Monday, March 18, 2024
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Tags General population

Tag: general population

Agreement to End Hostilities

The Agreement to End Hostilities, envisioned and written by the Best of the Best, is perhaps the most powerful document to be created in the past 50 years, a testament to the power of unity, and today a Blueprint for the possibilities for humanity globally.

Prisoners who continue to be held in solitary ask full Ninth...

Litigators request the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals review the reversal made by the three-judge appellate panel of the decision of the district court against California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. CDCR continues its epoch refusal to adhere to not only the letter of the Ashker v. Governor of California settlement agreement, but neither any modicum of the spirit of the agreement, thereby knowingly and intentionally perpetuating the torture of solitary confinement.

Damu released from Pelican Bay SHU three years after settlement

After 16-plus years of a plightful but solid struggle, I was finally released from Pelikan Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) on Sept. 28, 2018. Good things happen to good people, so I’m simply saying that good, including prosperity, will continue to flow through the Bay View newspaper community. We are forever in your debt. Those of us who recognize a true friend and advocate of the Prisoner Lives Matter movement, we recognize you.

Few prisoners strike at San Quentin

Few prisoners, if any, at San Quentin State Prison participated in what was reported to be the largest prisoner-led strike in United States history. There are many reasons for these prisoners’ lack of involvement. Most of the men imprisoned at San Quentin were unaware of the strike and the groups involved with it like Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and the Bay Area National Prison Strike Solidarity Committee.

Rally in solidarity: Join the California Hunger Strikes’ four ‘main reps’...

Rally at the San Francisco Federal Courthouse while the four California prisoner hunger strike and Ashker class representatives meet and confer* with CDCr to address the continuing solitary conditions that violate the Ashker lawsuit settlement agreement. The four prisoner hunger strike representatives will be present in the courtroom, an historic presence! Help create a strong show of solidarity with prisoners fighting for human rights! Join the rally outside the courthouse on Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2018, 11:30 a.m., at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, 450 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco.

SHU-shifting update: Relief finally granted to California prisoners experiencing ongoing isolation

On July 3, a critical ruling issued in Ashker v. Brown (aka Ashker v. Governor, Docket No. 4:09-cv-09-5796 CW (N.D. Cal.)), the federal class-action lawsuit challenging indefinite solitary confinement in California. The ruling, issued by Presiding Judge Claudia Wilken, granted Plaintiffs’ appeal on a motion challenging the ongoing conditions of extreme isolation endured by many class members.

Emergency action alert: The men who wrote the historic Agreement to...

In October 2017, the two-year period expired for the court to monitor the Ashker v. Governor settlement to limit solitary confinement in California. Since then, the four drafters of the Agreement to End Hostilities and lead hunger strike negotiators – Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, Arturo Castellanos, George Franco and Todd Ashker – have all been removed from general population and put in solitary in administrative segregation units, based on fabricated information created by staff and/or collaborating “inmate informants.”

Ongoing isolation in California prisons not governed by settlement, judge rules

A federal judge in a March 28 ruling declined to order the CDCR to move prisoners previously held in SHUs into legitimate general population conditions. Under a landmark class action settlement that was intended to effectively end indefinite solitary confinement in California prisons, nearly 1,500 prisoners were released into the general prison population, many to Level IV prisons, which is the highest security level in general population.

Brutha Sitawa: CDCr and Soledad Prison retaliate with false reports to...

For years now, I have endured threats, both overt and covert, from the mouths and hands of CDCr’s (California Department of Corrections and rehabilitation’s) OCS (Office of Correctional Safety), ISU (Investigations Services Unit) and IGI (Institutional Gang Investigations), all of them paramilitary services that boast they are a gang and call themselves the Green Wall. (See my article “Sitawa: Exiting solitary confinement – and the games CDCr plays.”)

Wrongfully returned to SHU: Six-month update

I begin this six-month update on the activities of CDCR and the CCPOA with my utmost thankfulness and respect for the San Francisco Bay View. I thank your staff and readers for continuing to shine a bright light on the injustices that occur daily behind enemy lines, as it pertains to human beings who are marginalized as prisoners, defined as slaves by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but yet full citizens of this country! I have now been housed in Pelican Bay Level II SHU for six months, and the situation has not progressed but has rapidly deteriorated.

