For the third time in two years, the Short Corridor Collective—an unlikely alliance of four convicted murderers with alleged ties to warring gangs, all serving time in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison, in Northern California—has organized a statewide hunger strike. Since January, largely through letters to the outside and word of mouth inside, Todd Ashker, Arturo Castellanos, Ronnie Dewberry, and Antonio Guillen have recruited about thirty thousand inmates across the state to join the strike, making it the largest protest in California penal history. Their action began on Monday, July 8th; the following Friday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (C.D.C.R.) reported that over seven thousand inmates had refused breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day that week. As of this Wednesday, there were about twenty-five hundred inmates halfway through a second week without food. The Collective has released a list of more than forty demands, ranging from higher-quality maple syrup to a detailed audit of the welfare fund prisoners pay into for education, recreation, and other services. Their central request, however, is not about having additional resources inside solitary confinement—it’s about the near impossibility of ever getting out.

California’s supermax prison at Pelican Bay has a thousand and fifty-six Security Housing Units, or SHUs (pronounced “shoes”), containing eleven hundred prisoners (about fifty of them house two inmates). When the facility opened in 1989, the SHUs were meant for short-term punishments of no longer than a hundred and eighty days, but roughly five hundred inmates have now been shut in them for more than a decade; about eighty have lived in isolation for more than twenty years. Each of the holds is a windowless eighty square feet, and they’re grouped together into pods of eight separate cells. The perforated-steel cell doors are equipped with slots for meal trays, and are operated electronically from a guard’s booth. Many have Plexiglas coverings, because the inmates spit or threw excrement at guards, a practice commonly known as “gassing” the staff. Concrete slabs molded to the walls serve as desks and beds. A waist-high stainless-steel toilet-and-sink fixture stands in a front corner. Social interaction is limited to yelling within the pod, and even that is strictly discouraged. Once a day, inmates are allowed, one at a time, forty-five minutes in the “dog run,” a sixteen-by-twenty-five-foot concrete pen attached to each pod. There is no opportunity for work, meaningful recreation, or any form of human contact. Visitors are extremely limited, and there are no phone calls, except in emergencies.

In a class-action suit filed last year against California Governor Jerry Brown and three top prison officials, ten inmates in the Pelican Bay SHUs described a daily “struggle to avoid becoming mentally ill,” fraught with night tremors, hallucinations, irrational anger, and suicidal ideation. Last year, Amnesty International released a report declaring that indefinite stays in the SHUs amounts to torture (a sentiment that echoed Atul Gawande’s “Hellhole,” a 2009 article in the magazine). And there are, potentially, consequences for society as a whole. In their 2001 book, “It’s About Time,” the sociologists James Austin and John Irwin found that inmates in solitary were “converted into extremely violent, relatively fearless individuals who profess and conduct themselves as if they do not care whether they live or die.”

SHUs were supposed to be a solution for a penal system constantly on the brink of mayhem. There are perhaps two hundred thousand gang-associated inmates in America’s prisons. Four of the most pervasive—the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, La Nuestra Familia, and the Black Guerilla Family—began in California prisons during the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Members soon established sophisticated drug and gambling operations, and fought mercilessly to expand their turf. A landmark survey from the mid-eighties found that gangs accounted for three per cent of the prison population but were responsible for fifty per cent of assaults. During the seventies and eighties, attacks on guards tripled to nearly a hundred a year. In 1988, the state tried to integrate its various gang problems under one roof, at the Corcoran state facility. Assaults on guards had been a weekly occurrence. In Corcoran, they soon spiked to nearly four a day.

Now, ninety-eight per cent of inmates in Pelican Bay’s SHUs are there because they have been “validated” as prison-gang members, based on any number of criteria—some were identified by other inmates, others by tattoos or artwork. The gangs aren’t so well represented in solitary just because their members commit more serious infractions, though that’s almost certainly true; rather, it’s because SHUs are the C.D.C.R.’s gang-fighting strategy. The only way out is to disavow membership, and the only way to do that is to “debrief,” or inform on other gang members. According to the Short Corridor Collective, special investigators assigned to each facility employ almost every aspect of daily life as leverage to induce debriefing. Medical care and adequate clothing are withheld. Time in the dog run is revoked. Already infrequent visits from loved ones are delayed or cancelled.

Most of the major prison gangs have “blood in, blood out” policies, under which an assault is part of the initiation and death is the only way out—and that can extend to members’ families. The debriefing requirement leaves some inmates with no good option but to languish in the SHUs indefinitely. It can be a particularly dispiriting state of affairs for those eligible for release. Parole boards require certain benchmarks of good behavior, like work participation and education attainment, that aren’t offered to inmates in SHUs. As a result, anyone in a SHU who has been sentenced under California’s three-strikes laws, which impose minimum-to-life sentences on third-time offenders, faces the serious possibility of a de facto life sentence in solitary confinement. In its 2012 report, Amnesty International estimated that about a quarter of the inmates in SHUs are serving minimum-to-life terms.

“The whole thing is Kafkaesque,” says Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is representing the plaintiffs in the class-action suit. “It’s an incredibly isolated situation, and there’s no way out.”

After similar hunger strikes two years ago, the C.D.C.R. promised to offer gang members a way out of the isolation units. According to Terry Thornton, a C.D.C.R. spokesperson, around two hundred inmates have since been identified for release from solitary, and another hundred have enrolled in a new “step-down” release program, a five-stage review process of educational benchmarks and good behavior to get back into the general population. The Short Corridor Collective also won a number of smaller reforms after the last strike, such as winter caps, wall calendars, and a handball for the dog run. “I think the Department has pretty much done what it can do,” California’s corrections secretary Jeffrey Beard said two days after the protests began, addressing the hunger strikers. “My hope is that they sort of make their point, get the thing over, and we can go back and start doing the reviews.”

But the Collective says the new “step-down” program has not materialized, and that getting out of the SHUs still requires debriefing. The group promises that fasting will continue until prison officials sign a consent decree—a legally binding contract—that details ways out of isolation that do not include debriefing. Prison officials have refused to give in to any demands. “The department is not going to be coerced or manipulated,” Thornton told the Times. “That so many inmates in other prisons throughout the state are involved really demonstrates how these gangs can influence other inmates, which is one of the reasons we have security housing units in the first place.” C.D.C.R. has not ruled out the possibility of force-feeding participating inmates; or perhaps, as in the past, it will try to entice them away from mass resistance with special menu items like strawberry short cake and ice cream. “They have never had ice cream in the SHU,” the wife of an inmate told the group Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity during a similar hunger strike in 2011. “And in the nearly twenty years he has been in the California system, he has never seen a strawberry.”

Photograph by Jim Wilson/NYT/Redux.