On Sunday’s 60 Minutes broadcast Oprah Winfrey reported on the use of solitary confinement in American prisons. She talked about how California is leading the way to reform of the practice, with changes in the state’s Pelican Bay Prison, which Winfrey called the most notorious state penitentiary in America.
It is a story that is very much worth watching.
“Designed and built as a ‘supermax’ facility,” Oprah began, referring to the 1989-constructed prison, “it’s been used for nearly 30 years to lock away inmates considered the most dangerous.”
As WitnessLA and others have reported, it was some of those most dangerous inmates—many of them leaders of the prison system’s notorious prison gangs, which have wreaked havoc inside and outside of the state’s correctional institutions for decades—who astonishingly managed to work with each other to organize system-wide hunger strikes, and a class action lawsuit, that led to negotiations with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), and ultimately real change.
[For more on this story by Celeste Fremon, go to http://witnessla.com/oprah-loo...olitary-confinement/]
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