For several months now prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have been on a hunger strike to protest what they believe to be an unfair detention by the U.S. Now, some California prisoners seem to have been inspired by that idea, and are taking similar measures to fight for their cause.

Roughly 30,000 inmates at California prisons are currently undergoing a hunger strike to attract national attention to their greivences. They claim that they are willing to do whatever it takes and will not back down from authoritative pressure or the pain that will surely rumble in their bellies.

"There's a core group of us who are committed to taking this all the way to the death, if necessary," Todd Ashker, an inmate at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, says in the video. "None of us want to do this, but we feel like we have no other option."

So far, inmates at two-thirds of California's 33 prisons have agreed to partake in the hunger strike, which includes both refusing food as well as not participating in work-based activities at the prisons. The prisoners have assembled a list of five demands that they say are imperative for good relations between them and the jail:

1. Stop punishing groups for the actions of individuals
2. Stop rewarding those who provide information on others
3. Improve nutrition
4. Institute constructive programs for those in solitary confinement
5. End long-term solitary confinement

"There are numerous constructive positive ways to bring their concerns forth," said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). "But engaging in a mass hunger strike, coercing other inmates maybe to do that too, you know, the disruption it can cause from a work stoppage, the department does not condone that."

Should the hunger strike continue, the disruption it could cause for the prison system would be severe. The cost of force-feeding is not cheap, not to mention that if they are not showing up for work, many of the internal processes of the prison will cease to work.

"We are presently out of alternative options for achieving the long overdue reform to this system and, specifically, an end to state-sanctioned torture," said a statement released Monday by the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition. "Now we have to put our lives on the line via indefinite hunger strike to force CDCR to do what's right."