A Response to CDCR Secretary Beard, by Caitlin Kelly Henry

In a recent OpEd, CDCR Secretary Beard, defends his agency’s use of torture, and justifies it by vilifying and dehumanizing some of its victims. Conditions in CDCR’s SHUs meet international definitions of unlawful torture. Sensory deprivation is torture. Prolonged isolation is torture. California, unlike most states and nations, refuses to recognize that it is both unlawful and poor public policy to punish people with prolonged isolation. Though no other jurisdiction appears to deny that these practices constitute solitary confinement.

These conditions cause permanent physical and psychological effects. As an attorney and academic, I have conducted over 60 interviews with people sequestered in SHUs, and have witnessed the physical and psychological effects of isolation. Having recently visited strikers, I can attest that as a result of their non-violent demonstration, they are experiencing irreversible and life threatening effects that will only worsen if CDCR and Governor Brown do not take action immediately.

Hunger and work strikes by disfranchised people, who have little to leverage but their bodies, have earned a dignified and noble legacy in human and civil rights movements. The last three California prison strikes have succeeded in shining light on atrocious living conditions typically shielded from the public behind prison walls.

The OpEd misrepresents CDCR’s de-jure policies, and avoids addressing its de-facto policies, which arise from prison staff’s vast discretion in policy interpretation and execution. The OpEd attempts to narrow the discussion to CDCR’s treatment of the sub-group of people staff accuse of being affiliated with gangs and focus on the strike’s second demand. However, the other four demands, concern issues affecting all prisoners in solitary, many of whom are never accused of gang activity.

CDCR continues to arbitrarily discipline and move people to solitary confinement without adequate due process, whether for a determinate term (though people are often held after the term’s end) or indeterminate term. Currently, CDCR is issuing rules violations to hunger strikers simply for not eating, and charging participants and non-participants with “gang related activity” for showing support for the strike. These violations can be used to send people to the SHU, keep them there, or deny people post-conviction relief (parole, prop 36 re-sentencing, etc.). To issue so many on such specious grounds at a moment when CDCR is mandated to release 10,000 people is emblematic of the due process violations the strike seeks to address.

As CDCR moves people to or within the SHU, staff have denied people access to their property. This includes placing people in a cell with a mattress, but no sheets or blanket, for days on end. Pelican Bay SHU cells have no windows or skylights, and the murky slits in the concrete at Corcoran can hardly be called windows. Light comes from a fluorescent bulb that is never shut off.

Especially since the strike’s announcement, CDCR has routinely denied people the ability to leave their cells for weeks on end, whether to shower, use the “yard” (either a metal cage or a small room with four concrete walls but no roof), or access the law library to meet court deadlines. With no access to the yard, some people exercise in their cells…but if they do so at the same time as others, the exercise is labeled as gang activity.

Access to other in-cell activities – like television, radio, books, or education – is contingent on having funds. Funds require either work (which many SHU inmates are prohibited from) or contacts on the outside. In the OpEd CDCR lauds how its “[r]estricting…communication…has saved lives both inside and outside prison walls” yet claims people can send and receive letters and visit every weekend. In reality, CDCR’s extreme prohibitions and restrictions on phones, letters, and visits destroy lives by interfering with constructive family and attorney communications. This flies in the face of correctional best practices, which evidence that maintaining community ties decreases recidivism and supports reentry. As a rule, SHU inmates are also denied reentry-facilitating activities, such as interaction with other people in religious service, therapy, classes, or meals. Since the strike CDCR has even confiscated books, mail, TVs and radios.

Governor Brown and Secretary Beard must cease their deliberate indifference and end the standoff by meeting the five demands.

Caitlin Kelly Henry, Esq.
Attorney at Law, Adjunct Faculty, UC Hastings College of The Law
P.O. Box 641050, San Francisco, CA 94164
(510) 277-2025

Hunger Strike, Day 30: Beard’s Article and Community Response

The hunger strike is now entering its fifth week. I’m still on vacation, but didn’t want this day to pass without pointing out Jeffrey Beard’s take on the strike:

We are talking about convicted murderers who are putting lives at risk to advance their own agenda of violence.

Here’s Dan Walters’ commentary.

