[Ppnews] Khader Adnan expresses solidarity with 30, 000 hunger strikers in California prisons

[Political Prisoner News]

  Khader Adnan expresses solidarity with 30,000 hunger strikers in
  California prisons

Submitted by Nora Barrows-Fr... on Thu, 07/11/2013 - 17:09
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/khader-adnan-expresses-solidarity-30000-hunger-strikers-california

Approximately 30,000 persons inside more than twenty prisons in 
California are on their fourth day of a mass hunger strike today, 
demanding an end to long-term solitary confinement along with other 
abusive conditions and policies. And they say they won't end their 
strike until state officials sign a legally-binding agreement to end the 
draconian practices 
<http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/california-prisoner-hunger-strike-begins/>. 


As I wrote on Monday 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora/prisoner-solidarity-palestine-pelican-bay>, 
Palestine activism groups are organizing in solidarity with the hunger 
striking prisoners in California. While Israel continues to arrest, 
detain, imprison and torture Palestinian men, women and children, many 
parallels are made between the systems of mass incarceration there and 
in the US. Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, wrote 
in a solidarity statement 
<http://samidoun.ca/2013/07/solidarity-with-california-prisoners-on-hunger-strike/>with 
the California prisoner hunger strike:

    Over 2 million people are imprisoned in the US and over 60 percent
    of those people are people of color, subject to a distinctly
    racialized system that routinely criminalizes youth of colour, in
    sharp contrast to the crime rate, which has fallen while
    imprisonment has risen. Mass incarceration is deeply racialized, as
    1/3 of young Black men are in the criminal justice system. The US
    holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners with 5 percent of the
    world's population, and prisoner resistance and political action has
    been sharply repressed.

    ... Solitary confinement is a mechanism of torture, from Palestine
    to Pelican Bay to Guantanamo, and we stand in solidarity with the
    courageous prisoners who challenge isolation and oppression.

Michelle Alexander, author of the important book /The New Jim Crow: Mass 
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness/, wrote in /The Nation / 
<http://www.thenation.com/article/new-jim-crow#>in 2010: "There are more 
African-Americans under correctional control today --- in prison or 
jail, on probation or parole --- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade 
before the Civil War began." Alexander adds that as the prison 
population rises --- there are more than 2 million persons incarcerated 
across the US --- nonviolent offenses "alone account for about 
two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more 
than half of the increase in the state prison population ... In some 
states, African Americans comprise 80 percent to 90 percent of all drug 
offenders sent to prison."

The Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity website 
<http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/> adds:

    The California prison system currently holds over 10,000 prisoners
    in solitary confinement units, with dozens having spent more than 20
    years each in isolation. Conditions in Pelican Bay State Prison's
    [secure housing units (solitary confinement)] sparked massive waves
    of hunger strikes in 2011 that saw the participation of 12,000
    prisoners in at least a third of California's 33 prisons.

To read updates on the mass hunger strike, which was organized by 
persons inside the Pelican Bay prison 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/pelican-bay-prison>, visit the 
Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity website 
<http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/>.


    Khader Adnan's statement

On Tuesday, Addameer <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/addameer>, the 
Palestinian prisoners' advocacy organization based in the occupied West 
Bank, published a statement of solidarity from Khader Adnan 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/khader-adnan> who famously went on a 
hunger strike in December 2011 for 66 days in protest of his 
administrative detention. Adnan's hunger strike elicited global 
solidarity and actions worldwide. He was released back to his home in 
the West Bank in April 2012.

Adnan states:

    I announce my full solidarity with my 30,000 oppressed brothers in
    the American prisons and I ask that the American people and the
    government end the policy of isolation of the detainees and the
    prisoners, and comply by human rights law that forbids continuous
    isolation because of its destructive effects on the mental and
    physical health of detainees.

Khader Adnan's full statement is below:


    130710-khader-adnan-solidarity.jpg
    <http://cdn1.electronicintifada.net/sites/electronicintifada.net/files/130710-khader-adnan-solidarity.jpg>

Khader Adnan's statement of solidarity with hunger striking prisoners in 
California.

(Addameer <http://electronicintifada.net/people/addameer>)

Also on Tuesday, Addameer reported that 12 individuals are currently on 
hunger strikes in Israeli prisons 
<http://addameer.org/etemplate.php?id=621>, and the organization 
provides their names, the length of their hunger strikes so far, and 
details of their detentions.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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