Hunger Strike in the California Prison System

This is pretty incredible and is getting very little national attention. The state of our prison system is a national disgrace, and California's system is among the worst.

For more than a week, the California prison system has been gripped by the largest hunger strike in its history. Today, campaigners say that some 12,000 inmates continue to refuse food in roughly two-thirds of the state's 32 facilities. That's down from the 30,000 who kicked off the strike, but still more than twice the number who participated in a similar action two years earlier.

The strike – which began with a group of men held in isolation in Pelican Bay State Prison before spreading across the state – was principally motivated by California's aggressive use of solitary confinement. In many cases, the strikers' demands are simple: one photo a year, one phone call per week, permission to use wall calendars.

"The prisoners are not on a suicide mission," says Roger White, campaign director of a Bay Area coalition called Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity. "If they didn't have hope that things could change and that CDCR [the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] could actually implement the demands, they wouldn't be striking."

In 2011, a United Nations torture rapporteur called for an absolute and international ban on indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement, arguing that just a few a days locked up alone in a cell has been shown to produce lifelong mental health problems. In California, hundreds of Pelican Bay prisoners have spent a decade or more in solitary confinement – some for as many as 20 or 30 years.

Everything is wrong with this chart

Everything.

Drug offenses and immigration "crimes" are both ludicrously high.

Despite the tens of thousands of cases of fraud that helped cause the banking crisis and recession, virtually no one is incarcerated in that category.

Literally 0.0% of the US prison system is dedicated to national security prisoners. That's not because there aren't any – it's because they're all held in military bases in foreign countries where little inconveniences like the rule of law don't get in the way.

Oh my fuck.

On a slightly lighter note, David Simon has agreed to do another season of The Wire if the US agrees to end to the drug war.

John Yoo v. Brilliant, Tasteless Pranksters

I've long wondered why John Yoo is teaching at UC Berkeley. Barring prison, it at least seems like he shouldn't be teaching. But if he can get a job teaching, how and why did he end up at Berkeley?

This video sheds some unsurprising but hilarious light on how it's going. And since I was on campus myself just yesterday, it seems particularly timely:




My favorite part is that the class applauds.


EDIT: This Glenn Greenwald piece about a letter by UC Law Dean William Orrick helps explain Berkeley's willingness to hire Yoo: the school's desire to defend and cement academic free speech transcends just about everything else.

EDIT II: Whoops, J.N. already posted this.

Infuriating Progress

Yesterday, the Obama Administration announced that it will no longer designate the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as illegal enemy combatants.

Those three words are, as I have noted a number of times before, the very heart of the Bush Administration's legal framework behind the detention of prisoners from the "War on Terror" in relative secrecy and without trial. The Obama Administration's decision to redefine the Guantanamo prisoners' legal status is therefore an acknowledgment of the problems inherent to that particular classification, and is something of a reassurance after last month's decision to maintain the use of the legal category for the detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Presumably, at least some of the Guantanamo prisoners will now receive the full rights entitled to them under the traditional justice system of the United States – something that terrified the Bush Administration for completely inexplicable reasons.

And indeed, Reuters quotes Attorney General Holder as saying some things you'd never have heard from a Bush Administration official:

"As we work toward developing a new policy to govern detainees, it is essential that we operate in a manner that strengthens our national security, is consistent with our values, and is governed by law."

Aside from the references to values and the rule of law (read: "not torturing people"), it's encouraging that Holder refers to the developing nature of the Administration's work on these issues, as it means that some of the poor decisions thus far may merely be temporary measures.

Nevertheless, the real question here does not concern Guantanamo Bay at all. That prison's fate is clearly sealed. The real question is about the United States detention facilities on foreign soil, where most current and future prisoners will be held and interrogated in the upcoming years. After all, Section 8(a) of Obama's executive order to close Guantanamo quite explicitly states that "Nothing in this order shall prejudice the authority of the Secretary of Defense to determine the disposition of any detainees not covered by this order." In other words: any reassessment of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners does not apply to the prisoners at the massively expanded Bagram facility in Afghanistan or any of the other US military prisons overseas. For now, we must assume that last month's reaffirmation of their illegal combatant status stands.

Even the ultimate treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners remains something of an open question, as the rumblings of many a human rights lawyer and activist can attest. With this new announcement, we almost have less of an answer than ever to the question of how future prisoners will be treated. And that is the very point I would like to stress: while just about any work to negate the illegal enemy combatant jurisprudence is good news in my book, I can't help but feel that the Administration's focus on Guantanamo is just a distraction, an effort to correct the most technically illegal portions of Bush approach to justice while maintaining their fundamental framework.

