For five days, 29,000 inmates in California's state prisons have refused all meals in the largest hunger strike and prison protest in state history. It is the third hunger strike in two years protesting the state's inhumane practice of prolonged solitary confinement, and it looks to be a long strike. Two years ago, inmates ended their strike after officials promised reform. This time, inmates say they will refuse to accept anything less than a legally binding agreement. These inmates, who are risking their health and their lives, are on my mind.
Here is what I want to tell them:
Your actions speak loudly. We can hear you. We know things must change.
We know that more than 4,500 of you live trapped in gray concrete boxes, with no windows, no fresh air, no sunlight.
We know you pass the months and years in a space 11 by 7 feet .
We know that the only place you visit outside of your cell - for just one hour each day - is called the "dog run." It is the length of two small cars. You go there alone.
We know that you get your food through slats in steel or iron doors, and officers give you paper cups filled with soap and toothpaste once a month.
We know that guards wake you every 30 minutes, including throughout the night.
We know that beyond these rude encounters, you have scarcely any human contact.
We know that, as of 2011, 500 of you have been locked inside these boxes of gray for more than 10 years, two hundred for more than 15 years, and 78 for more than 20 years. One of you was locked inside for 42 years.
We can't know what that is like. We can't even imagine the toll that such numbing boredom and crushing loneliness take on the mind, the body, and spirit.
We know some of you call it "living death." We know it is torture.
We know it is inhumane -- that depriving a person of human contact is a simple and effective way to destroy them, and that many of you will try to destroy yourselves to end the pain. We know that those of you in isolation account for half of the prisons' suicides -- even though you make up just 5 percent of the total population.
We stand with you. We are with you. Your hopes for human dignity are our hopes.
So, shamed by your treatment, inspired by your courage, and bound by our common humanity, we call on lawmakers to permit solitary only in extraordinary cases and only as a last resort. We call on them to keep those of you suffering from mental illness and developmental disabilities out of these cages. We call on them to check your mental health, and pull you from your cold, isolated cell if you show signs of illness. We call on them to stop throwing so many of you into these boxes.
One day, we will see solitary for what it is: cruelty. One day, we will be more humane. And you are helping us get there.
Hector Villagra is Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California; Cross-posted from Huffington Post

For more than one year, the government has refused to turn over information about a key representation it made to the Supreme Court regarding how long it detains certain immigrants during deportation proceedings. It has offered no explanation for its silence.
After repeatedly asking for this information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) – which provides public access to government records – the ACLU of Southern California has sued to compel disclosure. FOIA gives courts authority to require the government to make certain information public.
The government’s behavior stands in stark contrast to the purpose of FOIA: transparency. While the government is legally required to respond to FOIA requests within 20 days – or within 30 days, if there is an extension – it has flouted its own deadlines, and has yet to produce a single document in response to ACLU/SC’s request.
This isn’t merely a theoretical issue. The information ACLU/SC is requesting has changed countless lives.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court heavily relied on information from the Solicitor General in Demore v. Kim, a decision upholding a punitive federal immigration law that requires detention – without bail – of immigrants who are here lawfully, but face deportation for certain criminal convictions, including for fairly minor offenses. The decision undermined that most basic of due process guarantees: the right to an individualized bail hearing before the government can imprison someone.
In upholding this draconian system, the Supreme Court repeatedly relied on statistics provided by the Solicitor General that indicated that immigration detention is generally “brief.” However, the Solicitor General introduced those statistics for the first time at the Supreme Court, and it has never disclosed the factual basis for its representations.
Following the Court’s decision, the government has forcibly detained numerous immigrants, without the possibility of bail, as they fight their deportation proceedings, even if their detentions last months or years, and even if they do not present any danger to the community. For example, Byron Merida was locked up for over three years for no good reason. For the past five years, through the Rodriguez v. Robbins class action, the ACLU/SC has been fighting to ensure that people like Byron have the opportunity to seek release after they have been detained beyond the “brief” periods the Supreme Court upheld in Demore.
The public deserves to see the data behind the government’s assertions to the Supreme Court. ACLU/SC asked for this data in March of last year. Although the government acknowledged receiving the request, it hasn’t turned over any information – even after ACLU/SC appealed. Latham & Watkins is representing ACLU/SC in the lawsuit.
