Apr-May 97

CORCORAN: Hellhole of California

--and other California Security Housing Units

Corey Weinstein, M.D., has been visiting prisons and prisoners for 25 years and has been working with California Prison Focus for the past six years. Catherine Campbell, an attorney and CPF President, received the State Bar's 1996 President's Pro Bono Service award for her volunteer work with prisoners and their families. Corey and Catherine have conducted 16 investigative visits to Security Housing Units in this state and interviewed people in adjacent maximum security facilities.

Corcoran Prison is one of the major Se-curity Housing Units (SHUs) in California. One of the purposes of a SHU is to extract information from prisoners labeled as gang members (often through a kangaroo court). SHU prisoners are told, "You don't get out of here until you snitch on your (alleged) gang members." Throwing people into solitary confinement in order to extract information is prevented by the Geneva Accords during time of war but permitted in every state in this country under federal law.

SHU prisoners sit in their cells at least 22 1/2 hours a day. They have no hobbies, very few books, no TV or radio unless they can afford to buy one, no physical contact with anybody, not even other prisoners. The physical nature of these units-solitary confinement and sensory deprivation-is brutalizing, not only to the prisoners but to those who service them on a daily basis-the guards. And wherever we find one of these units, we find brutality by guards.

One kind of brutality is the "greet-the-bus" behavior developed by the guards at Corcoran. The guards who did this a lot called themselves the "Sharks" because they would attack prisoners without warning. Prisoners fully shackled-handcuffs chained to their waist-chains, legs hobbled with chains around their ankles-would come in on buses and be met by guards, often wearing black gloves, truncheons in hand, face-shields in place, badges covered (so that they could not be identified by name), who would beat them unmercifully. One notorious greet-the-bus incident happened when a busload of so-called East Side Crips arrived. The guards mistakenly thought these guys had been involved in the assault of an officer at Calipatria Prison in Southern California, so they brutalized them. They broke the ribs of five of them, banged their heads into the walls, shaved their heads, and humiliated, taunted, harassed, and physically tortured them. This was routine ritualistic behavior that ended recently because of the publicity over this particular incident.

Another kind of ritualized brutality is the "gladiator" arena. In the Corcoran SHU, 20 inmates at a time were sent out to the yard in groups of rival gangs-African American inmates from Southern California, Hispanic inmates from Southern California, white inmates, etc. These groups are historic rivals with one another akin to the kind of conflict in Bosnia and Croatia. Such rivalries go so deep and are so profound and divisive that there's no alternative for these inmates but to fight with one another.

The guards had unfettered discretion to move people around from cell to cell, so they would choose inmates who were better fighters, inmates they wanted to see beat up, inmates they wanted to see shot, inmates they wanted to watch fight, inmates who had a history of assault on officers, and pair them in configurations that would inevitably lead to a brutal confrontation. Many of these fights were allowed to go on for some time before finally being halted by firing the 37 mm. gas gun, which produces severe injuries although not any deaths. If the inmates did not get down after the gas gun was fired, the tower would gun them down with dumdum bullets from a high powered 9 mm. rifle. This gladiator sport began in 1989 when Corcoran first opened. That year Corcoran had a rate of inmate assaults five times that for any other institution in California, a statistic that should have warned Sacramento that there was a serious problem.

The gladiator sport was pursuant to what Sacramento called the "integrated yard policy." The ostensible rationale for this policy was to teach inmates to get along with one another. But there was never any research or monitoring of how the integrated-yard policy was actually applied in spite of fifty inmates being shot over the years, seven of them dying as a result of gunshot wounds. The seven prisoners gunned down at Corcoran represent more prisoners shot and killed by guards than at all other prisons in the United States combined during the same period, yet no investigation was conducted into the policy until Preston Tate was killed on August 2, 1994. Preston Tate had been in the jail system approximately three years and had just come back on a parole violation when he was killed. Then for the first time officers came forward to the press and to the FBI and reported the consequences of the policy.

We are suing on behalf of Preston Tate's parents, Bill and Vivian Tate, who live in Southern California. The California Department of Corrections documents almost everything that it does-transfer documents, disciplinary reports, incident reports, etc.-so there are volumes and volumes of written evidence on how these fights occurred and how they were set up.

There's an eerie resemblance between the gang culture amongst prisoners and the gang culture amongst guards. Striking and dramatic! Guards refer to themselves as "gangs" and inmates see them as belonging to particular gangs. Guards share the same codes of behavior that exist amongst inmates. We know about the Sharks at Corcoran because prisoners who don't know each other give us the same information. We know that there's a group of guards up at Pelican Bay who call themselves White Lightning. This is a tight little community within a prison, walled off from the rest of us. The California prison system is the most insular and one of the most brutal in this land. (One thing that makes New York a little bit better, is that they have had community oversight institutionalized for many years.) There have been 33 gunshot deaths in California in the last 5 years.

Prison is a very destructive kind of environment for the individual. It is specifically designed to destroy the person's personality, and debilitate him or her physically and psychologically. In general, prisoners are faced with horrible overcrowding, terrible unsanitary conditions, enforced idleness, and hopelessness. Now their ability to reach out to the community through media has been severely hampered by the media ban in California. Also, the family visitation program for prisoners with serious violations and those in high security housing has ended, thereby fracturing the family. Prison tends to create an institutionalized person, who has nothing to do, has no hope, and is wrenched away from family. About 90% return to society worse off than when they went in.

