As we go to press, the hunger strike in the California state prisons is in its 45th day, with one hunger striker dead and at least one hundred and ninety still risking their lives to end indefinite solitary confinement. Prisoners in California can be put into the SHU (security housing unit) for alleged gang affiliation, and are confined to cement cells for 22 1/2 hours a day, with only 90 minutes of solitary exercise outside their cells. There are prisoners who have been in the SHU in California for up to 40 years. This is torture! The strike organizers are a multi-racial group which led a similar strike in 2011 and last summer issued a call for an end to racial hostilities in the prisons. The 2011 strike was called off when the authorities promised to make some reforms in the SHU, but they never kept their promises. This time, the strikers are fasting until their demands are met, and the courts have given the state permission to force-feed them against their will.

The Incarceration of a Generation
The prisoners in the SHU are no angels. But violent crime is what capitalism celebrates, and the fact that there are so many young men in prison is a set-up. As we saw in the documentary Bastards of the Party (which we recommend to Red Flag readers) the racism which initially led to gangs being organizations of self-defense, the failure of the movement of the 1960s to put an end to racism (because it's built-in to capitalism), the elimination of industrial jobs in US cities in the 1970s, and the CIA-orchestrated mass influx of crack cocaine in the 1980s were the conditions which led to an entire generation of black men being incarcerated.
The government used the "War on Drugs" to justify increased police attacks on inner city neighborhoods, and combined that with racist sentencing laws to justify an explosion of prison construction. US prison population has gone from 300,000 inmates to more than two million since 1980, with the majority due to drug convictions.
This has been used to terrorize all workers. Capitalism is the Problem Inmates are risking their lives demanding five humanitarian reforms in a racist prison system which has locked up the young black men who led rebellions in the cities and in the army in the 1960s as well as an increasing number of young latinos and working class men and women of all races.
It exposes the brutal racist face of US capitalism, and parallels the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, who have also been force-fed during a hunger strike this summer. But capitalism depends on racism, and on brutal force. We can't confine our struggle to reforms. Capitalism itself is the problem, and only communist revolution— not fasting for reforms—can solve it.

Communism will Eliminate the Causes of Crime--But How?
By eliminating the biggest criminals of all— the capitalists, and by getting rid of wage slavery and money.
Most of the people in the SHU and in prison in general are there because of gangs and drugs.
Gangs give the targets of racism a collective to have your back. Drug dealing became one of the few ways for black men to make a living when industrial jobs disappeared.
Communism will have meaningful work, and a useful life for everyone. Instead of pushing the extreme individualism that leads to crime, communism will be based on cooperation to meet the needs of society. No one will be forced by hunger into anti-social behavior.
No one will be so isolated that they will need drugs to deal with stress. If people begin to engage in anti-social behavior, there will be a collective to deal with it before it gets out of hand.

Mobilizing the Masses to Deal with Anti-Social Behavior
But what about the people, especially right after a revolution, who have been so damaged by capitalism that they attack their class brothers and sisters? Instead of setting up a separate state apparatus of cops and courts and prisons, the masses of people in their workplaces and communities will solve these problems. In China after the revolution the party led the masses to demand retribution, and then to help former criminals and landlords to change. The collective will have to guarantee that anti-social individuals are not able to attack their brothers and sisters.
But we won't isolate people and create monsters who get out worse than they went in, like they do in the US prison system. Communists know from our study of the communist philosophy of dialectical materialism, that people can change. We know it will be a long, hard process, but we put our confidence in constant, collective, mass political struggle now and after the revolution.