Michael Kaufman is Staff Attorney at ACLU of Southern California

It's been almost exactly a month since President Obama welcomed a debate about government surveillance, saying it was healthy for our democracy, but we have yet to see the debate begin. A debate entails a discussion on a particular matter in which opposing arguments are put forward. But, as we are now seeing, if only one side has the information relevant to the matter, there can be no meaningful debate. Consider what information has (and has not) been made public in the month since the Guardian revealed that the government collects and stores data on virtually every phone call made to, from or within the United States, and disclosed the existence of PRISM, the NSA program that collects iInternet material, including search history, email content, file transfers and live chats. The administration rushed to assure the public that the surveillance was legal. Yet the interpretations of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), on which the administration relies to carry out the surveillance programs, remain secret -- despite the fact that many in Congress question, at the very least, the interpretation of the Patriot Act. Indeed, on June 27, a bipartisan group of 26 U.S. senators -- more than a quarter of the senate -- wrote to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, warning, in effect, that the government has misinterpreted the Patriot Act (or read the law differently from the legislators who drafted it) to justify the phone call tracking program. Without an understanding of what the government thinks the federal statute means, the public is left out of this critical part of the debate. The administration and its defenders also told the public that the surveillance was subject to oversight. But the FISA court that oversees the government's surveillance programs operates in secret and functions as a rubber stamp. Between 2009 and 2012, out of 6,500 government requests for warrants the court received, it rejected only one. Furthermore, many in Congress were unaware of the full scope of the government's surveillance. Senator Susan Collins, who serves on the Intelligence Committee this year, and served on the Homeland Security Committee last year, was not briefed on the NSA's PRISM program on Internet surveillance. The government unironically suggested that she could have asked for a briefing on the program, ignoring that she didn't know it existed. And, when a congressional oversight committee called Clapper to testify and Senator Ron Wyden asked him if the NSA collected any type of data on Americans, Clapper lied, as he later admitted.
Most consistently, however, the administration and its defenders have told the public that the surveillance has been effective. NSA Director Keith Alexander told a Senate committee, on June 12, that the agency's surveillance programs foiled "dozens" of terrorist plots. Alexander testified before a House committee on June 18, stating that the phone and Internet surveillance programs had prevented more than 50 terrorist plots since 2001.
Nonetheless, the details supporting the claims that NSA surveillance contributed materially to the investigations remain classified; as a result, the public is unable to assess the argument that the surveillance in fact has protected our national security.
Moreover, the purported tally of successes has blurred the line between the program amassing Americans' phone call data and PRISM. Alexander lumped the two programs together when he testified. But, when FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before a congressional committee on June 19, Senator Patrick Leahy specifically asked for the number of cases in which the phone call tracking program had played a "critical role." Mueller said: "I think there will be anywhere from 10 or 12, where [the phone call tracking program] was important in some way, shape or form." Mueller later admitted, however, that his estimate included information from both the phone call tracking program and PRISM, and that he couldn't say precisely what program was responsible for which successes.
This conflation makes it impossible to assess the phone surveillance program's unique value, if any, in protecting national security. Indeed, it is not only the public but also the large group of senators that needs this information. The senators' letter to Clapper lists several questions they want answered, including whether there have been any specific instances in which intelligence gained by reviewing phone records of Americans obtained through mass collection proved useful in thwarting a particular terrorist plot and that intelligence could not have been obtained without the mass collection. The administration has deliberately sought to focus the discussion on a purported cost-benefit analysis, but the public can't judge the purported benefit without the answer to this question.
Accordingly, in the debate we are supposedly having over surveillance, the public knows only what little the administration has been willing to share. The public still doesn't have the most critical piece of information it needs: the secret legal arguments that government relies on to justify the surveillance. The public also doesn't have the information it needs to judge the administration's claims about the program's utility, much less a full understanding of the threat the programs pose to privacy. So far, this has been nothing more than a public relations campaign, or the debate equivalent of one hand clapping.
Hector Villagra is Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California; Cross-posted from Huffington Post