Rebuilding an economic self-empowerment movement after more than 30 years in...

To the Bay View, thank you for sharing my enclosed thoughts, concerns and other key examples of long neglected and long overdue economic self-empowerment movement rebuilding solutions. I look forward to these good faith opportunities to add my talents and voice to our never-ending struggles for a true sense of racial, social and economic justice.

In our fifth year of the Agreement to End Hostilities, it’s...

We are within our fifth year of the August 2012 historical document, the “Agreement to End Hostilities.” Its release was followed by the Prisoner Human Rights Movement’s third and largest hunger strike in the state of California and larger than any prison hunger strike in history in either the federal or state prison systems in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world. At its peak, 30,000 prisoners here in California participated – prisoners in solitary confinement and the general population.

A solitary distinction

Since our historical release from solitary confinement, many of us have been bombarded by the same question: How did you (we) survive decades of being in solitary confinement? This is not a question of simplicity, it is only a quali­tative and quantitative prelude into an analysis rooted in a historical mater­ial construct which would require a compartmentalization of the particulars which are conducive towards providing an accurate response to the above quest­ion with both clarity and purpose.

Prisoners United of Silicon Valley thank each other and supporters for...

Greetings and solidarity to each other and all who participated in our initial hunger strike to end the arbitrary use of solitary confinement and inhumane treatment in Santa Clara County jails. We would like to extend our respect and appre­ciation to all who participated and sacrificed to provoke change. Although we came from diverse backgrounds – be it race, religion, color or creed – we set our differences aside and inter­locked arms, forming a formidable force through civil disobedience in solidarity.

When we don’t fight hate, we are preparing for others to...

In light of what occurred in Orlando, Florida, and other mass shootings, it comes as no surprise to any of us that the political establishment wants and encourages us to think of madness like this within the narrow context of gun control – taking guns out of the hands of criminals. But, the question must now be asked of the larger community: Why are we so unwilling to view and struggle around what these acts really are – hate!

Organizer ‘Malik’ Washington transferred to toughest prison in Texas

On Nov. 10, 2016, the state of Texas transferred me and 43 other men to the Administrative Segregation Unit at the Eastham Unit in Lovelady, Texas. Eastham is one of the oldest units in the state. The conditions there are much worse than at the Telford Unit. The most glaring issue for prisoners and guards alike is contaminated drinking water! High levels of copper and lead have been found in the water supply. The water has a horrible stench to it. And the taste? absolutely repulsive!

Censoring the Bay View shows how much master fears a revolt

I recently received a form that was generated by the California City Correctional Facility administration. This form notified me that I would not be allowed to read my Bay View newspaper this month. While this may seem like a clear constitutional violation, CDCR has stipulated by law that no inmate may possess any literature “which contains or concerns plans to disrupt the order, or breach the security, of any facility.”

Nationwide epidemic of suicide in solitary: Solitary confinement is murder!

This year at Holman in Atmore, Alabama, there have been five suicides in its segregation unit – more suicides or homicides than in its population. The latest was a mentally ill young man in his 20s. The conditions in the Administrative Segregation housing wings at the H.H. Coffield Unit located at Tennessee Colony, Texas are horrible, and these conditions have driven prisoners to suicide, approximately 13 deaths just this year! We need the broadest exposure of this horrifying trend.

Hugo Pinell, aka Dahariki Kambon: Decades of assassination attempts against the...

The recent victory won by the prisoner hunger strikers, the “solitary settlement” in Ashker v. Brown, is indicative of the solidarity among prisoners today, and it is for this reason I am sharing my story and history of Dahariki Kambon. We must carry on the spirit of what he stood for; his fight was against the racist oppressors and their cruel laws and policies of injustice and inequality.

Prisoner Human Rights Movement Blue Print

CDCr has systemic and dysfunctional problems that run rampant statewide within California’s prisons for both women and men which demand this California government to take immediate action and institute measures to effect genuine tangible changes throughout CDCr on all levels. The Prisoner Human Rights Movement Blue Print is essentially designed to deal with identifying and resolving primary contradictions by focusing on the various problems of CDCr’s dysfunction.