MOTHER JONES: Learn More About Prison Hunger Strikes
Why are prisoners striking?
More than anything, the hunger strikers want to put an end to the increasingly common practice of long-term solitary confinement in the state’s prisons. Most of them are inmates in the Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU), where 1,198* people are being held in 11-foot-by-7-foot windowless cells; about 400 have been in solitary confinement there for more than a decade.