Inmates in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison are planning on resuming their hunger strike on Monday, September 26. In July, a three-week protest started in the “short corridor” at the prison expanded to hundreds of inmates housed at institutions across the state. Now prisoners and prison officials alike are readying for a resumed strike.
Before the strike began, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began considering changes to its SHU policies–specifically, expanding the kinds of inmates that can be assigned to the restrictive, isolated unit. At present, inmates who commit crimes while in prison can be sentenced to a term in the SHU. Other inmates–an estimated 90 percent of Pelican Bay’s SHU–are there on indeterminate sentences because they’ve been pegged as members or associates of six prison gangs. For these inmates, the only way out of the SHU is to be paroled or to “debrief,” meaning telling prison officials all they know about their former gang.
Continue reading at our criminal justice blog, the Informant.
