UC student regents are supposed to represent all UC students. Sadia Saifuddin’s leading role in the UC-wide anti-Israel divestment movement calls into question her willingness to represent the Jewish community — its extreme left excepted.

In pushing for divestment from the Middle East’s sole liberal democracy, she proved herself part of a radical passel of sanctimonious students whose pursuit of a narrow agenda knows no bounds of reason, propriety or honesty. She pursued the agenda of the Muslim community to the derogation of the Jewish community, and many Jewish students are anxious about what she will do next year.

Saifuddin’s record on free speech is also poor. Her sponsorship of SB 114, censuring professor Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of UC Santa Cruz (who had remarked on the worrying prevalence of anti-Semitism among Muslims in the UC system), was startlingly intolerant of Benjamin’s free speech rights.

Amid the invective directed against her during her confirmation process, there was substantial truth. We can only hope that Saifuddin will make her year as the first Muslim-American UC student regent a positive milestone — for which there is tremendous potential. If she uses her position to bring Muslim and Jewish students together and stands up for free campus dialogue, her tenure can fulfill that potential. We hope it does.

— Ariel Fridman,

UC Berkeley junior

Having the right to smoke

I am a nonsmoker and a proponent of healthy lifestyles, but I disagree with the Draft Tobacco-Free Campus Policy at UC Berkeley which states that there is no safe level of second-hand smoke.

The U.S. Surgeon General and the campus policy claim that “there is no safe level of secondhand smoke.” That is an unfounded claim and probably a false one when you consider infinitesimal quantities. Second, the policy prohibits tobacco products that affect only the user, including smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarettes.

I believe that people should be free to do what they want, especially if it does not directly harm someone else.

Also, I’d prefer that UC Berkeley spend its resources on education rather than on the enforcement of this policy.

—Jeffrey Yunes

Bioengineering doctoral student

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post Letters: August 5 – August 12 appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Anthony Bongco/Staff

During the years most young adults spend completing college, UC Berkeley student Steven Czifra was serving a four-year sentence in solitary confinement.

By all accounts, Czifra had a rough childhood. Born into a family of addicts, he was smoking crack at age 9, in juvenile hall at age 13 and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison at age 14.

Now, as a 38-year-old transfer and re-entry student of English literature at UC Berkeley, Czifra has become an advocate for California state prison reform, protesting the use of solitary confinement. Most recently, he went on a hunger strike in solidarity with inmates of Pelican Bay State Prison, in which thousands of prisoners have been on hunger strike for 21 days as of Sunday.

In total, Czifra has spent eight years of his life in solitary confinement. When Czifra was 17 and serving a prison sentence for carjacking, he says he was found guilty of initiating a prison fight, which landed him a four-year term in solitary confinement. When he was 24, he says he took a plea bargain for another four years in solitary confinement after being found guilty of spitting on an officer and in violation of California’s three-strikes law.

While he was imprisoned at a Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, Czifra spent 22 and a half hours in his cell each day and was only allowed 90 minutes outside of his cell, which he would spend alone in a concrete, windowless pen. Czifra continues to suffer from severe anxiety and insomnia as a result.

“You take a person, you put them in a box, you don’t let them see the sun for eight years, you don’t let them talk to anybody or have fun,” Czifra said. “You don’t let them eat or make mistakes. The fact that I’m not a raving lunatic is a miracle.”

A few years after being released from prison in 2003, Czifra enrolled in a 12-step program, where he met his partner of seven years, Sylvia Garcia. Czifra began working odd jobs but found that they did not fulfill his academic ambitions.

“I owned a tree-trimming business, I was driving a tow-truck, I was swinging a hammer,” Czifra said, “and the entire time, I knew that I had other gifts that were being underused.”

Czifra originally received his GED in prison because of the promise of getting coffee and cookies in the prison quad. In his early 30s, he failed community college twice. The third time around, at the age of 34, he received straight A’s, helping him gain admission to UC Berkeley.

Today, Czifra lives in Albany with his partner and his 6-year-old son, Shane, whom he lovingly calls “the most incredible human being” he has ever met.
On an average sunny Tuesday afternoon, Czifra and his son spend the day bowling, playing with Legos and making lunch. Afterward, Czifra heads to his afternoon classes and does his homework for a few hours before having dinner with his family.

“If I could use one word to describe our family life, it would be ‘peaceful,’” Czifra said.

The 2-year old Czifra (left) is shown with his two siblings, Joy and Johnny.

