Click on http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194722523914909 for info on TWO DAYS OF MASS CALL-INS FOR PRISONERS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT INCLUDING CALIFORNIA HUNGER STRIKERS; Thurs. July 21, 12 a.m. to Friday, July 22 at 12 a.m.
Human Rights Examiner
July 18, 2011 – Like this? Subscribe to get instant updates.
Crisis stage, media silence in mass hunger strike California prisons
On Day 18 of America’s historical, human rights-based, Pelican Bay Prison Hunger Strike, a mass suicide being committed due to what The New York Times described Sunday as “Barbarous Confinement,” Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity notes that, after unanimously rejecting an “insulting” offer by CDCR on Saturday, the prisoners are continuing their strike for meaningful changes in Security Housing Unit (SHU) conditions and policies. Despite prisoners now in critical condition due to rejecting food and water, rights defender Michael Novick noted Monday that press coverage of this monumental United States human rights abuse event has been inadequate.
The less sympathetic public might believe prisoners deserve the abuse inflicted. This is partially due to a lack of unawareness that it is not the most violent, the “worst of the worst,” being tortured in prisons reported veteran human rights defenders Jean Casella and James Ridgeway of the lockdown watchdog group, Solidarity Watch on Monday.
“Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit [SHU] are ‘“the worst of the worst,’” reported Colin Dayan in an Op Ed piece in The New York Times. “Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation.”
To raise awareness without mainstream media coverage, on Friday, as prison authorities refused negotiating even while hunger striker inmates are dying in prison clinics, human rights defenders marched through downtown San Francisco in heavy 5:00 pm traffic to the UN Plaza in protest of United State human rights abuses in California prisons described as worse than hell.
Among other human rights rallies being conducted across the nation in solidarity with the suiciding prisoners, approximately 100 marchers in San Francisco loudly chanted in peak hour traffic Friday, “Support! The hunger strikers! At Pelican Bay!” (See: Indymedia video, “San Franciscans rallied and marched to show their solidarity with hunger strikers at Pelican Bay State Prison,” on this page above.) Continue reading