‘The Strike’ gives a behind-the-scenes look at solitary confinement

In 2013, nearly 4,000 California inmates in long-term solitary confinement (for decades, in some cases) went on what would become a months-long hunger strike. The collective action was designed to get the attention of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and protest the conditions of those in extended solitary confinement. At the negotiating table, the corrections department was met by a united front of inmates who, understanding the injustice of their dire circumstances, decided they would try to change the very policies that had left them “buried” in concrete cells.

“The Strike,” which premiered on PBS’ “Independent Lens” on Monday and is currently available on PBS.org, the PBS app and PBS’ YouTube channel, chronicles that feat of activist organizing. In the hands of filmmakers JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey, the documentary shines a spotlight on the men who helped organize and mobilize their fellow inmates. But it is also a living record of the recent history of the carceral system in the U.S. in general and in California in particular.

“We wanted to trace the arc of the rise of mass incarceration on a deeply personal, intimate level,” said Guilkey. But also, this is not an individual story. It’s a story of collective solidarity. And it’s a story of organizing across racial lines.”

As title cards inform viewers at the start of the film, Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit once held hundreds of inmates for more than a decade. Now, it’s nearly empty. The film tells the story of how the 2013 hunger strike helped make that happen.

Former inmates such as Jack L. Morris (a Chicano man who served 40 years in prison, with more than 30 spent in solitary confinement) and Michael Saavedra (who served close to 20 years, many of them in solitary) share their painful experiences on camera.

Through them, “The Strike” offers unprecedented insight into what led these California inmates to organize the largest prison hunger strike in U.S. history. With limited access to their families, the outside world and even one another, Morris, Saavedra and other Pelican Bay inmates found increasingly creative ways to connect with those they couldn’t see face to face. Those included notes in library books and conversations had over toilets and vents.

“We all actively, collectively, did what we did,” Morris says. “But in reality, we were siloed from others. We didn’t know what was taking place. I just had to believe that what I was doing, others were doing. And seeing it on the film, it inspired me. But it disappointed me, too. Because I couldn’t do as much as I saw many others do.”

For his wife, Dolores Canales, co-founder of the California Families Against Solitary Confinement, the film offers a chance to address the rhetoric pushing for solitary confinement in the first place.

“The narrative was: These are the worst of the worst,” she says. “‘We are keeping you safe. We’re keeping the guards safe. Everybody’s safe because we’re doing this.’ But I feel this film contradicts that narrative and reaches the very depth of humanity.”

Morris and Saavedra share how dehumanizing it felt to hear the rhetoric while imprisoned. They were among the men (many of them quite young when they first entered the carceral system) branded as violent gang members. That was often enough to strip them of the scant freedoms they were afforded in prison, decisions that were made not by judges but by corrections administrators, and that were all too difficult to undo.

“I hope that the film will help the general audience — the people outside — to really see that people can change and grow,” Saavedra, who has been pursuing a law degree since his release, says. “I’m hoping it gives audiences a different outlook upon us. And not just us people. But then also looking deeper at the system. This is what your system does. This is what the California Department of Corrections does to people.”

The Pelican Bay State Prison, which opened in 1989, served as a limit case for the practice of solitary confinement. As the documentary outlines, the building of that “state-of-the-art” penitentiary in the middle of the redwood forest in the northernmost part of California helped dehumanize those housed within its walls. They were kept away from their loved ones, but also from public scrutiny.

“This is mostly men — Latino, Chicano, men from Los Angeles, mostly — who are on the Oregon border in this windowless, concrete fortress cell, in this massive institution designed to hold over a thousand people in solitary confinement,” Guilkey explains.

Such context makes the hunger strike all the more remarkable. And it’s what made producing “The Strike” so challenging in the first place.

“It’s a protest that happens inside the most high-security prison you can imagine,” Muñoz says. “How do you visually piece this together? How do you tell this story?”

Mostly, it required getting recently released inmates such as Saavedra and Morris to share their experiences, and then piecing their stories together with archival footage for historical context. But viewers of “The Strike” also get to witness a tense meeting between the corrections department and the coalition of leaders organizing the hunger strike. Guilkey and Muñoz wouldn’t disclose how they got that secretly-shot footage, but it’s an explosive moment when those inmates present their requests calmly. They explain they have little to lose: What else would the corrections department do?

“When we think of the prison system, we usually think of power belonging to the administrators,” Muñoz adds. “To the wardens. To the folks who decide the policies. To the jailers. And what was extraordinary about these protests, but especially this footage, was that it was all flipped on its head. Now, this collection of incarcerated guys have come together and represented a collective of power. The whole system was on its head.”

The documentary may be squarely centered on the fight to abolish solitary confinement as it exists and is enforced right now. But for its filmmakers, “The Strike” offers a broader road map for how to face the current political landscape.

“This is multiracial, working-class, collective solidarity,” as Guilkey puts it. “This is social movement organizing and what it takes to do collective direct action to effect material change in your lives. This shows how to fight authoritarian power.”

And as “The Strike” shows, that takes work; one person at a time.

“Activism is not necessarily having a thousand people with you immediately,” Morris says, summing up the film’s message. “It’s taking the steps by yourself and bringing people as you move along.”