Prison activism

Despite the joys that come with pursuing an education and having a fulfilling family life, Czifra still faces the lasting psychological effects of spending eight years detached from human interaction.

“The dominating theme of my life is overcoming anxiety,” Czifra said. “Unless I stop and think everything through, my life is an earthquake. I was by myself during the time when I learned how to be with other people … when my emotional and mental systems were forming.”

Czifra was introduced to the prison hunger strike movement by his friend and UC Berkeley peer Danny Murillo, who was also kept in solitary confinement.

In recent weeks, Czifra, Murillo and other members of the campus organization Human Rights of the Incarcerated at Cal have been holding demonstrations in support of the statewide Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition, which began in Pelican Bay State Prison on July 8. Last Monday, Billy “Guero” Sell, a state prison inmate who had participated in the hunger strike, committed suicide after allegedly being denied medical attention.

Leaders of the movement are demanding that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation comply with core demands, which include ending group punishment, changing policies that force prisoners to snitch on gang members and expanding privileges for inmates in solitary confinement.

“The reason why I’m in this movement is that I’m in California and I care about my community, and this isn’t happening in Palestine or North Korea,” Czifra said. “This is happening here.”

The nine-year old Czifra (left) poses with Johnny.

A scholarly take on prison reform

When speaking about how he spends his time at UC Berkeley, Czifra says he is thankful that he is in a place that allows him to combine his activism for prison reform with his academic scholarship.

Last fall, Czifra began attending a prison studies independent reading group taught by UC Berkeley academics in the ethnic studies and gender and women’s studies departments. There, Czifra explored the intellectual meaning behind mass incarceration in society.

Patricia Penn Hilden, professor emeritus of ethnic studies, developed a bond with Czifra during the class and began meeting with him independently to discuss literature.

“I introduced him to my husband, who is a professor of comparative literature, and they talk about Descartes once a week,” Hilden said.

Czifra said that he read the classics while incarcerated but was unable to apply the knowledge he gained in a prison setting. Now, he is able to articulate his ideas with people from all backgrounds — both within and outside of the prison system.

“There’s nothing he likes more than diving headfirst deep into the pool of the literature,” said Victoria Robinson, a lecturer on campus in the ethnic studies and gender and women’s studies departments. “It is probably the thing that got him through his years in prison and solitary confinement.”

Czifra says that when he first started college, he wanted to teach inmates literature after graduating, but now, he says he is considering other careers, ranging from being a lawyer to a professor of literature. After an unexpected journey from solitary confinement to UC Berkeley, Czifra says he’s certainly not afraid of taking a chance.

Steven Czifra, at age 38, poses in a Halloween costume with his partner, Sylvia Garcia, and his 6-year old son, Shane.

Contact Sophie Mattson at smattson@dailycal.org.

The post UC Berkeley student, former inmate, speaks out about solitary confinement appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The demonstration was not an attempt to place a utopian model on a complex societal dilemma, as some online comments have suggested. Utopia might suggest an absence of the state, and the SHU was meant to suggest that the state adhere to the Bill of Rights — specifically, the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

What was not originally reported in the Daily Cal was that our action was designed to coincide with protests that were happening within correctional facilities statewide. Across administratively constructed and institutionally imposed geographic and racial lines, prisoners used the one resource they had, their bodies, to ensure that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation accepted the demands of the inmates — similar to demands the CDCR agreed to in 2011 but had failed to implement.

There were, and continue to be, five core demands:
1) End Group Punishment & Administrative Abuse
2) Abolish the Debriefing Policy and Modify Active/Inactive Gang Status Criteria
3) Comply with the U.S. 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

We encourage the reader to investigate the details involved with these demands that space prohibits including now. The hunger strike has since ended, but the discussion regarding the epidemic of mass incarceration cannot. We erected that tiny structure to highlight one key issue: long-term solitary confinement is torture. Torture is illegal.

However, it is important for the reader to understand what the gang status criteria are and what ‘debriefing’ means. Prisoners have reported that to be validated as a prison gang member, and sentenced to time in the SHU, the guards need only identify three pieces of evidence against an inmate to prove affiliation. This could be a drawing in your cell, a copy of Sun Tzu, or even an unqualified assessment of written communications with a family member. ‘Debriefing’ is the process by which inmates are interviewed regarding suspected gang affiliation, to determine whether or not their validation remains accurate by CDCR standards. However, it is widely understood that part of the procedure involves becoming an informant on others suspected of gang affiliation, in order to be released from the SHU. This process can be torturous itself and most assuredly will put the inmate’s life in danger, which contradicts the logic of the gang validation procedure in the first place — to ensure safety within the prison population. If the inmate was wrongly validated to begin with, he has no information to offer — so he can’t be released. Is this really expected to rehabilitate people?

