From the issue dated June 18, 2004
http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i41/41a01401.htm Madness in Maximum Security
By PETER MONAGHAN When America's overflowing prisons boil over, or when television shows such as HBO's prison drama Oz presume to portray the grim conditions inside them, members of the public may think they get a picture of what the institutions are like. Wrong, say criminologists and other social scientists who study incarceration. And yet, academics allow, over the last two decades, they, as much as the public, have had little opportunity to observe prisons from the inside because access has become more tightly controlled. "Most criminologists have never been inside a prison," says Jeffrey Ian Ross, an associate professor of criminology, criminal justice, and social policy at the University of Baltimore. At a time when Americans are discovering, through reports from Iraq, just how grave abuses can become when hidden from view, such secrecy in prisons is unsettling, scholars insist. The situation for scholars is a far cry from that in the 1960s and 1970s, when sociologists and ethnographers worked in prisons and produced many ethnographies and analyses. By the 1990s, those became as rare as escapes from Alcatraz used to be. Scholars say that less-glamorized and more-accurate information is urgently needed because prison has become home to vastly more Americans than ever before. Between 1980 and 1998, the number of people in state and federal prisons ballooned from 329,821 to 1,302,019 -- a higher percentage of the population than in any other country, and far higher than in most. The vast majority of prisoners are young, nonviolent, first-time offenders. Half of them are African-American, and half a million of them are released to the general population each year. Most reoffend, and many spread illnesses they caught while incarcerated. "The prison system is in many ways becoming a petri dish for the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and hepatitis," says Donald F. Sabo, a professor of social sciences at D'Youville College. Despite the need to study the problem, scholars face "bureaucratic rationalization of prison management," which has made access almost unattainable, says Meda Chesney-Lind, a professor of women's studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who has published widely on youth and adult imprisonment. "Administrators take courses in this, in how to deal with the press, or the public," she says. "There has been more management, and that has become antithetical to letting researchers into facilities." Lorna A. Rhodes, author of the just-released Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (University of California Press), is one of the few researchers who have managed to get past such restrictions and gain a clearer picture of the nature and effects of incarceration. Her book is the result of several years of fieldwork, which began thanks to a friend who worked as an officer at a state penitentiary and helped her gain access. After winning the confidence of prison staff, Ms. Rhodes, who is a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, was able to repeatedly interview prisoners, uniformed guards, mental-health workers, and administrators. She was helped, too, by her participation in a now-unusual instance of cooperation between a corrections system and academic researchers -- the Correctional Mental Health Collaboration between the University of Washington and the Washington State Department of Corrections -- which was active from 1993 to 2002. The researchers wished, says Ms. Rhodes, to provide a better picture of maximum-security life than the popular stereotypes. "I stay away from, for example, descriptions of people's tattoos," she observes, "and stony faces, and things like that. I feel like that would be replicating something that we already have enough of." But even without details like those, the picture of life inside America's maximum-security prisons that emerges in Total Confinement is harrowing. In the institutions, says Ms. Rhodes, whose previous book, Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (University of California Press, 1991), was based on observation of psychiatric hospitals, it can be hard to tell what is madness and what is not. Out of Control? In her book, Ms. Rhodes concentrates her attention on "control units" -- the "super maximum" wings within maximuum-security prisons, cordoned off by razor wire. They house inmates removed from the general prison population for breaches of prison regulations or for fighting or harming other prisoners or officers. These units emerge as, to say the least, hell holes -- black boxes within black boxes where prison officials can make criminals who often are too mentally disturbed to live peaceably in regular cell blocks "disappear," as she puts it. Control-unit prisoners spend 23 hours or more a day in 8-by-10-foot cells with one frosted window in the shape of a slit. They must withstand constant day-and-night clamor, raving neighbors, ghastly food, racial and other taunts, including encouragement to commit suicide, and predatory aggression, not always at the hands of other inmates. Rape is widespread, as it is throughout the prison system. The routines and severe forms of constraint of control units, augmented increasingly by electronic