SOLITARY
REFINEMENT
Criminal justice activists seek to abolish incarceration policies they say discriminate
By Samantha Kennedy • Bay City News
Between 2011 and 2013, while serving time in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation system, Minister King X was one of several inmates who helped organize hunger strikes that rippled through the California state prison system in a fight for better conditions.
Involving more than 30,000 prisoners, the strikes took place to protest conditions that included indefinite solitary confinement in some cases. They spurred statewide changes in 2015 that seemed to put an end to the indefinite solitary and to lockdowns viewed as racially discriminatory.
Twelve years later and out of prison, King X still fights for those incarcerated. “I couldn’t stop,” King said.
For King X and others, the advocacy continues.
And so do the protests.
Salinas Valley strike
This summer another action broke out, this time at Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad, where an estimated 500 men went on a two-week hunger strike to end what they said was a “deprivation of rehabilitative and constitutional rights.”
Loved ones and other supporters on the outside say the hunger strike that began on June 13 at Salinas Valley was specifically held to protest CDCR restrictions that halted visitation and most outside communication and had greatly restricted movement inside state prisons.
“We write to remind you of the commitments made in response to the historic hunger strikes,” this year’s strikers wrote in a letter announcing their action. “These agreements were not granted out of goodwill but won through struggle against abuses that were later exposed as not just unethical, but unlawful.”
In the letter, publicized by the outside prison group California Prison Focus and others, strikers called for an end to what they called arbitrary lockdowns, collective punishment and a “deprivation of rehabilitative and constitutional rights.”
The restrictions, known as a modified program, were put in place after what CDCR said had been an increase in violence, drugs and suspected overdoses in prisons. The crackdown at 21 prisons lasted from June 12 to July 2, according to the CDCR, and affected Level III and Level IV facilities. Level III and Level IV facilities are the highest security classifications in the CDCR system and include secure perimeters with armed coverage inside, outside or both.
The June restrictions came only three months after CDCR had temporarily placed similar restrictions on Level IV facilities in March, citing safety concerns for both staff and those incarcerated.
CDCR did not respond to a request for comment on the hunger strike in June, but after two weeks it reinstated in at least some prisons the revoked privileges that prisoners said they would protest until they were restored.
Dolores Canales, co-founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement, said CDCR’s modified program is something she’s been seeing more and more.
“It’s a form of solitary because you’re locked in your cell and you can’t get out even for a visit,” said Canales. “It’s an abyss of turmoil and confusion; that’s the best way to describe it.”
Canales, who was once in solitary confinement herself and advocated for prisoners in the 2011 to 2013 hunger strikes, said the restrictions are a “blanket punishment” because they apply to those who may not have committed any of the violence CDCR cited for the restrictions.
“That just causes more frustration in an already aggravated situation,” Canales said. “When they implement these no-notice lockdowns, it creates frustration not just for the incarcerated individual, but for the family out here.”
Pelican Bay inmates spur reform
In 2015, solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit was said by CDCR to have housed some of the system’s most violent and gang-involved prisoners.
The reforms, which grew out of the 2012 legal settlement known as Ashker v. Governor of California, forced CDCR to make changes both specific to Pelican Bay and statewide related to indefinite solitary confinement.
When a handful of prisoners in solitary confinement filed the lawsuit in 2012, hundreds of people had been in solitary for more than a decade, according to advocates. Seventy-eight had been there for more than 20 years. The suit claimed long-term solitary violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibiton against cruel and unusual punishment.
Many prisoners in the CDCR’s Security Housing Unit were confined to windowless cells for nearly 24 hours per day. That confinement included rare visitation and no phone calls. The settlement put a cap on how long prisoners could spend in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay and reduced CDCR’s solitary confinement population overall.
But Keramet Reiter, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, said long-term solitary persists in the system.
“Pelican Bay itself is not functioning as that high security supermax prison,” Reiter said, “but there are other places throughout the state where people are in long-term solitary. They’re just elsewhere.”
The CDCR says there is no solitary confinement anywhere in the system, but advocates disagree. Reiter said there’s “a tendency in prison systems to find ways to create long-term solitary confinement and to obfuscate exactly what they are.”
These are often going by other names, Reiter said, pointing to housing units with titles like Administrative Segregation Unit.
While Reiter noted the change at Pelican Bay, she said she hadn’t been there or to other prisons to see it herself. Canales said that, while she did see changes thanks to the Ashker settlement, some of those housing units looked similar to the old Security Housing Units.
CDCR did not respond to a request for comment asking for clarification on how modified programming or segregated units are different from solitary confinement.
The settlement also prohibited prisoners from being placed in solitary confinement based on their gang affiliation, a practice that had been alleged by the Ashker lawsuit.
The ‘voice of a voice’
King X called CDCR’s practice of isolating due to alleged affiliation to a gang an attempt to silence his push for Black liberation while inside.
