Stand with the Pelican Bay hunger strikers: Speak-out and March!

ON THE DAY OF THE PRISONERS START THEIR HUNGER STRIKE
STAND WITH THEM! SPEAK-OUT AT 5PM, MARCH AT 6PM

Prisoners in the Pelican Bay State Prison SHU, the so-called “worst of the worst”, are standing up on July 1st. This is the Security Housing Unit (SHU), a supermax control facility where prisoners are subjected to sensory deprivation, isolation and brutality. The prisoners there have called a hunger strike to achieve five core dem...ands (see back).

Many prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU, and their lawyers, have bravely fought to expose the torture that is going on. They have written letters and articles, and filed lawsuits. Against heavy repression and censorship they have struggled to connect with people on the outside who are fighting for the rights of prisoners.

The responsibility to stand shoulder to shoulder with our sisters and brothers locked up by this system is on us. Crimes against the very humanity of people are being carried out every single day at Pelican Bay Prison—and in other prisons all over the USA. This is an intolerable outrage. And a mass and determined movement outside the walls is urgently needed to expose and demand an end to these high-tech torture chambers.

-Revolution Club, Bay Area

“It is up to us: to wake up…to shake off the ways they put on us, the ways they have us thinking so they can keep us down and trapped in the same old rat-race…to rise up, as conscious Emancipators of Humanity. The days when this system can just keep on doing what it does to people, here and all over the world…when people are not inspired and organized to stand up against these outrages and to build up the strength to put an end to this madness…those days must be GONE. And they CAN be.”

Prisoners in the Pelican Bay State Prison SHU recently released a “Final Notice: PBSP SHU D-Corridor Hunger Strike”. This notice calls for a hunger strike, to start on July 1, 2011, and includes five core demands, which in summary are:

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1. End “group punishment” where an individual prisoner breaks a rule and prison officials punish a whole group of prisoners of the same race.

2. Abolish “debriefing” and modify active/inactive gang status criteria. False and/or highly questionable “evidence” is used to accuse prisoners of being active/inactive members of prison gangs who are then sent to the SHU where they are subjected to long-term isolation and torturous conditions. One of the only ways these prisoners can get out the SHU is if they “debrief”—that is, give prison officials information on gang activity.

3. Comply with recommendations from a 2006 U.S. commission to “make segregation a last resort” and “end conditions of isolation.”

4. Provide Adequate Food. Prisoners report unsanitary conditions and small quantities of food. They want adequate food, wholesome nutritional meals including special diet meals and an end to the use of food as a way to punish prisoners in the SHU.

5. Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates—including the opportunity to “engage in self-help treatment, education, religious and other productive activities...” which are routinely denied. Demands include one phone call per week, one photo per year, 2 packages a year, more visiting time, permission to have wall calendars, and sweat suits and watch caps (warm clothing is often denied even though cells and the exercise cage can be bitterly cold).


Connect prisoners you know with and donate to REVOLUTION newspaper and to the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund. Write to them and go to http://www.prlf.org and http://www.revcom.us.