But my god, I hope I'm wrong. The stakes could hardly be higher on this.

And John Yoo Responds...

After our discussion in the comments, it seems worth mentioning John Yoo's response to the release of nine memos in which he explicitly denigrated the first and fourth amendments and arguably encouraged war crimes. In (of all places) the Orange County Register, Yoo gives an interview with the following choice tidbits:

Q. Were you surprised with the student reaction at Berkeley to you being there?

A. Berkeley is sort of a magnet for hippies, protesters and left-wing activists. So I'm not surprised that being one of the few recognizable conservatives on campus that I would generate a lot of heat and friction. It happened well before working in the Bush administration.

Step 1: Announce status as reactionary asshole who hates "hippies." Check. Whatever "hippies" are, now that the 1960s have been over for forty years, John Yoo hates them.

Q. You recently wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal criticizing President Obama for closing Guantanamo Bay.

A. He's really restricting what the CIA can do in the war on terrorism. That's my opinion. Now that I'm not in the government, part of my role, because I have a certain amount of expertise, is to try to keep the government honest.

Honest. Huh. That was not the word that first came to mind, as I'm not sure how relevant honesty is here. More like evil. "Part of my role, because I have a certain amount of expertise, is to try and keep the government evil." But hey, it's his interview.

Q. What needs to be understood with governmental decisions?

A. There are tradeoffs inherent in every question. Someone can say, "I think it's more important that other countries have a more favorable opinion of us than any intelligence we gain from interrogation." That's a benefit and a cost. That's the cost … we will get less information about the enemy.

The enemy... does that include the 533 prisoners who were released from Guantanamo Bay? Or just the 241 still under guard? Or do you mean, all 779 illegally 100% legally held detainees? I'm so confused!

Q. Do you have a different perspective as a private citizen?

A. The thing I am really struck with is that when you are in the government, you have very little time to make very important decisions. You don't have the luxury to research every single thing and that's accelerated in war time. You really have decisions to make, which you could spend years on. Sometimes what we forget as private citizens, or scholars, or students or journalists for sure (he laughs), is that in hindsight, it's easier to say, "Here's what I would have done." But when you're in the government, at the time you make the decision, you don't have that kind of luxury.

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHY THE BILL OF RIGHTS EXISTS. That is exactly, 100%, why we have some lines that never get crossed, no matter what.

But here's the real kicker, which is getting particular play around the internets:

Q. Is there anything you would have done differently?

A. These memos I wrote were not for public consumption. They lack a certain polish, I think – would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently, but I don't think I would have made the basic decisions differently.

Translation: "I would have been just as disrespectful of civil rights, but would have either shredded the memos after they were read or lied more openly to the public about their meaning."

In conclusion: fuck you, John Yoo. Fuck. You.

Obama's First Failing Grade

I'd been hoping that I would not have the opportunity to use the below picture in a post. But the symbolism is sadly appropriate.


(Brennan Linsley / Associated Press)


Echoing perhaps the single most egregious legal position taken by the Bush Administration, the Obama justice department has now openly classified the detainees at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan as "unlawful enemy combatants." As previously discussed here, the purpose of this legal category is to keep secret the reasons for and reviews of their captivity and to deny any legal means to secure release.

Though the Obama administration's commitment to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay came as a surprising ray of hope for many of us who care about human rights, this new statement raises concerns that Guantanamo won't so much be closed as moved. As the New York Times article on the statement points out, the arguments of the two primary Supreme Court decisions on Guantanamo rest on the fact that the base is technically on United States soil. With that limitation removed, the overall mission of the prison can continue outside of SCOTUS's jurisdiction.

It isn't clear yet whether this indicates a full-fledged endorsement of the Bush legal framework or merely a temporary acceptance that will be addressed in time. But either way, it's worth remembering that Bagram has an arguably worse record than Abu Ghraib when it comes to prisoner abuses – there just weren't any publicly released pictures from Bagram.

Here's an Al Jazeera report, which both puts a human face on the situation and captures a US Officer's explicit statements on the legal status of the detainees and on the fact that Bagram contains prisoners from outside of Afghanistan:





Secrecy surrounding imprisonment is always worrisome, as public knowledge and legal recourse are the only means other than open revolt to keep abuse in check. Given how easy such abuse can be, how almost accidental or unintended, how impossible to investigate, an endorsement of institutionalized secrecy and questionable morality is playing with fire. For an administration that not only promised a change in detainee policy but would like to think of itself as pragmatic and rational, this is a scary step indeed.

Combine it with Hillary Clinton's remarks on China/Tibet relations, and you've got one truly awful week for human rights.