The New York Times provides coverage on the continuing hunger strike.
The New York Times provides coverage on the continuing hunger strike.
Almost 12,000 California prisoners were participating in the hunger strike as of September 28th. For more details, click here.
Realignment of the California prison system begins today under AB 109, following the Supreme Court’s mandate in Brown v. Plata, and constitutes “the most radical change in the prison system in decades.” The plan, which will transfer the state’s responsibility for lower-level drug offenders, thieves and other convicts to county jurisdictions, is designed to reduce the state’s corrections costs while also reducing its prison population. The stakes of the implementation of this plan could not be higher, as it represents the first radical shift in prison policy in decades towards prison population reduction, but comes clouded by predictable fears about public safety and variously grounded uncertainties about whether or not California is prepared for this systemic change. Read more here.
In other California news, on Friday, the Pelican Bay hunger strikers’ lawyers requested a meeting with Governor Jerry Brown to discuss their obstructed access to prison facilities resulting from actions by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations. The L.A. Times reports here.
Pelican Bay State prisoners who led the month-long hunger strike of over 6,000 prisoners this summer are back on strike.
The prisoners, as this summer, are protesting inhumane prison conditions, including a policy that allows prisoners to be held in solitary confinement for more than ten years. They resume their strike now to protest the absence of good-faith negotiations.
Read more here.
This piece from today in the New Republic situates the Troy Davis execution in the context of the recent history of the movement to end the death penalty. Professors Carol and Jordan Steiker offer a useful overview of this recent history as the reasoning behind their own (cautiously) optimistic position. Along the way, they helpfully outline the major moving pieces of legal and legislative strategy in this struggle.
The piece is prompted by the Troy Davis execution, and accordingly, highlights two potential ways that highly publicized “particular executions” can make an impact, which are in tension with each other: it expresses concern that such publicity can make “the American death penalty appear more entrenched and routine than it truly is, and [obscure] the broader trends and transformations,” at the same time that it has the potential to generate awareness, motivate people to act and “accelerate the movement toward abolition.” This particular article takes up the task of speaking to the first concern– it would seem, in light of the perception that the second is taking care of itself.
I wonder if it is, if we really believe that the public outcry against Troy Davis’ execution was “enough”– or “too much,” balanced against the proposition of some negative effect that could issue from public overestimation of America’s weddedness to the death penalty (?). I wonder if it was because there is already “enough” of a movement that, for example, that no faculty from Harvard attended the student organized vigil the eve of Davis’ death– because of some countervailing interest in helping balance public opinion? Some of the hundred-some students gathered there did notice this absence and may be looking for a way to understand it, give it meaning. But I can guarantee that many, many more people would have noticed if there had been faculty present to share that moment with outraged and grieving students. And I think that the meaning and mobilizing effect this participation would have had on a rising generation of advocates is not to be underestimated. What, again, was the concern that could outweigh this?
In case you all missed this news, earlier this month Arizona passed legislation imposing fees on visitors to prisoners, creating yet another obstacle to prisoners’ ability to communicate and maintain relationships with friends and loved ones outside prison walls.
At a time when states’ budgets are strapped, legislatures are charting new ground in their efforts to make prisons more profitable at the expense of the few basic rights prisoners still retain. Texas, for example, earlier this year tentatively approved a bill that would require inmates to pay $100 a year for healthcare (read more here).
Ashley Lucas commented on these events together in the context of prison economies in her insightful post on Razorwire women, in which she also points out that in Texas, prisoners are not paid any wages for their labor. The Texas legislation thus strikes a note as absurd and offensive as the California policy that Lucas describes, requiring prisoners to pay restitution fees for own their criminal convictions.
Attica’s 40th has past (see Nina’s Sept. 17th post to listen to soul-chilling recordings of Nixon and Rockefeller congratulating each other on the success of the slaughter), but we can learn from revisiting the story any day.
For that reason, take a moment to read about what happened at Attica again in this detailed, commemorative article in Prison Legal News, which also traces Attica’s immediate impact and subsequent legacy on prison reform and politics– throughout the hardening of prison policies during the next decades, up to the Pelican Bay Hunger strike this year.
Also worth reading is Attica historian Heather Ann Thompson’s commentary from September 8th.
Reading Thompson’s piece, I am struck by her description of how, “Over five days, Americans sat glued to their televisions as this uprising unfolded. They watched in surprise as inmates elected representatives from each cellblock to negotiate on their behalf. They watched in disbelief as these same inmates protected the guards and civilian employees they had taken hostage.”
Can you imagine mainstream media covering a prison uprising like this today?
Attica was a spectacle, but for people to watch what was going on, the media had to report it. We’ve largely taken that service for granted as we have remembered Attica over the years, and we might now– but for the fact that we really can no longer take it for granted.
The link Nina gave below for the anniversary of Attica was headlined with an image of carnage. An image like this should remind us that we don’t and won’t see equivalent images of the violence wrought by the contemporary U.S. State, not from prisons, city streets, nor from the wars in which we are engaged in overseas. Something has changed since that time, which is captured well in signs carried by protesters at Wall Street this week– “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”
I won’t go much further in spinning thoughts out loud– about the selectivity problems of our new mediasphere, or how more news is more immediately, widely, everywhere available yes, but only if you go looking for it or are already plugged into the right networks, and about the profound political consequences of the capture and deterioration of mainstream media. But this line of thought also affirmed my sense of the importance of using other media channels as much, and growing them as vigorously as possible.
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