In ‘The Strike,’ Filmmakers Illustrate the Issues With Solitary Confinement

Pelican Bay’s SHU (Special Housing Unit) is immortalized in Denzel Washington’s award-winning performance as a crooked cop named Alonzo in the 2001 film Training Day. Just after the film’s climax, as Alonzo is losing his iron fist grip over the residents of an apartment complex, he says to them, “You motherfuckers will be playing basketball in Pelican Bay when I get through with you.” Bloody, sweaty and nearly defeated, he continues with his hollow threat: “SHU program … 23-hour lockdown.”

The reference became cemented in popular culture, but the reality of being inside of a solitary unit — confined to a small steel-and-concrete cage for 23 hours a day — is as far from Hollywood as one can get. Up the California coast, roughly a dozen miles from the Oregon border, on the edge of Crescent City, is Pelican Bay State Prison.

Opened in 1989, the maximum security facility, designed for mass-scale solitary confinement, was once lauded by former California Governor George Deukmejian as the crown jewel of the state’s prison system. Today the facility is home to hundreds of minimum security residents, and only one quarter of its solitary units are occupied.

After years of activism, including a massive hunger strike staged by incarcerated people across the state in 2013 and a 2015 lawsuit, the CDCR’s (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) approach to solitary confinement has been drastically altered. While thousands of people have been reinstated into the general prison population after being released from long-term isolation, the practice of subjecting people to solitary confinement hasn’t completely ended. But the story of how we got to this point, where massive changes have been made at Pelican Bay and throughout the state’s prison system, is shown in the documentary film, The Strike.

The film — which will screen this Wednesday, Oct. 23, at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre and is scheduled to broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens in the spring of 2025 — was directed and produced by Lucas Guilkey and JoeBill Muñoz. Over a score created by well-known East Bay jazz artist Samora Pinderhughes, a handful of men who were once incarcerated at the notorious prison share testimonies about their time inside.

As the men explain their regimen of doing hundreds of push-ups, practicing hours of meditation and playing chess against themselves on a makeshift board made from folded paper, the audience gains an understanding of how cyclical the days on days of seclusion became. Award-winning film editor Daniela Quiroz works magic as she loops the list of activities the interviewees mention, causing the viewer to feel confined not only to the space but also the limits of what someone in solitary can do with their time.

One of the men breaks down the struggle of solitary confinement as “trying to tell your mind you’re not losing your mind, when your mind is telling you that you’re losing your mind.”

The documentary uses archival footage, reenactments and a staged setting to portray an SHU cell. The filmmakers also gained access to unreleased footage of meetings held by the incarcerated leaders of different racial groups within the prison, who in 2013 formed a truce. Together, they and thousands of other incarcerated people across the state participated in a hunger strike in order to bring attention to their grievances with CDCR.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says filmmaker Lucas Guilkey, discussing the archival videos of incarcerated leaders meeting with prison officials. “We had heard about these meetings, but never did we think we would actually get footage of it.”

In California’s prison system, where race divides people nearly as much as steel bars do, seeing stakeholders from different racial groups sitting at the same table is almost unfathomable. But it happened, and when it did, those leaders also brought a list of demands for prison officials.

At the heart of the battle were five key points: the need for regular meaningful human contact, an end to group punishment, the need for adequate food, the abolition of the debriefing policy (requiring those in solitary confinement to give up dirt on other incarcerated people before they’re allowed to exit) and, lastly, ending the practice of indefinite isolation.

There was also a push to end the process by which many incarcerated people land in solitary confinement, which often involved being penalized for holding revolutionary literature, cultural artwork or anything that was remotely “gang affiliated.”

On the heels of the hunger strike and the subsequent lawsuit, California made changes to its solitary confinement policies, including the amount of time people could be forced into isolation. (“The United Nations’ standard for [imprisoned] isolation is 15 days,” Guilkey says. “Beyond that is considered torture.”) Thousands of people who were siloed in cells for years were released to the general population, and substantive changes were made to the checklist that lands people in solitary confinement in the first place.

In October of last year, the CDCR announced that solitary confinement, rebranded as Restrictive Housing, would offer a minimum of 20 hours per week “out of cell time” to assist with access to classes and other workshops to help the rehabilitative process.

Guilkey, who began as a volunteer social media producer working to spread awareness of the prison hunger strike over a decade ago, says when he found out the details of the story, he knew it would make for an interesting feature film, even for those who aren’t engrossed in the nuances of prison in California.

“I think that you can still take a lot away about the power of organizing, about the power of family,” Guilkey says. He mentions the notion that when a person is incarcerated, a family is also incarcerated. “So the meaning of family,” he says, “is really super important.”

The film also deals with the consequences of “tough-on-crime policies” and misguided media narratives built around fear, which have led to devastating consequences for certain communities.

As a part of healing the people from those communities, filmmaker JoeBill Muñoz looks at this week’s screenings as a social gathering built around the film.

Muñoz explains that in making the film, they had no idea that the hunger strikers would live to see a changed prison system, and definitely didn’t foresee them eventually being released from prison. But, now home, a handful of the men will speak at this week’s screenings.

“They all went through the same experience. They were all in the same place for years of their life, isolated, and they didn’t know each other for the most part,” says Muñoz. “They’re going to be together on stage with us, and I think it’s going to be a real special event.”

After conceiving of this film 11 years ago, Guilkey says, “It’s been a long and winding road to bring this film to fruition.” After premiering it at Hot Docs in April and showing it at a few other festivals, Guilkey, who is based in the Bay, says this week’s screening is special: “I am personally just so thrilled to be bringing it home to Oakland.”

As a part of the International Documentary Association’s FallDocs 2024 showcase, ‘The Strike’ will screen Wednesday, Oct. 23, at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre, and will have subsequent screenings at San Francisco’s Roxie Theatre on Oct. 24. More info and tickets can be found here.