To The Center

Anti-Wall Street demonstrators and prison reform activists congregated outside of numerous prisons across the country on Monday to participate in nationwide protests calling on fundamental changes in the United States prison system.

According to The Guardian, the protest coincided with the prison hunger strikes that began at California’s Pelican Bay prison last July in response to a US supreme court ruling which stated that overcrowding in California prisons led to “needless suffering and death.”

Broadly speaking, protesters are demanding for an end to harsh living conditions inside prisons, capital punishment,  life sentences without parole, and the “three strikes, you’re out” law. Furthermore, demonstrators are opposing the use of isolation units, saying it is an infraction upon human rights.

Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and Shane Bauer, the American hikers who were held in an Iranian prison for over a year, went to the streets outside of San Quentin prison, located in California, to inform the crowd on the mentally brutalizing impact of solitary confinement.

“I myself experienced more than 14 months of solitary confinement, and after only two months my mind began to slip,” Shourd said.

Bauer further notes that improvements in their quality of life while living in an Iranian prison was the result of outside pressures. Those experiences are the reasons why Bauer argues that “this movement, this Occupy movement, needs to permeate the prisons.”

Reuters reports that former prisoners joined in on hours of protest Monday at San Quentin prison to tell their own incarceration stories. For many, the “three strikes, you’re out rule,” put them in prison for minor offenses.

“I’m here for the woman who stole a bottle of vitamins, the woman who stole a jar of Vaseline or a pair of underwear,” said former inmate Kelly Turner. Turner was jailed for 13 years after committing minor offenses.

In Washington, DC, protesters took the streets to protest the use of teleconference TV screens in place of glass during visitation. New York City also experienced around 250 protesters on Monday, including a woman by the name of Mercedes Smith, who spoke out against the imprisonment of addicted drug users.

According to The Guardian, the United States prison system is home to one quarter of the world’s prisoners and about one quarter of those are convicted on a drug charge. Activists stated that the nation’s prison population has rose 500% in the past three decades.