Disability Rights California Awards California Mandela Campaign with California Leadership Award
Disability Rights California Awards California Mandela Campaign with California Leadership Award
Disability Rights California is proud to present the California Leadership Award to the California Mandela Campaign at our upcoming gala. Ahead of the event on February 28, we wanted to share about the campaign and their inspiring advocacy work.
The California Mandela Campaign is a group of solitary confinement survivors, immigrant rights, disability rights, and civil rights advocates that are working to change the law in California through a bill known as the California Mandela Act, AB 280. Named after former political prisoner Nelson Mandela, the bill would limit the use of solitary confinement, and ban it completely for vulnerable populations including people with disabilities, in jails, prisons and immigration detention centers.
Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment where a person in prison lives by themselves in a single cell. It has been recognized by the United Nations, World Health Organization, and other international bodies as greatly harmful and potentially fatal. People with disabilities, pregnant people, youth, and the elderly are all at heightened risk from the harm caused by solitary confinement inside jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers in California.
One of the organizations in the campaign is Berkely Underground Scholars, an academic support program founded by formerly incarcerated students at UC Berkeley.
The goal of Underground Scholars is to create a prison-to-school pipeline for incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted individuals. Another organization in the campaign is California Families Against Solitary Confinement, which is an organization that came together in 2011 to support the statewide prisoner hunger strike against solitary confinement.
We spoke with campaign members Hakim Owen from Underground Scholars, Danny Murillo the Associate Director and co-founder of Underground Scholars, and Dolores Canales the co-founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement about their work with the group and connection to the fight to end solitary confinement. These conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.
How did you get involved with the campaign?
Hakim
Through UC Berkeley’s policy fellowship with Underground Scholars, which is basically a program at Berkeley that teaches about civic engagement and legislative and policy work. Through that program with Underground Scholars, I was introduced to the California Mandela Campaign. I saw an opportunity to lift a voice to a practice that I knew was horrific and get put in a position to help people not experience what I went through. At the end of the day, it all boils down to trying to help people, but in specific, black men who I have a particular passion for organizing and distributing information to, in hopes that we can come out of some of this fog that we've been in for so long.
Danny
Once I got to Berkeley this is kind of when I got involved in the organizing for the third hunger strike, which was in 2013. And then I've been involved with consulting and doing work around solitary confinement since then. I've done work with the Vera Institute of Justice and different organizations like California Family Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC), things like that and panels that I participated on.
Dolores
I've been working on solitary since the hunger strikes in 2011. With the Mandela campaign specifically Jackie and Hamid with Immigration Defense Advocates reached out to CFASC. I had a call with them, and they told me about the work that they had been doing with the Mandela bill. I knew from the first conversation it was something we needed to be involved in. We are California Families Against Solitary Confinement. We began because of the hunger strikes, organizing with our incarcerated movement leaders to end the use of indefinite solitary confinement. So, it was like coming full circle.
How has solitary confinement impacted you?
Hakim
On reflection, having been removed from it for a few years now, I think what it does primarily is that it takes a person, for me particularly, to a place of despair that I didn't know was possible. When you're in solitary it's like, when you go to prison you're being punished and it's horrific and it's hard and there's violence and there's all these different various things that you have to endure and the one thing that you have to rely on in those situations are some of the relationships that you've established and built with other people who are incarcerated, sometimes staff--the ones that are decent. So, when that's taken away from you, and you’re thrown in solitary confinement, it’s a level of despair that comes over you that it's hard to bounce back from. I'll tell you some of the thoughts that I was having: I would rather be dead than living like this, I would rather be homeless on the street than living like this, I would rather catch a beating and just bleed out of this. It takes you to a place that is very low and it’s an extended period of time. I had two solitary terms, one for 18 months and one for 36 months respectively, and that’s a long time to be caught up in those negative thoughts.
Danny
Well, I guess on a psychological level, I know that I have been impacted. I know that I'm traumatized by solitary confinement. I'm a very reserved person. I spend a lot of time at home by myself. I prefer not to be around so many people, but I can say that it's part of my work sometimes. So, I do recognize that I do have some type of psychological effects from that experience. Because of that experience and knowing what it's done to me, I want to advocate to end that practice, whether it's short-term solitary confinement or long-term solitary confinement, I believe that there's other ways of dealing with things that happen in prison.
Dolores
I have been in solitary confinement. My son had been in Corcoran SHU (security housing unit) solitary confinement for a decade and then was transferred to Pelican Bay, SHU unit. He was transferred to Pelican Bay a few months before the July 1, 2011, hunger strike. He was in D5 and he started writing us letters that they were going to all go on this hunger strike together, and everybody started sending letters out. What got my attention the most was that groups that historically were known to have division came together in organizing the hunger strikes. I remember reading letters from people that had been in solitary confinement for 28 or 30 years. I remember specifically one letter saying, “it's like being locked in the trunk of your car and you just get fed. You know you just get an opening to get a tray of food, two times a day, but being locked in the trunk of your car for decades.” I started thinking, and it really just hit me that California had no intention of ever letting my son out of solitary confinement. I always thought, they'll figure it out, they have to let them out someday. At that time, I didn't realize there were people doing 20, 30, 40 years in solitary confinement. Having experienced solitary confinement myself, I mean, I just did months here and there, and even then, I could remember the isolation of it. So, I couldn't even begin to imagine 20, 30 years isolated, buried alive in a concrete tomb.
What do you want people to know about solitary confinement?
Hakim
I feel like we have so much information, research, personal testimony, data, we know the societal problems. We know that solitary is torture. How do we know? Because if we're talking about our veterans or people that are maybe held as POWs— we talk about it and society completely understands what they endured. We understand what confinement and that type of condition will do. I believe that people know, and what it resorts back to is how do you get people to care. We look at people who have been incarcerated as less-than, as faulty, we put these stigmas on them. What’s needed is getting people to care and getting them to realize that it’s an issue that’s bigger than just locking people up.
Danny
It's inhumane. We are human creatures, right, who need to be socialized, who need to be able to have access to the resources that make us human. And that doesn't really exist in Pelican Bay SHU (Security Housing Unit) or in any solitary confinement facility that I was in. Solitary confinement is designed to strip you of your humanity. It's designed to break you mentally, physically, and spiritually. It's very similar to the system of chattel slavery. The system broke people. You broke them to accept their status as enslaved people. And so, for a lot of us, we become enslaved to that idea like, ‘yeah, well, this is my life, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to be.’ And it's like, it's not who you are. We're more than that, right? I was able to build up the resiliency to not allow that place to break me, and credit goes to those that were around me. People saw in me something that I refused to see in myself, in my humanity.
Dolores
What I would want people to know, I think most importantly, is that right now on any given day, in the State of California, in our county jails, in our federal detention facilities and in our prison system there are people, probably thousands, languishing isolated in a cell. They're probably suffering anxiety or panic attacks. They're probably feeling alone, isolated and hopeless. It hits you. The darkness comes in waves and it is sometimes a struggle to not drown and succumb to the feeling of despair. And I'd want people to know that solitary confinement absolutely does exist in our carceral system. Until we start acknowledging that it exists then the use of this practice will continue on as it always has.
What does it mean to you to see the campaign be honored?
Hakim
It means to me that there’s hope and that there is a chance for change. At times the work seems very daunting, and you realize what you're up against, structurally. But it just means that it's working and sometimes it might not feel like that, or it might be slow work but it's working.
Danny
I think it's well deserved. The work that we've done the last couple of years. We could have easily rewritten the bill and made it much more palatable for the senators and legislators and made it something that could be watered down. But it hasn't, right? So, I think that says a lot about the integrity and the character of this campaign. That we did not allow ourselves to just whitewash this bill and pat ourselves in the back, we did a great job just moving forward like, nah, we're going to push what we started and stick to that line.
Dolores
Well, for me it means that all those 30,000 people that were incarcerated and went on a hunger strike just to expose the use of solitary confinement, it's like they're being honored as well. To me, it's like the incarcerated community, all of their efforts, all of their suffering, all of their voices broke through the cement and steel meant to silence them and the true spirit of Mandela is being honored through the work of this coalition. It's recognition of the fierce and the strong organizing that took place. And so, for me, for the families of CFASC, this is an incredible honor for the coalition to be carrying on the work that was started from incarcerated individuals. This coalition and campaign remind me of the same commitment, unity and strength that was exemplified by the incarcerated hunger strikers.
What is next for the campaign, and your involvement?
Hakim
What’s next is to keep fighting and keep trying to see if we can get this bill signed. Until it is, we’re going to keep trying. For me and my involvement, it's just any way I can, any way that my work can be a benefit to the overall picture.
Danny
This year, I think I'm going to take a more front-center role. I think maybe I would like to do more speaking engagements and things like that. Like multiple opportunities came to do the article with the San Francisco Chronicle or LA Times and things like that.
Dolores
Right now, we're looking and hoping to do a lot of organizing this legislative session and getting it to the governor's desk, and that the governor would do the right thing. This is a bill about the people. It's not about policy, I mean, of course, it's about policy, but the true spirit of the bill is about the people that it's going to affect, the people that it's going to change their lives phenomenally. And that goes not just with the incarcerated people, but people that are working in these environments that don't even realize the harmful effects that it carries on in their home life or into retirement.