As a result, the criminal justice system is increasingly politicized, beginning with the determinate sentencing law and culminating in the three-strikes law. We are criminalizing previously non-criminal conduct. We have raised misdemeanors to felonies in order to put people back into prison. A thousand bills were passed by the California legislature from 1984 to 1992 that toughened sentencing laws in California.

Right now one of the biggest threats to our neighborhoods is the racially-based hysteria about gang involvement of kids that tends to label youngsters as gangsters while they're in their early teens, and insists on their gang affiliation while they're in juvenile facilities, which exacerbates the problem. If they go to the California Youth Authority, that hardens their gang affiliation in the context of a prison environment. Two-thirds of the inmates in California prisons are now affiliated with some kind of street or prison gang. These are young people who might never have been affiliated with any such organization, or would have been innocently so had they not been hooked up with the criminal justice system.

Since around 1975, when an inmate comes into the Department of Corrections, he is asked, "What gang do you belong to?" as though it is assumed that he is affiliated one way or another. The problem is particularly egregious for Hispanics, who are assumed to belong to either the Northern Hispanics or the Southern Hispanics. They are compelled, because of their origin, to ally themselves with a particular group of Hispanic inmates-channeled into an affiliation that becomes ultimately damning for them in the prison environment. It's incredibly difficult for an inmate to remain unaffiliated in some way or another.

It is in the interest of the California Department of Corrections and our law enforcement system generally, to promote the existence of gangs. It's money. Counties get enormous amounts of federal money if they can show that they have a gang problem in their neighborhood. So kids who happen to dress a particular way or look a particular way are labeled, and gang files are developed on when they are 13 years old because they happen to be Hispanic. It begins there. It begins on the streets of ordinary towns like Fresno, and it reaches a level of inescapability.

The higher the security of the institution, the more impacting is the psychological trauma of the institution. If you're at a Level 1 or a Level 2 prison, you may actually escape a lot of the brutality and psychological traumas. If you're in a Level 3 medium security prison, it can go either way. But if you're in a Level 4 or in a SHU, that's hard time; that's where a lot of the impact occurs. All you have to do is commit one or two serious rule violations to be moved to one of those SHUs. That's where minds fracture. Prisoners begin to have hyper-responsiveness to small amounts of stimuli; they have trouble understanding what's going on around them; they may "nut up" and begin to hear things and see things; they become suspicious, feel great rage inside with no place to carry that rage. They can self-mutilate, begin to do things that they would never have considered doing, and which none of their family members could have thought possible. Over and over again, families observing this tragedy call us, begging us to help their loved one inside: "I don't know him any more." "He's a different person." "She's totally changed." " I don't know what it's going to be like when she gets out."

We have a state-wide culture-a major industry in this state-that is largely dependent on the criminal justice system. There is a violence/money link within the Department of Corrections that is very much like national defense issues in the fifties and sixties. If you have enough fear, if you have sufficient objectification of an enemy, if you have a wide enough social divide between those who are on the inside and those who are on the outside, and if you have people who profit from it monetarily, politically and in other ways, then every effort will be made to exaggerate the danger and maximize the use of security to justify expenditures. That's what we have in the prison system in the state of California.

The construction of prisons has provided an increasing ability to physically control the prisoners. What we see in the Security Housing Units or the 180 so-called maximum security prisons is that the towers have an easy view of the entire yard and the whole prison, so they don't have to engage in social contact any more. At Alcatraz the guards walked among the prisoners and had to negotiate that common space, but in many prisons today there is very little common space. This is the great marvel of electronic doors and video camera visualizations, and new constructions that are such money makers for major firms building these kinds of prisons. In California Security Housing Units, an officer will never come in contact with an inmate whose feet are not shackled and whose hands are not handcuffed to chains around his/her waist.

The average educational level of a prisoner in California is 8th grade. In some prisons, particularly women's prisons, there's an opportunity to get a high school diploma through a GED program. At some prisons, inmates have been able to access correspondence courses, but they tend to be the small number of inmates who are competent at gaining access to various resources on the outside. Nothing within the prison system allows for that except in Level 1 for the older inmates or those in for a very minor offense who will get out in a relatively short time. There is no system-wide educational or inmate training program. Yet there's a California law requiring prisoners to be able to read and write when they exit the prison system. No authorities have ever been prosecuted for not observing that law. And a few years ago, the whole idea of rehabilitation was completely removed from law and legal mandate in this state. There's no legal reason or need to rehabilitate prisoners in this state now.

The average time served in a California prison is 21.3 months. Recidivism is presently 80%. They are violating people on parole for trivial reasons. The underlying statistic is that 70% of the crimes that result in incarceration in the state of California are drug and alcohol related (including even what might be violent crime). The average person entering the California Department of Corrections during the last five years is there for petty drug use or petty drug sales. The recent massive explosion in the incarcerated populations from the "drug war" has been called the war against poor and black and brown communities.

What is going on in the communities to bring about the increase in incarceration? We have not reached an acknowledgment that when we make an arrest, it is not a victory. Incarcerating someone is a sign of social failure, not a sign of social success. Something needs to be done, or not done, long before somebody is arrested in order to reduce the level of arrests and incarceration. Ultimately arrests and incarceration are dangerous, not only to the people who happen to be the victims of arrest and incarceration, but to the rest of us as well.


Material for this article was excerpted and edited, with permission, from Jerry Brown's interview of Corey Weinstein and Catherine Campbell on the "We the People" radio program.

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