Echoes of Isolation

One morning in July 2013, tens of thousands of California prisoners made history when they refused to eat. They were participating in a state-wide hunger strike, protesting policies that kept people locked in solitary confinement indefinitely. Hundreds of people in Pelican Bay State Prison, the state’s supermax facility near the Oregon state line, had been in isolation for over a decade.

Most were sent to solitary, known as the Security Housing Unit (SHU), for being labeled gang members. But that designation could be based on evidence as thin as reading a certain book, knowing someone in a gang, or sketching an Aztec warrior, incarcerated people and attorneys reported.

After 60 days of refusing food, and along with a concurrent lawsuit, the hunger strikers ultimately won major policy changes from the California corrections department. Among them was an agreement to move most people in long-term solitary back into the general population, giving many a renewed chance at parole. Now, back in the community and over a decade since the protest, these men are working to rebuild their lives, help others inside, and make sense of the trauma they endured.

An incarcerated man paces in the “exercise yard” of the solitary unit at Pelican Bay prison in 2014. SHU prisoners spend roughly 23 hours a day in their cells and often less than an hour in the concrete yard, with a partially open roof — their only exposure to sunlight and fresh air.

Photographer Brian L. Frank has been capturing this journey through portraits of people who were in solitary and who participated in the 2013 strike. The project primarily took place at Alcatraz, a site whose history echoes the experience of those in Pelican Bay. As a federal penitentiary, Alcatraz housed men who were deemed too dangerous for other facilities. Most were locked in small single cells. The prison, which closed in 1963, has since become a national park with exhibits exploring the past and present of incarceration in the U.S.

Frank had photographed men inside the Pelican Bay SHU in 2014, on assignment for The Atlantic magazine. “It was a traumatizing and defining experience,” he said. “To think that I might be the only human from outside the prison they really spoke to, maybe in 10 years. It was something that stuck with me.”

Participants in the portrait series include strike leaders like Sitawa Jamaa, one of four members of the Short Corridor Collective who organized the strike. The Collective formed when its members were isolated in a specific section of Pelican Bay’s SHU, intended to cut them off from members of their alleged gangs. Instead, the four men formed a multiracial coalition that drafted an “agreement to end hostilities” among incarcerated people and planned the protest.

“I don’t care what label you put on any of us, you can’t keep us in the hole because of a label,” Jamaa said. “They keep you in there forever, unless you snitch. That ain’t fair. I never had an incident in 34 years.”

Frank also photographed hunger striker Jack Morris in Los Angeles. Morris, who spent over 30 years in solitary confinement, came home in 2017 and now runs the reentry program for a community health clinic. “When I think of guys having to do time in solitary confinement, I can't even begin to make a suggestion as to how to endure that,” he said. “Because I don't know if I could survive again.”

While in the SHU at Pelican Bay, men were alone in their cells for roughly 23 hours a day, with every meal provided through a slot in their door. Many said they never received a phone call, unless a family member died. Visits with loved ones were behind a thick plexiglass window. And any time spent outside their cells to exercise took place in an open-air cement room, with walls so high they couldn’t see their surroundings.

An 8-by-10-foot solitary confinement cell at Pelican Bay’s SHU in 2014.

Rows of concertina wire and flood lighting surround the solitary unit at Pelican Bay in 2014.

At its peak, it is estimated to have housed over 1,000 men, many indefinitely.

Razor wire surrounds the decommissioned Lincoln Heights Jail in Los Angeles.

A photograph of the Reyna family, with a young Frank at the bottom right, in front of his Los Angeles home.

Reyna would later serve decades incarcerated, many of those years in a solitary confinement cell.

Richard “Razor” Johnson spent nearly 20 years in solitary confinement after being convicted on drug charges under California’s Three Strikes Law.

A hunger strike organizer and activist, Johnson went on to write a novel about his experiences in solitary, and to advocate for the release of SHU prisoners in a landmark lawsuit against the state corrections department.

