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  Pelican Bay and CA Prisoner Hunger Strike Support Demand an End to Torture   UCLA - in front of Royce Hall in the Quad - Be There! Thursday September 29   Installation Space, 10am-3pm

 

Contact Keith James:  keithjames22@yahoo.com; ph. 213-840-5348 ___________________________________________________________

 

On Thursday September 29, an interactive installation site at UCLA will provide a SPACE for students and professors, family members of those locked up in the SHU's (Security Housing Units), and others, to meet and discuss and collectively condemn the torture of CA prisoners and demand prisoners be treated as human beings.  

 

We invite those in the religious, legal, human and civil rights community to come to UCLA on Thursday, to meet students and family members, and SPEAK OUT in support of the prisoners.   The interactive installation site will feature visuals and it will spotlight families of prisoners in the SHU.  

 

Dramatic readings, letters from the prisoners themselves, will be read.  Speaking about the hunger strike, these letters include powerful exposure of the SHU and the hunger strike to stop torture: "our sacrifice now will mean a more humane world for us in the future...." and "the conditions at Pelican Bay may shock the public, the idea that American citizens endure torture daily, yearly and for decades may be a surprise to many, or the fact that many of the conditions for prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay are really better than SHU prisoners in Pelican Bay is hard to swallow but its true..."  We aim to break into the media with this action!

 

At UCLA, we have a moral responsibility to act in way commensurate with the justness of the prisoners' demands and the urgency of the situation.  A determined movement outside the walls of prison, including on campus, is urgently needed to expose and demand an end to these high-tech torture chambers called "SHU's".  ___________________________________________________________________  

 

In an act of tremendous courage, for 20 days, from July 1 to July 20, 6,500 prisoners across California took part in an unprecedented hunger strike action, crossing racial lines, to demand an end to torture.  On Monday, September 26, 2011 prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) have resumed their hunger strike. [Read more here and here.]  

Think about everything that makes you human... that keeps you physically and mentally alive... that connects you with the world and other people... that gives you a reason to live, to love, to learn and think....  All this is what the SHU tries to extinguish.  In the SHU you're locked up in a small, windowless concrete cell 23 hours a day, with minimum human contact and maximum sensory deprivation, for years and sometimes decades.  Human rights groups in the U.S and internationally have documented the inhumane conditions - these are crimes against humanity.  And the fact is tens of thousands of prisoners across the U.S. are being held in the kind of barbarous conditions the prisoners as Pelican Bay have so courageously rebelled against.  We need to build massive political resistance to the injustice of mass incarceration - the outrage of its leading edge targeting people of color -- and the inhumanity of solitary confinement.  Step out NOW and make a difference.