California prison hunger strike leader:
'If necessary we'll resume. This is war'
Exclusive:
From solitary confinement at the brutal Pelican Bay, Todd Ashker led a
protest that shook the US penal system
Rory Carroll, The
Guardian,
Friday 27 September 2013
Todd Ashker enters the visitation cubicle and a metal door slides
shut behind him. He places his hands into a slot so a guard on the
other side can unlock the handcuffs. He rubs his wrists and sits on
the fixed stool. Scars and tattoos cover his arms. The hair is grey
and close cropped, the moustache almost white. He is much thinner
than the muscled, bulked-up prisoner I have seen in photos.
A thick glass window
separates us and a surveillance camera peeps down, recording the scene.
Ashker picks up the phone. I pick up mine. The voice is strong, with a
vaguely mid-western lilt. "So. You're here."
Here is
Pelican Bay state prison, an outpost of concrete and razor wire in a
forest near
California's border with Oregon. A beautiful, rugged landscape where
Pacific waves crash against cliffs of redwood. You don't see any of that
from the super-maximum security jail. Except for the blue guard towers
it is drained of colour, a grey sameness coating gravel, fences and
buildings.
It was built to isolate
"the worst of the worst", the most dangerous murderers and gang leaders.
Ashker, 50, has spent most of his life here: "They'll never let me out.
I'm going to die here, I know that. But I have a choice. I can slowly
rot or I can fight. Fight to change things."
Ashker grew up in
Colorado and moved with his family to California as a boy. He was jailed
for burglary in 1982, when he was 19. He got tattoos – Celtic and Nordic
images, plus a few swastikas, and allegedly joined the Aryan
Brotherhood. Released, he was caught burgling again and jailed at New
Folsom state prison. In 1987 he repeatedly stabbed another inmate, an
Aryan Brotherhood member. He called it self-defence but a jury convicted
him of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to 21 years to life.
During the trial another inmate stabbed and wounded Ashker's attorney,
Philip Cozens, in what Cozens believes was an attempt to provoke a
mistrial.
"Todd is a very
dangerous man in terms of his ability to do things," says Cozens, who is
still a criminal defence lawyer.
Imagine approaching a
dog in a meadow, only to discover it's a wolf.
The reason I have
exchanged letters with Ashker, and am now visiting him, is to ask how he
and a handful of fellow inmates did something remarkable.
They have been held in
a Secure Housing Unit – solitary confinement – for decades. It is like
being entombed. Inmates call it "the hole". The cells, 7.6ft by 11.6ft,
have no windows. Food is served twice daily through a slot in the door.
Once a day each man is allowed to exercise, alone, for 90 minutes in a
"dog run", a small concrete yard. Interaction with guards and other
inmates is negligible.
Yet from this bowel of
extreme isolation Ashker helped orchestrate a
protest which united black, latino and white prisoners in
a massive hunger strike – 32,000 inmates in 33 Californian prisons –
which shook the penal system. It fuelled a national and
international outcry over the use of prolonged solitary confinement in
the US. The strikers called their action off earlier this month, after
California's state assembly promised to investigate the practice.
"My arms are sticks
now. Legs too," says Ashker, showing shrivelled biceps. He says he lost
20kg. "But the strike is not over. We have suspended it. If necessary
we'll resume and go all the way, starve to death. This is a war."
During our allotted two
hours he is intense, articulate and wary. He has largely shunned media
interviews since 1995, when CBS's 60 Minutes depicted him as a thuggish
neo-Nazi. His emergence as a leader of a multi-racial, non-violent
campaign for prisoner rights begs questions. Has Ashker changed? Is he
now battling injustice? Can he and his three fellow "principal prisoner
representatives" (they avoid the term leaders) change the system?
Ashker's journey from
teenage tearaway to grizzled jailhouse scholar underpins a largely
untold story of how Bobby Sands, Mayan cosmology, class-consciousness
and the Arab spring inspired one of the biggest challenges to US penal
policy in living memory.
'A
default management tool'
The US has been on an
incarceration binge. From just over 300,000 inmates in state and federal
prisons in 1978 the population has exploded to 1.57m today, the product
of policies like "zero tolerance" and "three-strikes" which mandated
jail terms for certain offences and lengthened sentences. Include county
and local jails and the US has the world's highest incarceration rate,
with blacks and hispanics vastly over-represented.
There are signs of
easing. Squeezed budgets and more lenient policies – low crime rates
softened voters and politicians – have seen the jail population dip
since a 2009 peak. The San Francisco chapter of the American Institute
of Architects is urging members to refuse to design execution chambers
and solitary confinement cells.
Tens of thousands of
prisoners, however, remain in solitary confinement (estimates vary from
25,000 to 80,000). "It has become a default management tool rather than
a tool of last resort," says Laura Downton, of the National Religious
Campaign Against Torture.
The psychological toll
of hallucinations, paranoia, self-mutilation and suicide has been well
documented. The UN special rapporteur on torture says solitary
confinement periods should last no longer than 15 days. In the US it can
last decades.
California, often
steelier than its liberal image, has been especially fond of the
practice and has about 3,500 inmates in Secure Housing Units (known as
SHUs, pronounced "shoes"). Pelican Bay is a SHU citadel. "It's the
prison of all prisons. A legend among inmates," says Danny Murillo, 33,
who is now studying at Berkley, having served time there for armed
robbery.
Authorities say
isolation is a necessary and successful tool to control the leaders of
gangs which once ruled bloody fiefdoms in Californian jails.
"Restricting the gangs' communication has limited their ability to
engage in organized criminal activity and has saved lives both inside
and outside prison walls," Jeffrey Beard, head of the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,
wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed.