surveillance, are so harsh that prisoners cannot be considered "rational actors," Ms. Rhodes argues. In fact, many inmates who are not mentally ill become psychotic under the strain of isolation. The conditions often provoke fear of all other human beings, or antagonism toward them, and prisoners respond with violence or other infractions that prolong their punishment. Such responses can strike outsiders as inexplicable. Many prisoners smear feces on cell walls, or on themselves. Others take to storing their own body wastes and blood, and fashioning them into projectiles that they throw through meal slots at guards. Inmates commonly describe this as "a particularly satisfying form of resistance," reports Ms. Rhodes. It contaminates guards with "a kind of contagion" that makes them "at least momentarily, disgusting themselves," she says. And because guards generally do not know which prisoners are suffering from AIDS, hepatitis, or other infectious diseases, an element of terror creeps in. Such behaviors are so prevalent, says Ms. Rhodes, that she wonders whether the ratcheting up of control overwhelms prisoners' self-regulation. In that light, she suggests, such overtly disgusting and irrational acts can be interpreted as "a willful -- perhaps even too sane -- deployment of the most obvious of weapons." Ms Rhodes observes that the battle to keep order amid such disruption -- and keep down the soaring costs of incaarceration as well -- has led prison officials to a "preoccupation with a technologically elaborate efficiency." Innovations such as computer-controlled locking and surveillance systems, and such tools of the prison trade as pepper spray, incapacitating stun guns, and increasingly severe "violent-prisoner restraint chairs," which shackle an inmate's limbs, torso, and head, have become the weapons of choice in this war. Prison officials, in writing about conditions in maximum-security wings, frequently acknowledge their shortcomings but say they are trying to correct them. As one report on the Iowa prisons puts it, they try to "focus on stabilizing, socializing, and reintegrating the offender back into an appropriate general population setting." But some human-rights organizations, like many scholars, have had harsh words for prison conditions. In recent years, Human Rights Watch has assailed corrections systems in the United States for mistreating and neglecting the one in six prisoners who the organization says are mentally ill, and who are three times as numerous as the mentally ill in hospitals. Human Rights Watch also says that prison officials have displayed a "wholesale disregard" for inmates' right to protection from rape. Ms. Rhodes says that although the ideal of individualism underpins the history of Western prisons and psychiatry, control-unit prisoners who are mad, or who are driven mad, have little chance to earn their way out of the units with good behavior. Prison officials say "individual choice" will determine punishment or reward, but the control they maintain is so severe that prisoners are largely deprived of personal choice, and often lack the ability to make choices because they are psychotic. Prison administrators and guards, she notes, constantly assert that prisoners choose to do what they do, from committing crimes to attacking prison guards. But the understanding of "choice" has a social context, she says. After several American prison riots in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, notions of choice intensified as a rationale for prisons, with a simultaneous withdrawal of explanations attributing behavior to childhood abuse or other social factors.With the rise of consciousness of "victim's rights," among other forces, she says, it has become "almost scandalous" to imply that anything but personal failings may underlie a criminal behavior, "unless there's a medical reason." "And even then," she adds, "you have to be really floridly psychotic before that will kick in." When inmates are first admitted to prisons, officials make determinations about whether they are "mad or bad": Are they rational-choice makers who have done wrong and will or may do so again, at any opportunity? Or, rather, do they represent an ongoing risk because they are psychotic? Narrowing the choice to those two options poses a problem, Ms. Rhodes writes: "An overly expansive definition of illness would threaten to shift many prisoners from the bad into the mad category, not only diluting punishment to an unacceptable extent, but also underscoring the lack of facilities for treatment." Even after most admittees have been designated as "bad," usually because they exhibit "antisocial personality disorder," the rest -- schizophrenics and other "mad" inmates -- still must be admitted, and housed in conditions where their madness surely will worsen, or under which their ranks will swell. Making that more likely is that both the mad and the bad often end up in solitary confinement. Despite the pain of, say, being zapped with stun guns, or forcibly removed from their cells, prisoners fear solitary confinement more than anything else, Ms. Rhodes reports. With good reason: Now, as it has done throughout penal history, solitary confinement drives prisoners mad. All maximum-security punishments exact a more subtle, but still harsh outcome, she says. They inject prisoners into a "mutually