Short Corridor Collective

The Short Corridor Collective is the name of a multiracial alliance between prisoners of Pelican Bay State Prison whom initiated hunger strikes in 2011. This group was established in October 2012 for the purpose of protesting against the Pelican Bay prison system, accusing it of having poor, inhumane living conditions. This alliance created an agreement to set aside differences and end the hostilities between racial groups within California prisons and jails. The collective was a result of the prison hunger strike movement that circulated widely within and outside of the prison. The primary focus of the strike was on the isolation units, more commonly known as the Security Housing Unit or SHU. However, the prisoner participation during this movement served as a reminder of the poor conditions of Pelican Bay prison, one of the first “supermax” prisons in the United States. The campaigns from the Short Corridor Collective were important due to the reforms that were achieved, such as visitation rights, proper health care, access to education and the exposure of the inhumane and harmful conditions of isolation wards.

The collective, also named the Pelican Bay SHU- Short Corridor Collective established and maintained five demands throughout the multi-year movement:

1. To end group punishment for individual rule or policy violations
2. To reform gang validation procedures
3. To comply with the recommendations of a national commission on long-term solitary confinement
4. To provide adequate and nutritional food
5. To expand rehabilitation, education and recreation programs

Important Events:

• July 2011: hunger strikes begin to escalate throughout prisons all across the state of California
• July 8th, 2013: 30,000 prisoners in California prison systems joined together to launch the largest hunger strike in the history of the state
• September 5th, 2013: a core group of 40 prisoners refused meals for 60 days and hundreds of other prisoners joined in the hunger strike for days or weeks on end

Pelican Bay Prison Structure, System & Location

The Pelican Bay State Prison was opened in 1989 as one of the world’s first “supermax” prisons. The term “super-max” is used to define prison systems of isolated units with the highest security levels. Pelican Bay holds 3,500 people and of those, around 1,500 of them are locked in solitary confinement. The prison opened with over 1,000 cells designed specifically to imprison prisoners serving long-term sentences in solitary confinement. Over 1,100 prisoners are currently in isolation units for a minimum of 22 to 24 hours a day in an 8ft by 10ft cell with concrete walls. Extended sentences in isolation units are correlated with high rates of suicide, self-harm, hallucinations, insomnia and more. The Security Housing Unit or SHU cells are designed for sensory deprivation with no windows and use fluorescent lights that constantly burn throughout the day. The door of the cell is made of perforated steel, facing another concrete wall. The only opening of the door is a slot for food called the “meal port”, which is also used to cuff the hands of the prisoner. Prisoners of the SHU, are delivered meals twice a day and the times they are not in their cell, they are alone in a windowless exercise space, often known as “dog runs” due to their resemblance to a kennel. The prison is also operating with the most advanced technology such as camera, microphones, heat sensors and centrally controlled cell and corridor doors. This allowed a single guard to continuously have control of the prison with his/her monitoring station. The adult prison system in California was originally designed to hold 80,000 prisoners but currently holds about 156,000 prisoners. Due to this, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was required to reduce its prisoner population to 137.5% of the initial capacity. By 1997, there were a minimum of 57 supermax facilities in the Unites States, along with other isolation units of similar design and operation. “Supermax” prisons were not invented at the federal level but rather by the state and institution level. Prisons, like Pelican Bay, were designed to operate from the inside rather than work under federal administration. Pelican Bay State Prison is located at the northwest corner of California, only 15 miles south of the California-Oregon border. The highway leading to the prison is demanding due to its twists, the fog that comes in from the coastline and the mountainous terrain. The prison is connected to this highway by a single narrow lane and exists behind a thick forest of redwoods. Many prisoners are prohibited contact prisoners and most prisoners are far from their homes and families which results in infrequent visits.

Harlow’s Study of Depression

In 1971, American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow conducted a series of studies on clinical depression in rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During his study, he designed a vertical chamber apparatus that he coined the pit of despair, in which baby monkeys were separated from their mothers and left in isolation for up to one year following birth. Harlow sought to develop a model of depression that he could apply to human social behavior and cognitive development, since primates have a cortex that develops similar advanced cognitive capabilities during childhood. Harlow tested the monkeys every day in a controlled environment that was empty of common social experiences, and where mothers could not teach them. Like humans sentenced to solitary confinement, Harlow’s monkeys developed severe social and emotional problems, sparking national outrage amongst animal rights activists. This led toward more standardization of ethical standards of experiments conducted in the United States.

Supermax Prisoners as Disintegrating Subjects

The U.S. legal system labels supermax prisoners as dangerous in such a way that categorizes and excludes them. These processes create a disintegrated subject, whose exclusion reinforces the power of the state. As legal subjects, Americans are each part of a social contract between the state and themselves. If one violates the law, the state has the power to punish them with respect to the law. A completed punishment in theory restores the individual to full citizenship status. Current disciplinary subjects are controlled by an administrative apparatus that discourages certain tendencies and through punishment attempts to make them obedient, internalize social norms and become capable of self-governing. In reality, prisoners are not coerced into obedience, instead they are disintegrated: sorted into excludable categories, stripped of their rights, and forever removed from social and governmental structures. In addition, their sanctions are administered discretionarily, unlimited by the due process rules or civil rights that are supposed to protect them. In this way, the solitarily confined are excluded from society and become disintegrated subjects in a space of legal nonexistence.

Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996

Immediately following the civil rights movement, activists began demanding the enforcement of Constitutional rights for prisoners and convicted felons. While the prison reform movement virtually died out by the early 1980s, inmate lawsuits steadily rose with the nation’s quadrupled prison population. In 1995, inmates filed almost 40,000 new federal civil lawsuits—constituting fifteen percent of the federal civil trials held that year, many of which were aimed at state officials. In response, Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) in 1996, that was designed to lower the incidence of such cases through the provision that a court "shall not grant or approve any prospective relief unless the court finds that such relief is narrowly drawn, extends no further than necessary to correct the violation of the Federal right, and is the least intrusive means necessary to correct the violation of the Federal right.” The effect of the act was dramatic in reducing the quantity of cases brought to the courts. Previously, prisoners won a substantial portion of the cases, exposing the constitutional violations inflicted upon them. Congress, however, found that these cases were the very rare minority of cases and the courts were being bogged down by what was characterized as “frivolous” litigation.

Suppression and Intervention

One of the most difficult challenges corrections officials face is controlling inmate gangs. Because of this, strategies such as suppression and intervention were created to neutralize the influence of major players and leaders of gangs. Suppression is a form of law enforcement presence that targets high-incidence areas and deploys the same officers to those areas for an extended period of time. Effective suppression is based on gathering and organizing intelligence information on gangs and their members. Law enforcement officers were specifically trained and experienced to recognize gang problems in particular parts of a given city. These efforts resulted in the imprisonment of large numbers of gang members. Social intervention programs are intended to stop gang violence, draw members away from their respective gangs, and provide them with alternatives. The age of gang members, degree of gang organization, and commitment to criminal activities determines the appropriate mix of these strategies. Busing children to schools out of neighborhoods that had gang structures and traditions helped mitigated the problem, but it risks spreading the problem. Overall, gang cohesion is typically reduced and children were less committed to gangs this way. The involvement of all social institutions and community groups are seen as necessary to the success of this strategy.

Solitary Confinement in the Media

Journalists face serious obstacles to reporting on prisoner—and even more when it come to those solitary confinement. Press access to governmental institutions can help to prevent corruption and abuse by those in power, and is typically cast in a positive light. However, when it comes to obtaining information about individuals kept in solitary confinement, the press is often kept in the dark. In the 1974 case Pell v. Procunier, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment does not guarantee the press access to prisons beyond what is generally afforded to the public. The Court reasoned that since other methods of communication exist, freedom of the press is not compromised by limitations to prison access. These barriers involve layers of bureaucracy, and help to minimize investigative inquiry and avoid close scrutiny of prison practices. Policies surrounding prisoners in soilitary confinement often include supervision of interviews, access to only certain types of prisoners and certain areas of prisons, and the ability to use recording devices. Many states gave themselves the right to deny interviews if they feel it will cause a “disturbance” but no subsisquent or concurrent policy states how that would be measured. In this way, prison officials have considerable latitude in deciding whether a reporter may interview a particluar prisoner, and even then each prisoner is limited to one one-hour interview per month. However, they do have the right not to be photographed or have their voice be recorded.

References

1. Diaz Casique, Francisco. "Anxiety and the Racialized Logic of Mass Incarceration in California." Social Justice, vol. 43, no. 4, Oct. 2016, pp. 99-104. EBSCOhost, (4)
2. Guenther, Lisa. "Political Action at the End of the World: Hannah Arendt and the California Prison Hunger Strikes." Canadian Journal of Human Rights, vol. 4, no. 1, Jan. 2015, p. 33. (2)
3. Herzing, Rachel. "Tweaking Armageddon": The Potential and Limits of Conditions of Confinement Campaigns." Social Justice, vol. 41, no. 3, July 2014, pp. 190-195. EBSCOhost, proxy. (1)
4. Reiter, Keramet. "Response: Retaking the Archive of Knowledge about Solitary Confinement." Social Justice, vol. 43, no. 4, Oct. 2016, pp. 118-122. EBSCOhost (3)
5. Zimring, Franklin E. "Four Important Lessons from 23/7." Social Justice, vol. 43, no. 4, Oct. 2016, pp. 115-117. EBSCOhost,(5)
6. Suomi, Stephen J., et al. "Rigorous Experiments on Monkey Love: An Account of Harry F. Harlow’s Role in the History of Attachment Theory." Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, vol. 42, no. 4, Dec. 2008, pp. 354-369. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s12124-008-9072-9.
7. Reiter, Keramet and Susan Bibler Coutin. "Crossing Borders and Criminalizing Identity: The Disintegrated Subjects of Administrative Sanctions [Article]." Law & Society Review, no. 3, 2017, p. 567. EBSCOhost, proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edshol&AN=hein.journals.lwsocrw51.43&site=eds-live.
8. Fiebig, Chantale. "Legislating from the Bench: Judicial Activism in California and Its Increasing Impact on Adult Prison Reform." Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, vol. 3, 01 Feb. 2007, p. 131. EBSCOhost,proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx direct=true&db=edslex&AN=edslex4CD0731B&site=eds-live.
9. Carlson, Peter M. "Prison Interventions: Evolving Strategies to Control Security Threat Groups." Corrections Management Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2001, p. 10.EBSCOhost,proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bah&AN=7065399&site=eds-live.
10. Becker, Ben. "Under the Radar." New Labor Forum (Sage Publications Inc.), vol. 21, no. 1, Winter2012, p.6. EBSCOhost,proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=edb&AN=71795625&site=eds-live.

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