Several major media outlets are reporting today that the California prison hunger strike has ended. Click here, here, and here. “Yet prison advocates claim that those reports have yet to be confirmed,” ColorLines reported.

You might be wondering why California prisoners started the hunger strike. It started over what prisoners call “inhumane” conditions in isolation units at Pelican Bay. Prisoners in those isolation units spend 23 hours a day in a cell and are allowed one hour of “recreation” in a concrete exercise yard. Not surprisingly, prisoners and their advocates say that spending long periods of time in isolation cells is tantamount to “torture.”

Here is their list of demands:

1. End Group Punishment & Administrative Abuse

 2. Abolish the Debriefing Policy, and Modify Active/Inactive Gang Status Criteria.

 3. Comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long term solitary confinement.

 4. Provide adequate and nutritious food.

 5. Expand and provide constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU status inmates.

Yes, this is not exactly a frivolous demand asking for steak and lobster.

The reason no one knows for sure whether the hunger strike is over is because prison officials shut off media access to the prison. Just this week the Los Angeles Times posted an editorial questioning the prison blackout tactic. The Times wrote:

Oscar Hidalgo, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told Times staff writer Jack Dolan that media weren’t being allowed into Pelican Bay “due to security and safety issues.” We’d be more inclined to believe that, and not that prison officials were trying to avoid adverse publicity, if California’s prisons didn’t have such an extraordinary history of shoddy medical care and inhumane conditions. As it is, we think the public has a right to firsthand accounts of what goes on behind the barbed wire.

California is such a mess. And they wonder why the federal judiciary feels the need to provide oversight.