Pelican Bay (CA) Inmate Agreement To End Racial Violence

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

It's no secret that the American prison industry has slowly shifted from a rehabilitative model (which focuses on helping inmates restructure their lives and become productive members of society upon release) to a warehouse model. Human beings who are convicted of crimes (often minor, non-violent crimes) are shipped off to a building for a certain number of months — that number callously calculated by the prosecution and the judge. Once they arrive at prison, they lose practically all of their rights, and prison officials focus on short-term "safety" to the exclusion of all other goals. This leads them to implement draconian practices like solitary confinement, and to use those practices against inmates with little-to-no reliable information.

Thankfully, prisoners are fighting back against this broken system. In California (whose prison system is so bad that its medical care is in federal receivership and it has been ordered by federal courts to reduce overcrowding in its prisons) a group of inmates at the Pelican Bay institution organized a hunger strike last year against California's unjust solitary confinement policies (which encourage inmates to provide bad information that lands other prisoners in solitary). Now, the inmates have come to an agreement intended to put an end to violence between racial groups in order to focus more directly at the injustices imposed by the prison officials. The full statement is here. If this is successful, maybe Pelican Bay inmates will lead the way to better prisons across the country — prisons where we actually focus on helping people turn their lives around rather than treating them like animals.