reinforcing cycle" in which, in the eyes of prison staff and even other inmates, they "come to represent a shadow side of human nature." Then, because they signify danger, harsher and harsher confinement seems guards' only reasoned, risk-minimizing recourse, says Ms. Rhodes. Tainted prisoners who are not currently violent are designated as "violent potential" and become "simply bodies to be stored." Put simply: Once in the control unit, you are lucky to get out. The Other Side of the Bars The specter of philosopher Michel Foucault hovers over Ms. Rhodes's book. Due to his writings on madness, discipline, and punishment, most notably Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (reprinted in paperback by Vintage in 1995), the prison provides metaphors in much modern academic writing. But, Ms. Rhodes says, the application of Foucault's thought to prisons is tricky. "Unlike all the places where Foucault's metaphors are used for how power works," she observes, "when you're in a supermax prison, you're in the place that is working the way he wrote about it -- and yet in other ways, it isn't." Most obviously, she says, prisons are not just metaphors of imprisonment. They are imprisonment. Projects that grapple with such complexities are essential if policy makers and the public are to become better informed about the realities of prisons, says Mr. Ross of the University of Baltimore. In Convict Criminology (Wadsworth, 2002), he and his fellow editor, Stephen C. Richards, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Northern Kentucky University, set out to provide what he calls "a missing piece in the puzzle of understanding prisons and corrections" by collecting writing that includes several articles by ex-convicts. While former correctional officers, parole officers, and the like are well represented in the ranks of criminology, the field has heard little, until now, of the experience of academics who have been sentenced to time behind bars. Mr. Richards did three years, including time in two maximum-security prisons, on first-offense marijuana charges that he says were baseless. Mr. Ross, who once held a job assessing the mental competence of prisoners about to stand trial, says "some respected criminologists have that kind of history, but most have been in the closet." Every week, he says, he hears from academics or aspiring academics who were once convicts, debating whether to admit to their pasts. The ex-convict authors in Convict Criminology, by treating their own experiences as empirical data for criminological study, replace fantasies with reality, says Mr. Ross. So what, then, is an appropriate and realistic balance of punitive and psychiatric responses to extreme prison behavior? That is the question, says Ms. Rhodes. What is clear, she says, is that the task of achieving such a balance is not easy for prison guards. Many of them buy into the rhetoric of the "warehouse prison," she says, because it is they who suffer the assaults, as well as stigmatization outside the prison, once friends and acquaintances learn of some of their experiences. They also have little ability to improve conditions, working as they are in low-paying jobs that often are the only alternative to flipping burgers in rural communities. And in a further complication, says Ms. Rhodes, while friends on the outside say that "we should just shoot them all," they inevitably also sympathize with some of prisoners, whom they know. She came away from her research with empathy for prison workers. They suffer from severe job stress. They must deal with inmates whom they quickly learn not to trust, not knowing which they can trust. Even if inclined to support or protect ill or oppressed prisoners, they lack the means to do so. And, she says, "they are entangled in issues that would be very hard to sort out." Civilizing Incarceration At the end of her book, Ms. Rhodes describes a project in the control unit of a maximum-security prison where officials cleaned the walls of racist graffiti, made renovations so that it would be more difficult for prisoners to throw feces at staff members, and directed administrators to walk the tiers once or twice a week talking to inmates and dealing with problems. Educational programs were introduced. Four years later, the unit was experiencing dramatically less violence and use of force on prisoners. Many inmates who had seemed to be doomed to spend their lives in control units managed to graduate back to the general prison population. The existence of so many control units where "no redemption of any kind is possible," says Ms. Rhodes, is "a failure of imagination." Change, over all, is very slow in coming, she says: "I think people are quite locked into their own visions." The best hope for less self-defeating attitudes about prisons, prison construction, harsher sentencing laws, and the incarceration boom, she says, is that legislators and the public will come to realize that "we can bankrupt ourselves doing this. There are diminishing returns. You get some drop in crime rates after your first large boost in incarceration, but when you start locking up a lot of petty drug criminals, you're not getting very much for your money." Nationwide, state and local incarceration costs almost $40-billion each year, she notes. Legislators in some states, says Ms. Chesney-Lind, are realizing the huge cost of mass imprisonment, both in terms of what cannot be paid for when prison budgets are so large -- higher education, for example. In social terms, legislators "are looking at the incarceration of nonviolent offenders, and are asking, 'Did we mean to punish them as if they were violent offenders? What about criminalizing drug addiction as if it was a crime rather than a public-health issue?'" When it comes to imprisonment, she says, "no one else in the developed