Upon his release in 2021, Johnson founded the nonprofit Formerly Incarcerated Giving Back, which works with leaders in Oakland to provide community services, end gang violence and fight against systemic racism in the criminal justice system.

Alcatraz Island, initially constructed as a military prison in the 1850s, was later converted into a maximum-security federal penitentiary until its closure in 1963.

“I had guys ask me, ‘Where are we in the world, where are we in the state?’” said psychologist Craig Haney, who studies the mental toll of long-term isolation. He has interviewed over 100 men in the SHU at Pelican Bay as an expert witness. “They could have been on Mars because they never got visually in contact with the world around them.”

When it was built in the late 1980s, the solitary unit at Pelican Bay was a new kind of incarceration, Haney said. Human contact between incarcerated people and officers was largely eliminated. Cell doors were operated by the push of a button, messages were communicated via intercom, and surveillance was done with cameras instead of officers making rounds.

Haney’s research found that such prolonged isolation led to paranoia, anxiety, despair, anger and, eventually, numbness among people in the SHU. “When you’re in the SHU, you don’t feel,” said Frank Reyna, who spent 20 years in solitary at Pelican Bay. “If you feel, you start getting weak. When people die, you just move on. You lose your emotions.”

Prison officials had built a fortress designed to keep people away from each other. But locked alone in their cells, the men at Pelican Bay found any way they could to connect — by talking through their cell doors, the vents in the walls, or in cracks in the corners of their recreation cages.

People found different ways to pass time, and make what meaning they could. Jamaa organized reading groups on his tier, with men taking turns reading different passages to each other and analyzing the text. Many spent hours in the morning with fastidious workout routines. During the strike, Brian James at Corcoran prison, south of Fresno, found himself counting and re-counting the perforations on his cell door.

There were only three ways out of the SHU, prisoners concluded: “snitch, parole, or die.” To snitch meant to provide information on another alleged gang member, and open yourself to the risk of retaliatory violence. Parole was unlikely for those whom prison officials had deemed among “the worst of the worst.” The only way out of the Pelican Bay SHU, hunger strikers reasoned, was in a body bag. They had nothing to lose.

When the strike began, “there was something in front of me to reach for, or hope for,” said James. “You spend your life inside of a box alone. So to know I’m in solidarity with [so many] people, it gave me that push in the right direction. I immediately knew we were a part of something really big.”

Participants remember how, after a few days of fasting, the tier grew quiet. Where there used to be the sounds of morning exercise routines and chatter between cells, people began to spend more time in bed, conserving their energy.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of activists outside the prison were amplifying their message. The strike made international news. Celebrities like Danny Glover and Jay Leno lent their support. Groups held frequent rallies outside state prisons.

Dolores Canales’ son was on hunger strike in the SHU in Corcoran prison. She and other family members organized the California Families Against Solitary Confinement to pressure the corrections department to change their policies. “I felt like they would probably let them starve to death before meeting any demands,” she said. “There was such an urgency that if we did not do something, it would never change.”

Jack Morris and Dolores Canales met through a mutual friend in the prison activism community. They married in July 2022, in a ceremony with multiple nods to the hunger strike that ultimately brought them together. “So much of our wedding revolved around those still behind the walls,” Canales said. “It was like they were there with us.”

A drawing made by Frank Reyna of Frida Kahlo, which, according to Reyna, was used to validate him as a gang member and indefinitely incarcerate him in solitary confinement. The earrings Kahlo is wearing were considered gang symbols by prison officials.

After a two-month strike, state lawmakers agreed to hold a hearing on the issue, and the men returned to eating. The protest had a long-lasting impact in California and beyond. In December 2012, before the strike, there were 9,870 men in some form of isolation in California state prisons. This past December, the most recent data available, there were 3,030. The strike also sparked a nationwide movement against isolation — the next year, 10 states passed laws restricting its use. Many more states have since followed.

