PELICAN BAY STATE PRISON — Inside the concrete labyrinth of California's highest-security prison, an inmate covered in neo-Nazi tattoos and locked in solitary confinement has spearheaded the largest prison protest in California history.
Convicted killer Todd Ashker and three other inmates — representing the Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and the Black Guerrilla Family — called for a mass hunger strike July 8, largely to protest indefinite incarceration in solitary confinement.
More than 30,000 prisoners answered.
PHOTOS: Inside Pelican Bay State Prison
Though segregated from others, the leaders, who dub themselves the Short Corridor Collective, have kept the protest going, with more than 600 inmates still refusing food.
Among the four, Ashker is the most outspoken of the collective and the legal brains behind the strike.
Some prisoner-rights advocates describe the intense and sometimes volatile man as a brilliant champion for California's 130,000 prisoners.
Armed with a prison law library and a paralegal degree earned behind bars, Ashker, 50, has filed or been party to 55 federal lawsuits against the California prison system since 1987, winning the right for inmates to order books and collect interest on prison savings accounts.
"There's an element within [the Department of Corrections] who would celebrate some of our deaths with a party," Ashker wrote to The Times in March after prison officials denied access to him.
But others say Ashker is a danger, accusing him of being an Aryan Brotherhood member bent on freeing gang leaders from solitary confinement so they can regain their grip on the prison system.
"We're talking about somebody who is very, very dangerous … who has killed somebody in a pre-meditated way," said Philip Cozens, Ashker's court-appointed defense lawyer in a 1990 murder trial.
Terri McDonald, who ran California's 33 prisons until a few months ago and now runs the Los Angeles County jail system, said Ashker and his compatriots in the Short Corridor Collective are not fighting for rights, but power.
"From my perspective, they are terrorists," she said.
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Ashker has spent nearly all his adult life in California's prison system — and much of that time, he has been in solitary confinement.
Born outside Denver, he wound up in Northern California after his father ran afoul of the law. Lewis Ashker is serving a life sentence in South Dakota for the 1985 murder of a retired police officer during a botched attempt to steal the man's gun collection.
Ashker's mother remarried and moved away in the late 1970s, leaving her son with a friend in Contra Costa County, according to his parole transcripts.
Ashker was 13 when he threatened another student to get his lunch money. It was the first of a long series of transgressions — among them truancy, DUI and burglary — that put him in juvenile halls and boys ranches for most of his youth.
Ashker ascended to state prison in 1982 at age 19 after being convicted of burglary. Five years later, housed at New Folsom State Prison near Sacramento for a second burglary, he stabbed another inmate 17 times.
According to testimony at his murder trial and a subsequent parole hearing, Ashker attacked the Aryan Brotherhood gang member while another inmate held a mattress over the door to block the guards' view. Prosecutors said the killing was a hit ordered by the white supremacist gang. Ashker contended he was acting in self-defense.
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