At the time of the first strikes, King X and others incarcerated in CDCR, county jails and federal prisons across the country wrote to The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, a Bay Area-based Black-owned-operated newspaper. Founded in 1976 by Muhammad al-Kareem, the paper is known as a platform for prison correspondents, and it was instrumental for King X and others during the first round of strikes, publishing letters that detailed prison conditions and called for reform.
“These papers (SF Bay View and California Prison Focus) are the voices of the walls behind enemy lines,” said King X, sitting in a kitchen that doubles as the paper’s headquarters. “The San Francisco Bay View was our school because we were able to communicate through the very thing that they feared, the very thing they criminalized — the education that was being shared.”
“It didn’t even occur to me what they were doing, but (those incarcerated) had figured it out before I did,” Mary Ratcliff, co-publisher of the paper, told King X across the room. “They realized that if they put something in the paper, every prisoner in California would know about it.”
King X and other prisoners said CDCR had withheld several editions of The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper from prisoners who were subscribers during the 2013 hunger strike for allegedly inciting the action.
Ratcliff said a call with Canales, the co-founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement, broke the news that CDCR officials “blamed the Bay View for the hunger strikes.”
“It was the proudest moment of my life,” said Ratcliff. “I was speechless.”
Mutope Duguma, who spent more than 20 years in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit, was one of the paper’s most prolific writers during the strikes, said Ratcliff.
“The world came to our defense after hearing countless stories of TORTURE,” Duguma, wrote in 2016. “The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper not only made sure our voices were heard but also sought out the voices that needed to be heard.”
“Dr. Willie and Mary Ratcliff have always spoken to the oppression of New Afrikans (i.e., Black people) but make no mistake about it: Inside that struggle for justice, they have spoken for all oppressed people, no matter where they exist in this nation and world,” Duguma wrote.
Canales echoed that outside supporters are not giving those incarcerated a voice but instead acting as “the voice of a voice.”
Current reform efforts
Despite partial successes, efforts to further limit solitary confinement — even with pushes from those incarcerated — have fallen short.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has otherwise touted his reform efforts at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, has blocked two attempts to reduce solitary confinement in CDCR facilities to meet international standards.
The push, known as the California Mandela Act, would have capped time in solitary confinement at 15 consecutive days in a 60-day period, allowing 20 days in total nonconsecutively.
It also would have banned pregnant women, people under 26 and older than 59, and those with mental, physical and developmental disabilities from being placed in solitary confinement.
Newsom, who has called solitary confinement “ripe for reform,” nonetheless vetoed the bill in 2022, citing safety risks to prisoners and staff.
In a second attempt to pass the bill in 2024, Newsom again killed the bill.
King X and Ratcliff discussed what a new governor might mean for both Black Californians and those incarcerated after Newsom terms out in 2026, expressing interest in Green Party candidate Butch Ware, a Black man.
Steve Brooks, a currently incarcerated journalist at San Quentin who at one point spent more than a month in solitary, participated in the 2013 hunger strike in solidarity with the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit prisoners. Actions like hunger strikes are pretty common in the CDCR system, he said.
“People do this all the time,” said Brooks. “Everything stems from this idea of being treated like a human being, so people are struggling for their humanity in prison.”
Usually, said Brooks, prisoners also have to take their struggles to court.
“It’s always a long, drawn-out battle,” he said. “Unfortunately, hunger strikes are just one of those things that people have had to use over the years to bring attention to their human rights.”
Brooks said he’s noticed an increased awareness in how prisoners are treated, especially following the hunger strikes in 2013. But “it’s still a long ways off” to get the full recognition that prisoners deserve to be treated with the same human standards as those who aren’t incarcerated.
In August, CDCR again implemented a “systemwide” modified program for multiple Level III and Level IV facilities, including restricted housing units, according to an announcement on its website. The restrictions once again, include the temporary suspension of in-person visitation.
“It’s always a long, drawn-out battle. Unfortunately, hunger strikes are just one of those things that people have had to use over the years to bring attention to their human rights.”
Steve Brooks, incarcerated journalist
At least five facilities said they had suspended in-person visits for select cell blocks.
The Department did not say why the restrictions were put in place or how many facilities were affected but said in its announcement it “prioritizes safety and security.”
By Sept. 5, the announcement had been removed from the website.
Canales, who noted her disappointment in the pushback against recent reforms, said opponents of solitary confinement — however it’s labeled — haven’t given up. A bill that would collect data on solitary confinement in CDCR prisons is the most recent effort by advocates.
AB 701, introduced in February by Assemblymember Liz Ortega, D-San Leandro, would conduct a one-time comprehensive study on the use of solitary confinement in all detention facilities in the state.
Ortega said the state lacks clarity on the specifics of how solitary confinement is used in facilities and her legislation would give a better picture of that use.
Canales, despite opposition to some recent reform efforts, believes most people still want changes to solitary confinement in CDCR.
“I think they just don’t know how,” Canales said.