Wednesday, July 10, 2013

California's prison hunger strike and shadow of Guantanamo - latimes.com

California's prison hunger strike and shadow of Guantanamo - latimes.com

About 30,000 California prisoners this week began what could potentially be the biggest prison hunger strike in state history. Out of curiosity, I checked out the petition containing the prisoners’ demands. The first signature belongs to Todd Ashker, a convicted killer incarcerated at Pelican Bay.
He doesn’t sound so bad when you check him out at “Write a Prisoner,” the prison pen pal website. Born under the astrological sign of Cancer, he just turned 50, is separated, and in 2008, earned a paralegal degree.
“Hey, thanks for stopping by to check out my ad!” Ashker writes. “Believe it or not, you’re meeting a man who’s presently spent the last 27 years in a solitary confinement cell — buried alive, treated worse than a subhuman animal, deprived of all normal human contact, all the while doing what I can to maintain my humanity, some sense of sanity, largely relying on a wry sense of humor to keep the madness at bay.”

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