PelicanBayStatePrison is California’s highest security lock-up. In the words of Bob Ayers former warden ofPelicanBay, the prison was reserved for “the worst of the worst.”
Their hands are cuffed behind their backs, attached to shackles around their waists. Their clothing is monochromatic, monastic: white pants and white shirts, the uniform of prisoners inside PelicanBayStatePrison’s Secure Housing Unit. The shirts tie vertically with laces up their chests.
PelicanBayStatePrison has 1,056 state-of-the-art, windowless isolation cells, divided into 132 self-contained pods of eight cells each.
Amplifying Hope In The Last Mile. In 2018, after years of steadily programming and lowering his classification score, Thailee Nguon transferred to PelicanBayStatePrison, a Level 2 facility in Crescent City, California.
In PelicanBay’s SHU, Todd told our class, he went through a transformation. He met another prisoner who introduced him to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, which had a great effect on him.
PelicanBayStatePrison, which houses California's supermax, holds approximately 1,300 inmates in its security housing unit (SHU).
PelicanBayStatePrison is known for housing some of the nation’s most violent offenders. Since its inception in 1989, it boasts that not one prisoner has ever escaped from its grounds, so it was no surprise that entering this level 4 SuperMax prisonfacility was going to be a feat in itself.
figure 2. A pod at PelicanBayStatePrison SHU with metal grid doors and cell-fronts. Photo by Monica Lam, working with journalist Michael Montgomery and the Center for Investigative Reporting, 2012.
A similar case, Madrid v. Gomez (1995), exposed the adverse conditions ofPelicanBayStatePrison, acknowledging the infliction of psychological torment. The court recognized that solitary confinement could constitute cruel and unusual punishment—but only for mentally ill prisoners.
Arts in Corrections. A partnership with the CA Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, designed to have a positive impact on the social and emotional well-being of people experiencing incarceration. www.artsincorrections.org.
At PelicanBayStatePrison alone, more than 500 prisoners had been held in the SHU for over 10 years, and 78 prisoners had been there for more than 20 years. They were warehoused in cramped, windowless concrete cells for almost 24 hours a day with no phone calls...
PelicanBayStatePrison Houses 'the Worst of the Worst' in the Starkest Isolation Imaginable.
But many prisoners at PelicanBayStatePrison remember what happened in June 2001, when over 1,000 prisoners at PelicanBay and other SHU prisons went on a hunger strike for two weeks. That strike was ended when the CDCR agreed to re-evaluate cases of "gang validation."
Housing Unit (SHU) at PelicanBayStatePrison (Leung, 2009). Even isolation in one of the most secure and impenetrable prisons within a prison, the SHU, could neither stop nor deter these gangsters from conducting their business both inside and outside the prison walls.