world has followed our lead."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-lockdown8apr08,1,7802527.story?coll=la-news-stat
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April 8, 2004 SACRAMENTO — For 20 months, scores of Latino gang members at Folsom State Prison were locked in their cells around the clock and deprived of regular exercise, visitors, religious services, hot meals, telephone calls and frequent showers, internal documents show. At least one top Department of Corrections official has concluded that the extended harsh restrictions — known in prison parlance as a lockdown — amounted to violations of state policy and the inmates' constitutional rights. Imposed as an emergency measure after a gang riot in April 2002, the lockdown continued month after month, even though inmates filed more than 100 grievances. Restrictions on exercise, visits and hot meals were eased in December, but even now some limitations remain in effect. Newly appointed Corrections Director Jeanne Woodford confirmed that an internal department inquiry was underway. She would not discuss it, but called the length of the lockdown excessive. "Should it have gone on for two years? In my opinion, it should not have gone on for two years," Woodford said in an interview. National prison expert Craig Haney said, "a lockdown for two years is just about unheard of." Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychology professor, added that "to confine inmates under those conditions for that long really presses against the psychological bounds of people's survival." Haney — and some state corrections administrators — say the lockdown underscores the department's struggle to manage an ominous problem: the expanding power of gangs within the sprawling prison system. The department estimates that more than 100,000 inmates — about two-thirds of the population — belong to gangs or splinter groups. Although officials have tried to limit violence by isolating leaders at a few maximum-security housing units, gangs — and scores of splinter groups — have continued to flourish, battling each other in a constant war for turf and control. When riots occur, officials routinely impose a lockdown while they search cells for weapons and identify instigators. Such was the case at Folsom, where all 3,500 inmates were locked down after the 2002 melee. Gradually, groups of convicts were released from lockdown after agreeing not to initiate further violence, officials said. But one group — members of assorted Northern California Latino gangs — would not make such a pledge, a department spokeswoman said. Those were the inmates who ended up on lockdown for 20 months. "When they refuse to agree not to attack someone, then, for obvious security reasons, we can't put them back on the yard," said department spokeswoman Terry Thornton. That explanation rankled some inmate advocates. They said lockdowns often drag on — as at Folsom — in part because prison officials lack an effective strategy for preventing more violence when inmates are released to mingle again outdoors. "Using a lockdown as a quick response to a security breach is a common corrections practice," said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator of the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington. "But something like this is astonishing. It sounds like there are major problems in California and that corrections administrators are letting the gangs run the prisons." . In December, then-Corrections Director Edward Alameida fired Folsom's warden, Diana Butler, citing the need for "new leadership" but making no mention of the lockdown. In January, 10 other top managers at the prison were reassigned, but again nothing was said about the lockdown. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has asked the U.S. attorney in Sacramento to investigate the April 2002 riot and its aftermath. Prison sources say the FBI is collecting documents and asking questions about the lockdown. Folsom marks the latest episode in what some describe as a crisis engulfing California corrections. Over the last four months, disclosures have revealed problems ranging from extreme violence in juvenile lockups to a "revolving door" parole system that funnels two-thirds of all ex-convicts back to prison. Legislators are holding oversight hearings on the troubles, and a commission appointed by Schwarzenegger has been asked to suggest reforms. State Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) is among those pushing for change. She called the lockdown "indefensible" and a violation of federal standards. "It's very disturbing," said Speier, who vowed to pursue an audit of lockdowns throughout the prison system. "It's like grounding a child for five years and forgetting all about him." According to documents and interviews, the lockdown rose out of a period of escalating tensions between rival Latino