Petition filed to United Nations to Intervene on Solitary Confinement Conditions

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Dolores Canales' son has been living in a closet sized cell for over ten years. She wants to change his living conditions.

"What would you do if it was your son, your husband or your brother?" Canales asks.

Canales and other mother's held a news conference today outside the state building in downtown LA on behalf of the 4000 prisoners living in solitary confinement in California. The group is petitioning the United Nations to abolish the use of solitary confinement for prisoners based merely on gang membership. Prisoners who are associated with gangs, are placed in a security housing unit, known as Shu. They cannot leave until they have been free of gang activity for 6 years. Peter Schey, President of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law feels the living conditions in Shu are deplorable.

"These men are detained in small concrete cells the size of a closet they have no fresh air they do not see sunlight, they do not have the opportunity to work or engage in recreation. They have almost no contact with other human beings," said Schey.

Last July, prisoners in solitary confinement went on a hunger strike, to protest the inhumane conditions. After 3 weeks, the strike was called off when the California Department of Corrections Rehabilitation, or CDCR, agreed to conduct case by case reviews for Shu prisoners. Jeffery Callison from CDCR denies the allegations of inhumane living conditions in Shu and says new policies are in the works.

"The proposed policy was just released at the beginning of this month, earlier this month, and there a formal process that you need to go through and at this point the proposed policy is being circulated amongst external stake holders," said Callison.

But prisoner rights groups say these don't go far enough. Canales feels these conditions break the human soul.

"There knowingly confining you in these conditions, that there hoping your brain turns to mush, that you feel yourself slipping that the line of insanity is so thin and will you break to the other side or are you grasping to hold on," said Canales.

The prisoners hope the United Nations will intervene by holding on-site investigations; permitting Red Cross visits and ultimately ruling that California's policy on isolated segregation violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.