Despite the hunger strikers’ wins, the fight against the use of solitary continues. State activists are pushing for the California Mandela Act on Solitary Confinement, which would put strict limits on the length of isolation in state facilities, and ban it outright for pregnant people and people with disabilities. The act is named for the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a version of the bill in 2022, calling it “overly broad.”

After a long-term fast, people need to return to eating very slowly, to avoid serious health complications. And after being starved of human contact, prisoners describe how they needed to also slowly readjust to being around people. Psychiatrist Terry Kupers called it the “SHU post-release syndrome.”

“When people get out of solitary, they isolate themselves,” said Kupers. “They dread crowds. They can't look for a job. They don't want to be near people they don’t know. I have mothers in the community calling me saying, ‘My kid will not come out of the room. What should I do?’”

Reyna came home to Los Angeles in October, after over 38 years in prison. “Sometimes I could have a beautiful day, man, and then I just feel empty, like I’m back to where I was,” he said. “But now I can release things. My feelings are coming back. Now, I don’t care, I cry.”

A plant grows from a crack in the concrete at Alcatraz. “Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.” – Tupac Shakur

After 25 years in California prisons, including 18 years at San Quentin and a year in solitary confinement, Troy Williams founded Restorative Media, a nonprofit that amplifies the stories of justice-impacted people while advocating for societal change.

Through his partnership with the National Park Service, Williams has organized the Formerly Incarcerated Speaker Series at Alcatraz Island.

A mixed-media collaboration between Donald “C-Note” Hooker, who has been incarcerated in the state’s prisons for 28 years and has spent time in solitary, and Brian L. Frank. It features Frank’s photo, over which Hooker drew a rose emerging from the cracks in the concrete floor. Hooker’s letter, right, describes his inspiration from Tupac Shakur.

Surrounded by treacherous, frigid waters and overseen by formidable prison defenses, Alcatraz was largely considered unescapable during its time as a maximum-security federal penitentiary.

Sitawa Jamaa spent 43 years incarcerated, 30 of those in solitary cells. Jamaa and prison activists say he was punished for his organizing behind bars. He cofounded the Short Corridor Collective, a group of prison leaders who organized hunger strikes across California to protest the use of indefinite solitary confinement.

The California prison hunger strikes that Jamaa helped organize were the largest of their kind in U.S. history. They succeeded in changing prison policy, which had allowed men to be placed indefinitely in solitary for allegations that they were gang members, without a burden of proof.

Rubin “Jitu” Williams spent about 36 of his 44 imprisoned years in solitary confinement cells across California, including 26 years at Pelican Bay. He was integral in the hunger strikes that sought to end the use of indefinite solitary confinement in the state.

Since his release in 2019, Williams has sought to increase community awareness around the use of solitary confinement. He has worked with youth in Oakland to improve their communication skills and decision-making.

A plant grows near the Los Angeles River, behind the now-closed Lincoln Heights Jail. “You never know how strong you can be until being strong is the only choice you have left.” – Tupac Shakur

People incarcerated in the SHU were previously not allowed mirrors or recent photos of themselves. “I disappeared,” Brian James, above, said of his time in solitary. “I’m not a phone call, I’m not a visit, I’m not a picture.”

Author and advocate Dorsey Nunn was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 19 and learned to read and organize from politically active elders during his time at San Quentin State Prison. Paroled in 1981, he founded the grassroots human rights organization All of Us or None, which fights for the civil rights of formerly and currently incarcerated people and is largely credited with having led the “ban the box” effort to eliminate questions about criminal backgrounds on housing and employment applications.

The Los Angeles River flows behind the now-closed Lincoln Heights Jail at sunset.

Minister King X, who served 18 years in California state prisons, maintains a historical archive of materials from the protest, including letters from participants and the agreement drawn up by the strike’s leaders. “I was being stripped of the little rights that I did have in the prison,” King said of his time in solitary. “I was put in little cages when it was time for me to go outside. It made me feel like, are we human?”

A guard points at the “exercise yard” provided for Pelican Bay SHU prisoners in 2014, a concrete room where they spent the little time they had outside of their solitary cell.