Just violence?: California's short corridor hunger strikes and arguments over prison legitimacy.

• Author: Earle, Chris S.

The pain begins almost immediately. Within days, hunger strikers exhaust their glycogen reserves and begin to shed substantial weight; after a week, the body enters "starvation mode," cannibalizing its own muscle, organs, and bone marrow; strikers become weak, often feeling faint and dizzy and may experience a variety of sensations, including cold and pain (Kalk, Felix, Snoey, & Veriawa, 1996). Such physical deterioration is visible in the discoloration of the skin, in the withdrawing of the cheeks, and in the sharp protrusion of the clavicles (Keys, Brozek, & Henschel, 1950). As strikers approach death, they may experience double vision, vomit bile, and begin to bleed from their gums and into their stomach and intestines (Russell, 2005, p. 89). In addition to physiological deterioration, strikers may suffer from depression, emotional distress, and even hysteria (Kalk et al., 1996; Keys, et al., 1950).

The hunger striker's visceral suffering is considered central to his or her moral claim. A tactic used only when other modes of appeal and petition have failed, hunger strikes frequently occur inside prisons and detention centers. In 2013, named the year of the hunger strike by The Nation, prisoners fasted in Palestine, Russia, Colombia, Yemen, as well as in California and at Guantanamo Bay, to name a few (Mizner, 2013). For prisoners who have been denied justice, the slow decline to death is meant to accentuate the power differential between prison and prisoner, burdening the prison and state with moral culpability for the suffering and possible death of the prisoner (Ellman, 1993; Hauser, 2012; Shah, 2014). The hunger striker's power, as Annas (1995) contends, "comes from the striker's sworn intent to die a slow death in public view unless those in power address the injustice or condition being protested" (p. 1114). As such, the key political and linguistic challenge for the protest-faster is to frame his or her starvation as a sign of exploitation (Annas, 1982; Hauser, 2012).

Yet prisoners' non-violent protest too rarely provokes a compassionate response from the state or public and may in fact be met with increased state violence and discipline. Prisoners are largely illegible as victims. To be certain, prisoners are socially devalued and unsympathetic figures, often recognizable only as perpetrators. This reality confronted prisoners in California who undertook three hunger strikes between 2011 and 2013 resisting the state's reliance upon solitary confinement. Almost sixty days into the third and largest strike, a federal judge authorized the state to force-feed prisoners, accepting the state's argument that the strike was orchestrated by violent gang leaders who were coercing other prisoners into participation and posed a security threat. The court criminalized the non-violent protest, deeming it a form of violence. The strikers suspended their protest-fast two weeks later.

In this essay, I examine the Short Corridor strikers' arguments-both bodily and discursive-alongside the state's response, foregrounding the struggle to name and make sense of various forms of suffering and violence, those rationalized or abhorred, just or unjust. Persuading the public and courts that their self-starvation was a sign of exploitation proved difficult. This is in part because, as Cacho (2012) claims, those who occupy criminalized statuses are largely ineligible for personhood. For Cacho, ineligibility means being "subjected to laws but refused the legal means to contest those laws as well as denied both the political legitimacy and moral credibility necessary to question them" (p. 6). To be ineligible for personhood is to be punished but not protected by the law, to be the object but rarely the subject of justice (Cacho, 2012; Espiritu, 2003; Rosello, 2001; Williams, 1991). In the United States (and elsewhere), prisoners may be doubly excluded from the social contract: as racialized figures who don't fully count in "the people" (Mills, 1997) and as actors who have broken that contract, failing societal norms and obligations. Ineligible for personhood, prisoners are seen as deserving of punishment and retribution, as unfit to be free.