gangs that prison officials label northern Hispanics and southern Hispanics. Those tensions peaked April 8, 2002, when members of the southern group attacked their enemies on the exercise yard, resulting in a melee that left 24 injured and one officer permanently disabled. Documents show that during the 20-month period after the riot, the northern Hispanics' conditions of confinement were severe. On Dec. 9, 2003, the department's then-regional administrator for northern prisons, Ana Ramirez-Palmer, sent a memo to Alameida outlining findings of a management assessment. The memo expressed "significant concerns" about the lockdown and recommended that the U.S. Justice Department investigate "the apparent civil rights violations." Another memo a few days later cited these problem areas, among others: • Food: The inmates were not afforded two hot meals a day as required by department policy. The only hot meals provided were breakfast on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. • Showers: Because the inmates refused to wear soft-soled shoes, they were routinely denied showers. Some inmates, however, were allowed to use the outdoor showers three days a week. • Exercise: At the start of the lockdown, all the inmates were given periodic access to telephones and a "mini-yard." Later on, some of them were denied all exercise. • Canteen: The inmates were not allowed to make purchases at the prison store, where convicts typically buy snacks, hygiene items and stamps. "Since they could not purchase stamps … and were not indigent, they could not mail out any correspondence to family or friends," the memo said. • Visiting: Except for Dec. 26, 2002, the locked-down inmates were not permitted any visitors. • Religious services: None. In addition, the prison's chaplains and spiritual advisors "failed to provide face-to-face interaction by walking the tiers." The memo also noted that the inmates' appeals pertaining to the living conditions were not processed according to policy. A review of appeals filed by several inmates showed that many of their complaints centered on the quality of the food. In one complaint, dated Dec. 14, 2002, inmate Harold Matus said he and fellow inmates were being served peanut butter and bread as a main course three times a day. Such a diet, he said, violated department regulations that require balanced nutrition and at least two hot meals a day. The complaint ended up at the director's level, where it was reviewed — and denied — by a staff member on behalf of Alameida. That decision cited what appeared to be the department's overall justification for the lockdown — that the warden has the authority to "temporarily suspend the normal operations" of a prison to maintain safety and security. Shortly after receiving the memos, Alameida resigned for personal reasons. Woodford, the new department director, acknowledged that "we do have a ways to go" in controlling gang violence. Several years ago, she noted, the state considered adopting a program that motivates inmates to break free of gangs. The department's model for the program, however, carried a high price tag, and the idea was shelved. One high-level corrections administrator, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the lockdown should never have lasted so long. "It's insane," the official said. "After you impose a lockdown, the goal is to do your cell searches and investigation and then unlock as soon as possible. If you're afraid that will lead to more violence, you use your head and scatter the troublemakers at other prisons. You don't just sit there and keep them locked down and hope the problem goes away." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prisoner's isolation leads to desperation Safer cells mean dangerous streets Joan Ryan Tuesday, January 27, 2004 ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/27/BAGAC4IMC91.DTL
For six years, Jason Treas lived in a world of one. He had no physical contact with another living being. Not a handshake, a hug, a slap on the back. He had just three face-to-face conversations during those years, all through a glass partition. He never spoke on the phone. He never saw a blade of grass or a bird from the bare-walled, windowless room in which he spent 22 1/2 hours a day, or from the covered concrete courtyard in which he spent the remaining 90 minutes. The background noise to his world of one was the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the shouts of other inmates whose faces he couldn't see. At the end of the six years by himself, Treas was dropped off in San Francisco on an April afternoon last year with the clothes on his back and $200 in his pocket. "It was sensory overload,'' Treas said over lunch Monday at a Mexican restaurant on Mission Street. "I was so nervous I thought I was going to throw up.'' He had migraines for weeks from the sun. He was frightened in crowds. He had no job. His father was a drug addict. His mother had disowned him. He fully understood, now that he was without a job or the skills to function normally in society, why so many men end up back in prison. "Desperate men are going to do desperate things,'' he said. Legislators in Sacramento have been investigating corruption and brutality in the state prison system, trying to push for overdue reforms. If one of the goals of prison is to keep our society safer, then we