A month of hunger
The hunger strike among California prison inmates is a month old today.
The state's corrections department maintains that the strike is a ploy to free up gangs to do business behind bars. But the longer this thing goes, the more ridiculous that sounds. These prisoners are putting their lives at serious risk in order to leverage their demands. And the demands are for things that it's shocking they even have to ask for:
- End long-term solitary confinement, per the 2006 reccomendations of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons. It's been well documented (pdf) that solitary amounts to psychological torture. It's so awful that some prisoners are willing to starve to take a stand against it.
