California Inmates Petition UN To Monitor Prisons
LOS ANGELES (AP) — California prison inmates who are held in solitary confinement are petitioning the United Nations to intervene to stop the practice.
Advocates for the inmates and their families held a news conference Tuesday in Los Angeles and made public a petition directed to the organization.
About 4,200 inmates are held in isolation in California prisons and attorney Peter Schey says about 400 are represented in the petition.
Six-thousand inmates in 13 prisons stopped eating last summer to protest the isolation policy.
Prison officials recently proposed changes that would make it easier for inmates to earn their way out of solitary confinement.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
