Just Violence?: California's Short Corridor Hunger Strikes and Arguments Over Prison Legitimacy

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. …