Once an inmate is
deemed a gang member, he is removed from the general population and put
in a SHU where he remains, without chance of parole, unless he
"debriefs" against other alleged gang members. Those who refuse languish
indefinitely. They get a TV and radio and access to a library but are
denied physical human contact. A glass screen separates them from
visiting family.
To maximise their
isolation, Pelican Bay clustered the alleged leaders of four gangs – the
Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mexican Mafia and
Nuestra Familia – in a special SHU section with a short corridor.
Authorities did not anticipate that these men from rival racial groups
would manage not just to communicate but to form a bond. They shouted
through drain pipes and holes in perforated doors, passed secret notes,
sent messages via lawyers.
"You get to know each
other," says Ashker. He denies being an Aryan Brotherhood member. The
swastika tattoos? "I was 19. Inside each group shows racial pride,
white, black, brown, all of us."
'A
prisoner class'
The writings of Thomas
Paine and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the
United States planted the idea that instead of race rivals they were
a "prisoner class" with the penal system as a common foe, says Ashker.
Thus was born the Short Corridor Collective, comprising Ashker, Ronnie
Dewberry, who is black and Antonio Guillen and Arturo Castellanos, who
are latino. They issued a plea – some would say an order –
for a truce among races in California's jails.
Ashker is the most
outspoken. Over the years he has earned a paralegal degree and
participated in dozens of federal lawsuits, including the right to order
books and earn interest on prison savings accounts. He also won a big
payout after a guard shot him in 1990, shattering his arm and causing
chronic pain often left untreated. "I've used the money to fund more
litigation," he says.
The main grievances are
the isolation and the pressure to "debrief", aka snitch – policies
seemingly engraved in granite. Some critics accuse the prison guards'
union, a powerful political force, of expanding the SHUs to generate
more jobs and overtime.
In 2009, Ashker read
Nothing but an Unfinished Song: Bobby Sands, the Irish hunger striker
who inspired a generation, by Denis O'Hearn, a sociology professor at
New York's Binghamton university.
Sands died in the Maze prison in 1981 after starving himself for 66
days, the first of 10 hunger-strike deaths which fanned new life into
the IRA and INLA campaigns against British rule in Northern Irleand.
"At first I was against
the idea of damaging myself. These" – he indicates hovering guards –
"are my enemies. They'll celebrate when I die." The idea grew on him,
however, and it intrigued the rest of the collective. The 2011 Arab
spring and the Mayan calendar's denoting of 2012 as the start of a new
historic cycle convinced them to act. Ashker says:
We realised we had to
take responsibility for change. And that they couldn't do anything
against a peaceful protest.
Painstakingly, the
collective built support throughout the general population. In July 2011
they launched the first hunger strike, which at its peak involved 6,600
men in 13 jails. That number had dwindled to 440 by the time it ended,
20 days later, but authorities were rattled. The scale was
unprecedented. The media and likes of Amnesty International paid close
attention. A second strike two months later drew 4,500 men and lasted 18
days.
California's Department
of Corrections and Rehabilitation ceded modest reforms: more evidence of
gang activity would be needed to banish an inmate to the SHU, and a
four-year step-down programme to leave solitary confinement without
snitching was introduced.
This did not satisfy
the collective so
in July this year it launched another hunger strike, involving 32,000
inmates in 33 jails. Authorities called it an effort by gang leaders
to manipulate public opinion and reclaim control over jails. Supporters,
including human rights groups, politicians, clerics and celebrities,
called it a cry against injustice.
Strikers refused solid
food but consumed vitamins and Gatorade, which has calories. By the time
the strike ended, on 5 September, after 60 days, the number of strikers
had dwindled to about 100, with several hospitalised.
The threat of force-feeding and the promise of hearings at the state
assembly in Sacramento prompted the suspension, says Ashker. He does not
share the optimism of outside supporters who hailed a public relations
victory. "I'm not happy about it but we have to wait and see what the
politicians come up with."
'Isolation is becoming unacceptable'
Ashker says that
despite the enforced solitariness, the same numbing routine year after
year, he has changed for the better. "When I was younger I had problems
with impulse control. I control it now, I meditate half an hour every
day." One of his favourite words is evolution.
O'Hearn,
who has corresponded with and visited Ashker, considers him a
friend. "Todd is dangerous only in the sense that he is subversive," he
says. "I just know for a fact he's a different man at 50 than he was at
19. He's very widely read and writes very well. He's an incredibly
bright guy." The solidarity of Pelican Bay inmates is tilting debate,
says the professor:
Isolation is becoming
an unacceptable way to hold people for a long time.
Cozens, the attorney
who was attacked by a friend of Ashker in 1990, is more cautious. The
man he knew then was a violent sociopath, he says, but that was a long
time ago. "There are changes that happen to people between those ages,"
he says. He thinks solitary confinement is overused. "There are guys who
have earned their stay there but there are others who should be
released."
Ashker, whose pale,
unlined face bespeaks decades without sun, does not expect to leave the
hole. His defiance is engrained and he scorns even those guards who try
to be friendly. "Don't matter if they smile. They are complicit in the
system."
Ashker's stake in the
outside world is negligible. His mother and only sibling, a sister, are
dead. His father is serving life in South Dakota. He married an English
penfriend (he has an ad on
writeaprisoner.com), but it ended after his hopes of parole
evaporated. They wed separated by glass, never allowed to touch. "I hope
she finds someone to be happy with," he says.
When I ask Ashker if he
envisages an existence beyond the razor wire, if he yearns, for
instance, to gaze at the stars or stroll down a street, he looks
puzzled. "I'm not getting out. My struggle is here."
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977
www.freedomarchives.org
HOME |