There's a mass hunger strike gaining steam in California's prisons over certain particularly barbaric practices such as solitary confinement.
The prison hunger strike is a curious phenomenon. Here you have this prison population, which is supposed to be despised by the majority of society because such and such made their choice and they deserve it and that is justice and so on. But then the state completely loses legitimacy if it isn't treating its prisoners with a minimum of humanity, which ticks up in quality over time.
This is how hunger strikes are successful. Our prison institution is a blight on the concept of what society is supposed to be. But at least we can't just let large swathes of a group die off. Of course there are deaths and rapes within the prison system all of the time. This should be outrageous, but the outrage is blunted over time with relentless cultural restylings in the form of rape humor and "shank" humor. Nevertheless, it bears repeating that we still can't let large proportions of the prison population die off from hunger.
Ideals do matter.
I don't wish to come off as particularly sanguine here. They "solved" the hunger strike at Guantanamo with forced feeding. Then we can rattle off a series of great injustices such as the large proportions of African American and Hispanic prisoners in there with very minor charges like drug possession (or perhaps bogus charges; it has been found that cops lie quite a lot), daily rape, beatings, murders, prison privatization and the drive to lobby for heavier criminal charges, a two-tiered justice system bifurcated with money, the very skewing of law towards the powerful, guard brutality, overcrowding, and etc. etc.
There is pushback. Again, ideals do matter. It is worth relentlessly repeating and advancing notions of minimal human rights that should be observed by every institution under any condition.
