UC Riverside

Unbroken Spirit: Pelican Bay, California Prisoner Hunger Strikes, Family Uprisings, and Learning to Listen is a full-length study of the 2011 and 2013 California (CA) prisoner hunger strikes that emerged from Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP), California’s heaviest monitored maximum-security prison. The California prison hunger strikes animated a new criticism of inhumane prison conditions that was articulated through the analytical and critical frameworks of incarcerated people, sparking a new set of public debates about human rights, incarceration and state priorities. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the Pelican Bay and California prison hunger strikes, An Unbroken Spirit embraces multiple methods to document the socio-political consequences of Security Housing Units (SHU) on both those incarcerated within Pelican Bay and the “free world” communities they come from. This project provides the first sustained engagement with the historical conjunctures, textual archives, film and popular cultural contexts, policy implications, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork that specifically addresses the emergence of PBSP-SHU and the hunger strikes. Utilizing an expanding body of scholarship in the emerging field of Critical Ethnic Studies, and informed by a radical prison praxis, this dissertation departs from traditional disciplinary approaches to social movement theory by methodologically and theoretically centering the organizational, intellectual, and political labor of incarcerated strikers and their families. My dissertation primarily asks, “How might the actions propelled by the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike help enrich or critically inform existing academic, policy, and community-based discourses of violence, harm reduction, social justice, and community health in communities of color experiencing the effects of mass incarceration?” An Unbroken Spirit examines how the logics of the prison apparatus are uncovered through the contested politics of the prison hunger strike and its support networks. I argue that this prisoner-led movement, and the proposed models of organizing by families, provides direction toward alternative social and cultural relations necessary to recompose power. Importantly, their theorizing around criminalization offers us transformative visions and strategies for anti-prison organizing. As we learn the importance of listening, they disrupt the troubling ways human value is ascribed by a criminalizing national culture, and remind us of the sacredness of life.