Since August, inmates at Pelican Bay state prison say they have been awoken every half hour by guards in a practice that amounts to sleep deprivation

Less than a month after inmates at a California maximum security prison reached a landmark settlement to curb decades-long solitary confinement, inmates and their advocates are protesting against another new policy that they say is subjecting them to inhumane treatment.

Since August, inmates at Pelican Bay state prison say they have been awoken every half-hour by prison guards in a practice that amounts to sleep deprivation.

The policy, known as security and welfare checks, requires prison guards to check on inmates in segregated housing, including solitary confinement cells, every 30 minutes to make sure they are not injuring themselves or trying to kill themselves.

A CDCR spokesperson said the checks are based on a 1995 court order in a class action lawsuit (Coleman v Brown) between a group of prisoners with severe mental disorders and the state of California, which determined that CDCR wasn’t providing adequate care to prisoners with mental illness.

Prison officials say the suicide checks started in other prisons in 2006 but were implemented less than two months ago on 3 August at the Pelican Bay prison in northern California.

The timing has raised the ire of inmates and their families, occurring a month before advocates reached the settlement to curb solitary confinement measures that sparked numerous hunger strikes and national campaigns to end a practice many consider inhumane.

“Being in the SHU [security housing unit] is hard as it is … being by yourself and isolated, but it’s torture when you can’t sleep because of the nonstop banging of the metal doors, stomping by the guards, buzzers, and the guards shining a flashlight in your eyes two times an hour,” said Akili Mims, a Los Angeles resident who was released from Pelican Bay’s SHU on 5 September, more than a month after the checks were implemented.

Inmates in the SHU, otherwise known as solitary confinement, spend 22-23 hours in a windowless 8ft by 10ft concrete room, and are denied all physical contact with visitors, phone calls, and educational and recreational programs. There about 2,700 inmates currently in Pelican Bay, about 1,200 in the SHU and another 350 in other segregated and psychiatric units.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cell in the secure housing unit of Pelican Bay state prison in Crescent City, California. Photograph: Reuters

Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the CDCR said the agency received complaints from Pelican Bay prisoners as soon as the checks started and that the department has provided ear plugs for the inmates to block the noise.

“I visited my son in the Pelican Bay SHU on 12 September and he is going crazy from not being able to sleep. I’ve never seen him like this. He couldn’t think and he fell asleep while I was talking with him from across the glass partition,” said Dolores Canales, whose 38-year-old son John Martinez has been in the Pelican Bay SHU since 2011 for allegedly being affiliated with a gang.

Canales and a group of about 20 other protesters gathered in front of the Pelican Bay prison on Wednesday with banners reading: “Sleep deprivation is Torture.”

Through his attorneys, Martinez has written to CDCR leadership saying that the checks are in violation of his rights, under the US constitution’s eighth amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment. “Our client is being treated like a prisoner of war, in a torture interrogation facility, when he is not allowed to sleep for more than 30 minutes at one time,” says a letter from Martinez’s attorney representative, Deborah Cain, to the CDCR chief ombudsman, Sara Malone, on 28 August.

Canales says that Martinez is serving time for second-degree murder, which he was convicted of more than 20 years ago. He has also served 10 years in the SHU in the California state prison in Corcoran, central California.

Steven Fama a staff attorney at the Prison Law Office, said the court ruling, Coleman v Brown, doesn’t specifically order CDCR to do the checks and that it is up to CDCR what kind of suicide monitoring system they develop.

Fama said he and other attorneys in his office are concerned about the health of the Pelican Bay prisoners affected by the checks.

In a 31 August email to CDCR leadership, attorneys at the Prison Law Office said that they “received multiple credible reports from multiple prisoners that custody officers in the SHU are intentionally awakening each and every prisoner in the SHU every 30 minutes through not only aggressive use of the Guard One wand system and excessive stomping/key jingling noise throughout the rounding, but also by repeatedly slamming the door to the Pod, and shining their flashlights into every prisoner’s eyes”.

“Once they [the guards] finish one round they have to start another. They hate it and so they take it out on the prisoners,” said Mims.

Canales and other prison rights advocates say the implementation of the checks is not a coincidence.



“The case that this policy is based on is from 2006 but I think it is the prison system retaliating against prisoners in solitary confinement who supported the Ashkar case,” said Canales, the mother of prisoner John Martinez.



Canales is referring to the legal settlement on 1 September that ended the state’s ability to indefinitely lock up prisoners in solitary because of their “status” – having been labelled as gang members or associates of gangs. The new system will only allow prisoners to be placed in solitary for set terms if they have committed a serious crime in prison or are proven to be physical threats to other prisoners.

Thornton says the new checks are not connected to the Ashkar settlement but didn’t answer questions about why the checks started at the Pelican Bay SHU almost nine years after the court order was issued.