The Short Corridor strikers' arguments had to contend with both their illegitimacy as subjects and with the often unquestioned legitimacy of the law and prison. The strikers' and states' arguments were thus enmeshed with discourses of responsibility, placing in tension what Lavin (2008) calls liberal and post-liberal responsibility. In the United States, the criminal justice system depends on a liberal account, identifying responsibility as a possession of the subject, as something the subject has; liberal responsibility functions to lay blame on and then punish causal agents. In contrast to this reduction of responsibility to the will of an autonomous agent, Lavin oudines post-liberal responsibility as a matter of social relations. Similar to conceptions of relational agency in rhetorical studies (Davis, 2010; Gehrke, 2009; Hesford, 2011; Lundberg & Gunn, 2005; Marback, 2010), post-liberal individuals are constituted by their responses, and, as such, are interdependent beings who are never the sole authors of their words or actions (Lavin, 2008). It follows that responsibility and agency are distributed across, as well as enabled and constrained by, the social and material conditions within which we act. (1) In this scheme, punitive retribution or the exclusion of deviant individuals makes little sense.

The Short Corridor strikers and the state thus advanced arguments about the legitimacy of the prison specifically and of the retributive criminal justice system generally. I reveal these arguments to be dependent on the trope of madness. In relation to the strikers, as alleged gang members, madness is not so much the counterpart to rationality, but refers to agentic and willful, yet senseless and pathological, acts of violence. Madness, evoked in this way, does not mitigate the agent's responsibility but actually lends urgency to calls for punishment and retribution. In arguing the hunger strikes to be an instance of gang violence, the state aimed to reinscribe the strikers as mad, as the origin of violence and societal ills. To preserve order, the argument goes, agents of madness and disorder must be excluded. The strikers' bodily protest and discourse too risked articulating such frames and were always vulnerable to being subsumed by them. Given the overrepresentation of convicted criminals as violent and mad, there was little space for them to be recognized as deserving of protection and care under a liberal account of responsibility.

However, I also point to moments when the strikers disturbed notions of liberal responsibility through their narrative arguments making visible the experience of being held in solitary confinement. These narrative arguments made dominant conceptions of criminality and responsibility unfamiliar, identifying violence and madness as responses to and conditioned by social relations and the surrounding environment. In addition to countering the state's depiction of gang violence, the narrative arguments shifted the emphasis from the strikers to the ways prison conditions drastically contort prisoners' avenues for action and response. In revealing liberal responsibility to be a damaging fiction, the strikers' arguments do not call for a more restrained use of force or a more humane form of imprisonment, but question the legitimacy of the prison system, indicting it for producing the very things it claims to discipline: madness, violence, and death.

CALIFORNIA'S SHORT CORRIDOR HUNGER STRIKES AND THE QUESTION OF MADNESS

Prisoners in California waged three widespread hunger strikes resisting the state's use of long-term solitary confinement. The first two were in 2011 and each lasted for three weeks, with roughly 6,000 prisoners fasting in July and September protests. The third strike was much larger with over 30,000 initially refusing food and lasting sixty days from July 8 to September 5, 2013. Ten days into the last strike, 2,500 prisoners continued to fast. By the end of August, over forty prisoners persisted. One striker, thirty-two year old Billy Sell, would die just days after resuming eating, although the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) labeled Sell's death a suicide and as unrelated to the strike (Devereaux, 2013). After sixty days, the strike was suspended in the face of two developments: the CDCR was granted permission from a U.S District Court judge to force-feed strikers and the California Senate agreed to hold hearings on the morality and legality of solitary confinement.

The strikes were organized by the Short Corridor Collective, so named after the unit in Pelican Bay State Prison housing several of the strike leaders. Although prisoners throughout California participated in the strike, the main efforts were in Pelican Bay and Corcoran State Prisons, two supermaxes constructed in the late 1980's. Supermax refers to any prison or stand-alone unit that isolates prisoners from the general prison population and from external stimuli for long periods of time (and thus is different from segregation units in which prisoners may be held for short periods). Pelican Bay, at the time of construction, was referred to as a "prison of the future" designed to house "the worst of the worst," lauded for being "entirely automated and designed so that inmates have virtually no face-to-face contact with guards or other inmates" (Corwin, 1990, para. 26, 15, 11). Pelican Bay represents a bleak future, especially considering that in 1995 a federal judge condemned its conditions as pushing the limits of what human beings can tolerate (Madrid v. Gomez, 1995). The judge nonetheless stopped short of finding cruel and unusual the conditions of the Secure Housing Units (SHUs, pronounced as "shoe"), which hold prisoners in long-term...