User:Elisejost/sandbox

In 2011, 6,000 California prisoners partook in a hunger strike to protest the unconstitutional conditions they were subject to. Prisoners refused to eat until their five demands were met. They asked for: 1) Removal of collective penalties and an end to departmental misconduct, 2) Revoke the debriefing policy, consisting of gang-affiliated inmates divulging information on their gang before being released, 3) Terminate long-term solitary confinement, 4) Serve nourishing and balanced meals, and 5) Implement a variety of rehabilitation programs and privileges for Security Housing Unit (SHU) inmates. The protest gained traction in California prisons; at its peak, over 12,000 prisoners were taking part in the hunger strike. The strike ended after 20 days when the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation announced that they would reassess every inmate in the Security Housing Unit. The California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation met few, if any, of the prisoners demands. By 2013, only 382 of the 4,527 SHU inmates residing in California cases had been reexamined, and of those 382 inmates about half were released.

On May 23, 2011 the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision in Brown v. Plata that overcrowded conditions in California prisons constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishments. The decision upheld a lower court decision which found that "an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies." The Court found that, at the time of the lower court trial, California jailed nearly twice as many prisoners as its prisons were designed to hold. In the majority opinion for the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: