to die. Yet under this current system of what amounts to intense torture, what choice do we have? If one is to die, it will be on our own terms.

Power concedes nothing without demand.

James Crowford, Mutop DuGuya (a/k/a Bow Low)

[1] According to the San Francisco Chronicle one prisoner a week was killed in the state's prison system due to medical neglect.

************************************************** ******
OUR FIVE CORE DEMANDS:

1. Individual Accountability - This is in response to PBSP's application of "group punishment" as a means to address individual inmates rule violations. This includes the administration's abusive, pretextual use of "safety and concern" to justify what are unnecessary punitive acts. This policy has been applied in the context of justifying indefinite SHU status, and progressively restricting our programming and privileges.

2. Abolish the Debriefing Policy, and Modify Active/Inactive Gang Status Criteria - the debriefing policy is illegal and redundant, as pointed out in the Formal Complaint [IV-A, p. 7]. The Active/Inactive gang status criteria must be modified in order to comply with state law and applicable CDC are rule and regulations [eg, see Formal Complaint, p. 7, IV-B] as follows:

A) cease the use of innocuous association to deny an active status,
B) cease the use of informant/debriefer allegations of illegal gang activity to deny inactive status, unless such allegations are also supported by factual corroborating evidence, in which case CDCR-PBSP staff shall and must follow the regulations by issuing a rule violation report and affording the inmate his due process required by law.

3. Comply with US Commission 2006 Recommendations Regarding an End to Long-Term Solitary Confinement - CDCR shall implement the findings and recommendations of the US commission on safety and abuse in America's prisons final 2006 report regarding CDCR SHU facilities as follows:

A) End Conditions of Isolation (p. 14) Ensure that prisoners in SHU and Ad-Seg (Administrative Segregation) have regular meaningful contact and freedom from extreme physical deprivations that are known to cause lasting harm. (pp. 52-57)
B) Make Segregation a Last Resort (p. 14). Create a more productive form of confinement in the areas of allowing inmates in SHU and Ad-Seg [Administrative Segregation] the opportunity to engage in meaningful self-help treatment, work, education, religious, and other productive activities relating to having a sense of being a part of the community.
C) End Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Release inmates to general prison population who have been warehoused indefinitely in SHU for the last 10 to 40 years (and counting).
D) Provide SHU Inmates Immediate Meaningful Access to:

i) adequate natural sunlight
ii) quality health care and treatment, including the mandate of transferring all PBSP-SHU inmates with chronic health care problems to the New Folsom Medical SHU facility.

4. Provide Adequate Food - cease the practice of denying adequate food, and provide a wholesome nutritional meals including special diet meals, and allow inmates to purchase additional vitamin supplements.

A) PBSP staff must cease their use of food as a tool to punish SHU inmates.
B) Provide a sergeant/lieutenant to independently observe the serving of each meal, and ensure each tray has the complete issue of food on it.
C) Feed the inmates whose job it is to serve SHU meals with meals that are separate from the pans of food sent from kitchen for SHU meals.

5. Expand and Provide Constructive Programming and Privileges for Indefinite SHU Status Inmates. Examples include:

A) Expand visiting regarding amount of time and adding one day per week.
B) Allow one photo per year.
C) Allow a weekly phone call.
D) Allow Two (2) annual packages per year. A 30 lb. package based on "item" weight and not packaging and box weight.
E) Expand canteen and package items allowed. Allow us to have the items in their original packaging [the cost for cosmetics, stationary, envelopes, should not count towards the max draw limit]
F) More TV channels.
G) Allow TV/Radio combinations, or TV and small battery operated radio
H) Allow Hobby Craft Items - art paper, colored pens, small pieces of colored pencils, watercolors, chalk, etc.
I) Allow sweat suits and watch caps.
J) Allow wall calendars.
K) Install pull-up/dip bars on SHU yards.
L) Allow correspondence courses that require proctored exams.

NOTE: The above examples of programs/privileges are all similar to what is allowed in other Supermax prisons (e.g., Federal Florence, Colorado, and Ohio), which supports our position that CDCR-PBSP staff claims that such are a threat to safety and security are exaggerations.

Date: April 3, 2011 Submitted by:

Todd Ashker and Danny Troxell
On behalf of themselves and similarly situated participants

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