Massive California prison protests enter third day

About 30,000 prisoners in the U.S. state of California entered their third day of hunger strike on Wednesday, protesting their solitary confinement and other torturous conditions.

The protests, which began in two-thirds of California’s prisons on Monday, focus on policies under which prisoners are kept in isolation in small windowless cells, some for decades.

Nearly 5,000 of the total 130,000 inmates in the California prison system are locked in solitary confinement units.

The protesting inmates want a five-year limit to solitary confinement and are also asking for increased education and rehabilitation programs for those kept in isolation.

The statewide prison protest was organized by inmates at Pelican Bay, the state’s most isolated prison near the Oregon border.

Dozens of people have protested in Los Angeles and Seattle in solidarity with the prisoners and more protests are planned by the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.

California inmates have increasingly protested inhumane conditions within the solitary confinement units.

In March 2012, 400 California inmates in solitary confinement petitioned the United Nations to intervene.

“I have seen fellow prisoners murdered by correctional officers, mentally ill prisoners abused, I have seen men psychologically break down, cry, scream and go insane,” Alfred Sandoval, who is in Pelican Bay on murder convictions, wrote in the petition.

The United States holds more prisoners in solitary confinement than any other so-called democratic nation in the world, according to Reuters.

According to a report by NPR in March, an estimated 80,000 American prisoners spend 23 hours a day in closed isolation units for 10, 20 or even more than 30 years.

Amid growing evidence that solitary confinement causes mental breakdown, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has decided for the first time to review its policies on solitary confinement, the report said.

Solitary confinement exploded in the U.S. in the 1980s when almost every state built what is called a “supermax” prison facility for the so-called “worst of the worst.”

According to a 2012 report by Amnesty International on California’s supermax units, 34 prisoners in California commit suicide every year.

Solitary confinement doubles to triples the costs of incarceration, up to $60,000 a year per inmate, NPR said.

American prisoners in solitary confinement have testified about suicidal depression, self-mutilation, lethargy, hallucinations and other ills.