There are also some important statements on this Facebook page to counter Beard’s commentary. I reproduce verbatim Tom Ammiano’s:

I have read Secretary Beard’s claims in the LA Times and I have visited the SHU. On the one hand, the CDCR told me its isolation policies have put a stranglehold on gang leaders’ control. On the other hand, now they say gang leaders are calling the shots in the hunger strike despite their isolation. Which is it? They told us everyone in the SHU was a validated gang member, but when they reviewed cases, they cleared scores of prisoners of gang affiliation. We find it difficult to take CDCR’s claims about the hunger strike at face value. It would be easier to know if prison media access policies were better, as would have been the case under my bill vetoed by the Governor last year. Even so, one thing is clear: The isolation policies are of dubious benefit and they are an international embarrassment. I realize these prisoners have been convicted of terrible things, but I don’t have to believe everything they say to know that we must change our correctional practices. Taxpayers should not be funding indefinite isolation that is condemned in other countries as a human rights abuse.

Hunger Strike, Day 28: CDCR Mediating with Hunger Strike Representatives

Hunger strike supporters in Sacramento. Photo credit:
Melanie Mason for the Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

California’s prisons chief has agreed to meet for the first time with advocates for inmates who are in their fourth week of a hunger strike over conditions in solitary confinement.

“It’s progress,” said Ron Ahnen, president of the Oakland-based group California Prison Focus, which publishes a newsletter circulated to thousands of state inmates that hunger strike organizers used to broadcast their protest. 

Ahnen is among a small group of activists set to meet Friday with Jeffrey Beard, Gov. Jerry Brown’s appointed head of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Other expected attendees include a representative from the American Friends Service Committee.

Meanwhile, an interesting Bloomberg piece by Steven Greenhut compares Brown’s we-don’t-have-a-prison-crisis stance to George Wallace’s resistance to school desegregation.

Jerry Brown, the quirky progressive governor, is defying the orders of three liberal federal judges to release thousands of criminals from the state’s prison system in order to relieve chronic overcrowding. The rhetoric is growing more heated as the state defies a special judicial panel that last week rejected the governor’s attempt to delay the releases and used harsh language in doing so: “Despite our repeated efforts to assist defendants to comply with our Population Reduction Order, they have consistently engaged in conduct designed to frustrate those efforts.” 

In picking up the states’ rights banner, Brown finds himself being compared to Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, who in 1963 defied a federal order to desegregate the state’s schools. But some see Brown as a hero. 

In California, the federal government might order marshals to open the cell doors and Brown could stand in a cell, argued Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton. “Wallace was shamefully standing in the schoolhouse door trying to protect a university’s bigotry from integration by black students,” Skelton wrote. “Brown would be heroically protecting citizens from thugs.”

_______________________________
Props to Caitlin Henry for both links.

CCC Field Trip: Wrongful Convictions in Ecuador (and, SCOTUS tells Jerry off)

By now, many readers have already heard the news: Gov. Brown’s plea to modify the release plan and avoid releasing 10,000 inmates per the Plata mandate has failed in the Supreme Court. Justice Kennedy authored the decision.  Law enforcement is already grumbling.

I’m on Quito, Ecuador, on vacation and don’t want to get aggravated, so if you like, go read Scalia’s dissenting opinion for yourselves.

 Quito is a beautiful high-altitude city in the shadow of Mount Pichincha, with amazing art, colonial architecture, and marvelous parks. And, of course, as one does, the first thing I did this morning was read the local paper, El Comercio, which featured this amazing story about a wrongfully convicted man and his post-exoneration life.

Here’s the bit that caught my eye:

Según datos de la Defensoría Pública, el 65% de personas apresadas recuperó su libertad porque no se hallaron pruebas en su contra. Estos datos fueron levantados desde el 2007 hasta el 2010.

(According to data from the Public Defender, 65% of arrested people were freed because there was no proof against them. These data was collected between 2007 and 2010. My translation–H.A.)

In fact, the article notes that wrongful convictions are so common that the Public Defender’s office has a psychological department dedicated to help exonerated people deal with the stigma and reclaim their lives.

Expect more reports on the Ecuadorian justice system.