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."

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