have to stop dumping ex-convicts back onto the street after years of sensory deprivation. This means getting rid of the place where Treas and thousands of others have done their time, the infamous Security Housing Unit, known as the SHU, at Pelican Bay State Prison near the Oregon border. There are no educational or vocational classes in the SHU. There are no prison jobs or any group activity of any kind to pass the time. Some inmates go crazy. Treas recalled one inmate who became so paranoid that he never left his cell. Some men become more violent. Here's why we should care: Hundreds of these inmates every year are released directly from the SHU back into society to live among the rest of us. Correctional authorities say SHUs are crucial in isolating the worst of the worst in order to keep safe the guards and the rest of the inmates. Understandable, but illogical. What about us? How is this approach keeping society safe when the prison system dumps these isolated, dysfunctional men back on the streets without social or job skills, without any psychological preparation for life in a crowded, noisy, messy, demanding world? The practice of complete deprivation is stunningly short-sighted -- keeping the immediate peace in prison at the expense of the eventual peace out here. It is setting up ex-cons for failure, and putting every citizen in California at risk. Treas' time at Pelican Bay capped 11 total years of incarceration, beginning in juvenile detention. While on a weekend pass from a juvenile ranch, he was charged and convicted as an adult for assault with a deadly weapon in the shooting of an Irish tourist, a charge he denies. He was 16. Now he is 27. He looks, in some ways, like a central-casting depiction of an ex-con, with tattoos, a mustache and goatee, and black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. But he has, through his own diligence and social awakening in prison, landed a job at a San Francisco-based magazine called The Beat Within, which publishes writings and art from inmates at juvenile halls and prisons. Treas began contributing to The Beat years ago, developing an intense pen- pal friendship with several of the editors. He taught himself math, English and history, and earned a GED. The Beat editors helped him land a grant when he got out that is paying him a salary for a year to help teenagers at three San Francisco Boys & Girls Clubs to paint murals. He leads art and writing workshops at Walden House and other San Francisco places where runaways and troubled teens turn for help. He shares an apartment in Pleasant Hill with his sister and commutes every day by BART to the city. But most inmates who leave the SHU aren't as fortunate. They don't have jobs to pay the bills. They don't have friends and co-workers to teach them how to use a computer for the first time, or to listen to them when another intimate relationship fails to meet the idealized version they had created in their heads all those lonely years. "My success is not the prison's success,'' he said, finishing his burrito. "I don't know how I made it out. If not for the grant I got, what would I be doing now? In the SHU, the things you need in order to function in society are all taken away from you. You are removed from everything that makes you human." E-mail Joan Ryan at [email protected] .
http://au.news.yahoo.com//021227/11/ikzh.html Friday December 27, 04:00 PM Actor Robert Blake Depressed in LA Jail - Report Actor Robert Blake ( news), in jail awaiting trial on charges that he murdered his wife, worries that this may be his last Christmas on Earth, according to a television report broadcast on Thursday. Local Los Angeles station CBS2, the west coast flagship of the CBS network, said that Blake's attitudes toward life appear to have deteriorated along with his physical condition. "This is the fourth time I have interviewed Robert Blake, the second time in jail, and definitely there is a change," said reporter Paul Dandridge, who added that the actor, now 69, is "not sure as to how much more he can last." Dandridge said the only human contact Blake has is a once-a-week handshake from a priest who visits the actor in his jail cell. Dandridge said Blake, the star of the television series "Baretta," told him he wondered if "this would be his last Christmas on Earth." Blake, who is accused of shooting his wife Bonnie Lee Bakley to death while she sat in a car in May 2001, is scheduled to answer questions under oath on Jan. 15 in connection with a wrongful death lawsuit Bakley's children filed. A preliminary hearing in the criminal case against him
is set for Feb. 26.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/01/03/state2235EST0169.DTL Lockdown at Pelican Bay after fight Friday, January 3, 2003
URL:
(01-03) 19:37 PST (AP) -- CRESCENT CITY, Calif. -- A partial lockdown was instituted at Pelican Bay State Prison after a fight broke out involving up to 75 inmates. The fight Thursday afternoon was the largest at the remote prison near the Oregon border since a riot in February 2000, according to Lt. Rawland Swift, public information officer. Swift did not know what caused the fight. Guards used pepper spray and tear gas to control the inmates. Four inmates had minor injuries. Pelican Bay is home to the state's most hardened criminals, most of whom are serving lengthy terms for violent crimes. The riot in 2000, involving 200 inmates, was the largest in prison history. One inmate was shot to death and dozens were seriously injured. ©2003 Associated Press
