California Prison Focus (CPF) grew out of a five year effort by the Pelican Bay Information Project to fight against the torture of prisoners at the Pelican Bay State Prison SHU. CPF broadens the effort to include more prisons, and is allied with the work of the Pelican Bay Information Project.
While every prison in California degrades and brutalizes some of its prisoners, it is in the SHUs that prisoners are most often abused. California has three such units - two for men and one for women - holding more than 2700 people. At Pelican Bay State Prison prisoners are kept in their windowless cells for a minimum of 22 1/2 a day. They never see the sun directly. There is no education, no job training, no work, no religious services, or hobby materials. No communal activities of any kind are allowed. All meals are eaten in-cell. Those with the money can purchase a radio or TV, although only from one CDoC approved vendor. Prisoners are subject to strip searches upon departure from and return to their cell for purposes of "security" - when they have not come in contact with any other individual. Sentences are determined by a classification committee that can only be described as a "kangaroo court" at which prisoners are not allowed legal counsel. The other two SHUs - Valley State Prison for Women and California State Prison at Corcoran - offer similar accommodations. Eighty-two percent of those in the SHU are prisoners of color, an astounding 59% Hispanic.
CDoC claims that the SHUs are used to make prisons safer by housing the "worst of the worst" prisoners away from those who obey the rules. In fact, the SHUs hold many prisoners whose only offense is speaking out against injustice, filing meritorious grievances or lawsuits, or helping other prisoners stand up for their rights. Other prisoners have run afoul of the rules because they are mentally or psychologically disabled and denied effective treatment in prison. Because CDoC operates an unconstitutionally neglectful psychiatric system in all of its prisons, mentally ill prisoners are likely to wind up in the SHU instead of in treatment.
A large percentage of men are in the SHU because they have been labeled as prison gang members in a cruel game called "Snitch, Parole or Die." Under the "snitch" policy prisoners are assigned to the SHU as gang members through confidential information, and can only be released from the SHU by informing on the alleged gang members, reaching their parole date or dying in prison. Information gained under such duress is notoriously inaccurate. The practice of throwing someone in solitary confinement in order to extract information is considered torture and is prohibited by the Geneva Convention governing wartime combatants.
Negative psychological effects of long term SHU housing
is called the SHU Syndrome, which includes mental and emotional breakdown.
Prisoners are
left to suffer without help from proper staff. Direct release from the SHU
into
the community is standard practice. Many prisoners are ill-equipped to
reenter society, and
carry anger and frustration within them. Each year, hundreds of SHU
prisoners enter our poor
and minority communities worse off than when they left.