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

Abstract

Prisoners turn to hunger strikes, as performances of extreme bodily vulnerability, when formal modes of appeal are foreclosed. A hunger strike's efficacy depends, in part, on the prisoner's self-starvation being read as a sign of exploitation, as morally implicating the prison and state (Annas, 1982; Hauser, 2012). In this light, this paper examines the 2071–2073 Short Corridor hunger strikes that opposed the use of long-term solitary confinement in California. Attending to the strikers' bodily and discursive arguments as well as to the state's response, I demonstrate the competing arguments to be about the legitimacy of the prison and criminal justice systems, about the extent to which criminalization and incarceration are rational responses to deviance and disorder. Because the strikers were largely illegible as victims, persuading audiences of the need for substantial change required a confrontation with the very assumptions about responsibility that undergird the criminal justice system.

Key Words:

• hunger strikes
• bodily argument
• responsibility
• prisoner rhetoric
• advocacy