When reached for comment regarding our demonstration, Terry Thornton, deputy press secretary for CDCR, had made statements that we would like to address. According to the Daily Cal, Thornton remarked that some prisoners have access to items like radios, televisions, libraries and educational programs. In the case of radios and televisions, this is indeed true. In fact, part of the demands of the prisoners is for an expansion of these privileges. But is she somehow suggesting that television is a substitute for human contact or direct sunlight? Let me ask you this: If you were locked in your bathroom for 10 years — scratch that — for one year with your television, would you emerge from that situation sane?

Regarding their access to libraries, this is also true — to a certain extent. They have access to a legal library that is guaranteed for any prisoner. As far as other literature, it is unclear what they could obtain or whether this material could be used to further implicate them in gang activity. We do know that prisoners claim they are denied access to self-help programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, which raises questions as to how effective their present constructive programming may actually be.

We, the students of the Human Rights of the Incarcerated Coalition, are not alone in our sympathy with the demands of prisoners in long-term solitary confinement. The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition agrees, and so do the ACLU and Amnesty International.

One of Amnesty International’s first T-shirt slogans read:

“Torture is a Curable Disease.”

If you agree or would like more information, please join HRI at our upcoming meeting on Oct. 25 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in 206 Wheeler Hall or at our speaker event on Oct. 29 from 7 to 9 p.m., in the Genetics and Plant Biology building.

Jason Webber is a UC Berkeley junior and a member of the campus student organization Human Rights of the Incarcerated Coalition.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post Inmates are humans appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Kevin Foote/Senior Staff

Demonstrators set up a mock jail cell on Sproul Plaza on Wednesday to protest inhumane treatment of prisoners in California solitary confinement cells.

The post Protesters set up mock solitary confinement demonstrations appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Kevin Foote/Senior Staff

Demonstrators set up a mock jail cell on Sproul Plaza on Wednesday to protest inhumane treatment of prisoners in California, an issue officials from the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation say is much more complicated than the demonstration let on.

Passers-by were invited to step inside a cell, which protesters said aimed to imitate the quarters prisoners in solitary confinement have to live in.

UC Berkeley junior Jason Webber, who helped facilitate the protest, said that over a long period of time, solitary confinement amounts to torture.

“It goes above and beyond what you need to do to someone, regardless of what their crime is,” Webber said.

Jerry Elster, who spent five years in solitary confinement and spoke at the protest, equated the experience to sitting in a closet or bathroom for 23 hours a day.

“The system is locking people up, depriving them of certain human rights,” Elster said. “It’s more than deplorable — it’s unconstitutional.”

Terry Thornton, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said conditions in California cells are different from what the demonstration presented. Some prisoners have access to radios, televisions, libraries and educational programs, she said.

Azadeh Zohrabi, a UC Hastings College of the Law alumna who spoke at the protest, said prisoners can be sent to solitary confinement based on determinate or indeterminate sentences. Indeterminate sentences include a process of “validation,” where people can be put in solitary confinement for perceived gang-related activity, she said.

“Most people in solitary confinement haven’t actually engaged in any behavior that warrants the situation,” Zohrabi said. “The process is arbitrary and broad.”

Zohrabi said she heard a story of a letter being returned to family members instead of being delivered to a prisoner because it included the Spanish word for sun, “sol,” and that was deemed gang-related. She said she had also heard that another prisoner was not able to send a letter to his uncle because he called him “Tio,” the Spanish word for uncle.

Thornton said the validation process is how law enforcement officials work to disrupt gang activity in prisons. A new system is currently being reviewed by the California Office of Administrative Law, and wardens are being sent information on changes this month.

“The issue of dealing with gangs is an issue this department has been grappling with for decades,” Thornton said. “It’s an investigation process.”

UC Berkeley senior Sam Miyazaki, who was there for the protest and went into the cell, said before the demonstration, she did not know anything about any of the issues being discussed.

“It’s freaking sad,” Miyazaki said.

Contact Shannon Carroll at scarroll@dailycal.org.

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