www.sacbee.com Officers injured at New Folsom The prison is locked down after inmates attacked the guards. By Denny Walsh -- Bee Staff Writer
Officers involved in the melee used pepper spray and side-handle batons to quell the uprising, while officers in towers fired rubber bullets into the yard and live warning rounds overhead. The disturbance was put down within three minutes, Feryance said. Sixteen inmates have been identified as being involved, the lieutenant added. Sgt. Sebastian Graham and Officer Stephen Solomon were taken by ambulance to the UC Davis Medical Center, where they were treated and released. Graham had a gash on his head that required seven sutures and two puncture wounds on his upper back. Solomon suffered abrasions to his face. A number of inmates were treated for "abrasions, bruises and bumps" at the prison, Feryance said. Several other officers were treated for minor injuries. An investigation of the incident is under way, the lieutenant said. "As of now, it appears to have been spontaneous," he said. About the Writer
The Bee's Denny Walsh can be reached at (916) 321-1189 or [email protected]
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www.sacbee.com Many inmates in lockdown after riot Racial conflict is a given in prisons, officials say; the difference at Folsom was the use of deadly force. By Niesha Gates -- Bee Staff Writer
He was in stable condition Friday.The riot marked the second time in two years that a correctional officer in a California prison has used deadly force. The incident has prompted a major in-house investigation and raised questions about the prison system's segregation policies.Ayers said the mÍlée lasted five minutes as more than 100 inmates beat one another with hard plastic trays, cups, plates and fists. Some inmates dove to the floor and scrambled under tables to avoid the fight and officers' attempts to break up the fighting with rubber batons and pepper spray. It ended after one shot was fired by an officer, who was patrolling the area from a catwalk above the dining hall, he said."Once the rifle was fired you could have heard a pin drop," Ayers said. "They all went to the ground, and we began using restraints and escorting them out of the area."Ayers didn't identify the inmate who was injured and later underwent surgery.The officer who fired the shot has been placed on administrative leave while prison officials investigate the shooting. They will be interviewing each of the prison's 3,875 inmates. It took 33 seconds to contain the last riot at Folsom prison, in April, between Mexican Americans from Northern and Southern California, he said. Prior to that, the last riot of equal magnitude was in 1992, between Mexican American inmates from Southern California and African American inmates who belonged to the Crips gang.Folsom prison houses mainly medium-and minimum-security prisoners. It also houses 797 Level 3 custody inmates, a category one step below maximum security.Prisoners involved in Thursday's riot were all medium-security inmates, Ayers said.Russ Heimerich, a Corrections Department spokesman, said reports of race riots come in to the department daily. The distinguishing mark in Thursday's riot was the use of deadly force."All of our riots are race-based riots. This is nothing new," he said. "What is new is that now, unlike 40 or 50 years ago, most prisoners associate with some sort of prison gang, and those gangs are based on race."Heimerich said when a fight breaks out, it's usually because one gang perceives that another gang was disrespectful. "It could have been something as simple as bumping into someone without apologizing," he said.Inmates who take part in riots may face punishments, including administrative segregation, prison transfers or felony prosecution.Heimerich said the Department of Corrections is trying to address the racial self-segregation within the prison system but doesn't know how to stop it. "They come in and affiliate that way," he said. "The best we can do is try to manage the tension."When riots occur, instigators are transferred and inmates are placed on lockdown. Advisory councils made up of inmates sometimes are established to help prison officials better understand the problems, he said.But according to Steven Fama, an attorney at the Prison Law Office in San Rafael, such solutions merely add to racial tension."All too often, in the wake of incidents like this, CDC officials are too quick to make assumptions based on an inmate's race. Lockdowns will be imposed and lifted on the basis of race," Fama said. "An inmate wants his conduct to be judged on what he's done in the past,
not by his ethnicity."About 15 years ago, Fama said, there were prison
programs that helped curb racial tension. But a lack of funding and a shift
of emphasis has eliminated them."The emphasis now is on punishment and
stripped-down, bare-minimum prisons," Fama said. "The problem ... is that
the people in them are still human beings. What's needed are programs that
would allow prisoners to break down barriers and form relationships."About
the Writer
The Bee's Niesha Gates can be reached at (916)608-7454 or [email protected]
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