Point Reyes Light - August 24, 2000
Convicts sentenced to years of rape
California incarcerates more than twice as many people as any other state. It's not only the nation's leading jailer; many critics and scholars consider it the most disreputable one too. Corrections officers and inmates alike have found themselves victimized by a system intent on housing criminals in huge, military style facilities, where incidents of rape, assault and battery, intimidation, and abuse of the mentally ill have become accepted daily occurrences.
The California Department of Corrections operates 33 state prisons and a long list of smaller correctional facilities. It employs some 46,000 people to oversee more than 161,000 inmates who range from drug-addicted single mothers to hardened serial killers espousing racist doctrines.
With voter approval and adoption of the "three strikes" law - which mandates life sentences for all three-time felons - and an aggressive effort to imprison drug users and dealers, state prisons in the last 25 years have grown vastly overcrowded. This, during a time when the crime rate has dropped and billions of dollars have been spent building new facilities.
Inmate abuse Dr. Corey Weinstein, a director of California Prison Focus, a San Francisco-based prison watchdog organization, believes that the CDC has promoted an atmosphere of violence and mistreatment in state prisons far beyond what exists in other states.
"Our system here is an aberration. California has the most violent prison system in the country," Weinstein said. "The CDC has said that they have created policies designed to reduce violence and abuse, when in fact they have chosen policies which encourage violence. The management of the system has been a disaster for the last 25 years. The rate of violence is up, abuse of inmates is up, and prisoner on staff assaults are up."
Incidents of violence in state prisons - between inmates and guards and among the inmates themselves - have in fact been on the rise since 1990. A report released earlier this year by the CDC indicated that in 1999, a total of 6,796 incidents of assault and battery involving inmates, staff, and visitors were recorded - an average of 4.5 incidents per 100 inmates in a typical prison population. In 1990, the figure was reported to be 2,299 total assaults, or only 2.6 incidents per 100 people.
Most abuse not reported The same CDC report also documented an alarming 4,160 combined incidents of assault and battery on inmates by fellow prisoners and guards in 1999, and an additional 12 incidents of inmates being killed by corrections officers in the line of duty. Left out of the report - something noted by Prison Focus' Weinstein - are figures of incidents of abuse and assault of inmates specifically by prison guards.
Rose Braz, the program director of Critical Resistance, an Oakland-based nonprofit that promotes the use of social programs in lieu of large-scale incarceration, said most abuse of inmates by guards goes unreported, in part because the CDC is mainly a self-monitoring agency.
"There is certainly a lot of disincentive for prisoners to report abuse," she said. "The obvious reason is fear of retribution. But in addition, prisoners' reports are not always taken seriously by the authorities, and they also realize they're not going to be set free if they report an incident."
Lack of oversight Weinstein said he believes most violence in state prisons is not documented because of a lack of oversight, and the CDC ignores almost all incidents of rape and sexual abuse. "Almost all of it goes unreported," he said. "The penal managers say that it is consensual sex, and in the end people are forced into accepting rape."
While statistics on rape and sexual abuse of both men and women in prisons are infrequently compiled, what little data exists suggests that hundreds of thousands of inmates every year are sexually abused by corrections officers and other prisoners.
Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR), a prison watch organization in Fort Bragg founded by former prisoners, estimates that 80,000 unwanted sexual acts take place behind bars in the US every day, with a total of 364,000 prisoners raped every year. Of those victims, the organization estimates 196,000 are males in state prisons, 123,000 are males in county jails, 40,000 are boys in juvenile and adult facilities, and 5,000 are women in prisons.
Other statistics from SPR confirm that many victims, especially those in juvenile institutions, are in fact raped more than once a day before they are released. In addition, after studying results from a 1994 survey of male inmates in the Nebraska prison system, SPR revealed that prison staff were reported as perpetrators in 18 percent of sexual abuse incidents.
Marin County Jail Mike Ridgway, the administrative lieutenant for the Marin County Jail, told The Light the county's policy of placing only two inmates in cells that are divided into small manageable sections called "pods" has minimized violence at the modern jail that was built in 1994.
Ridgway explained that policies of avoiding overcrowding, rewarding good behavior, and providing inmates with educational and vocational programs have kept flareups at the jail down around one incident per month. "We have a strong commitment to the county parole program, and inmates modify their behavior accordingly," he said.
While the Department of Corrections documented incidents of assault and battery at every state prison and correctional facility last year (except at one low-security women's camp), two state prisons have become notorious for guards' outrageous behavior:
At Corcoran State Prison south of Fresno, eight correctional officers in 1994 allegedly staged "gladiator-style" fights between inmates in the prison yard strictly for their own amusement. One inmate, Preston Tate, was shot to death in April 1994 during one battle moments after a corrections officer allegedly yelled, "It's going to be duck-hunting season."
After the CDC found the allegations groundless, the FBI was called in to investigate the matter. The eight officers went on trial in 1998, including four who were facing possible life sentences for Tate's death. While surveillance video had recorded the brawl and an inmate testified that the fight between two black and two Latino prisoners had been staged, all eight guards were acquitted in June.
All told, guards at Corcoran - which crowds 6,286 inmates into a high-security prison that can hold just 2,916 - killed seven prisoners and wounded 43 others between January 1989 and mid-1994. While several officers at Corcoran have been found guilty of abusing inmates, no top administrators have been charged with wrongdoing.
At Pelican Bay State Prison in Del Norte County, one inmate was killed and 16 were shot in a February 23 incident involving about 200 of the 3,384 convicts crowded into a 2,280-capacity maximum-security prison. The riot broke out in the seldom-used prison yard, where some 28 black and three Latino prisoners were stabbed or wounded by other inmates. Authorities later recovered close to 90 inmate-manufactured weapons in the yard.
The prisoners were placed under lockdown immediately after the incident, and officials have since released inmates into the yard only in racially segregated groups for the legally-required ten hours per week. Two guards charged with using excessive force in the February incident were acquitted last week after the Del Norte district attorney concluded that the shots they fired to quell the violence were justified under the circumstances.
Pelican Bay has been long scrutinized for its brutal treatment of prisoners. In 1995 a federal judge ruled that the prison's isolation unit violated inmates' constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment. The same year a jury ordered the penitentiary to pay $250,000 to an inmate shot by guards and then thrown into a feces-littered cell with a dirty wound.
'Counseling sessions' Braz of Critical Resistance suggests that such extreme examples are only the tip of the iceberg for thousands of cases of abuse and misconduct throughout the system. "I think that if you look at how long it took for the Corcoran allegations to come to light indicates how much abuse goes neglected," she said, adding that abuse is ingrained in the everyday operations of the system itself.
"At Pelican Bay, what they call 'group psychiatric counseling sessions' take place in locked cages in the yard. These people are suffering in part from the problems associated with 24-seven confinement and only one hour a day of sunlight."
At Marin's own San Quentin State Prison, home of the state's death row and the system's oldest facility (1852), violence has also made headlines. In July, five inmates reserved in a yard for criminals with the worst disciplinary problems unraveled a chain-link fence and threatened guards manning a security gate before they were finally subdued.
San Quentin guard acquitted In April, a former San Quentin prison guard charged with assaulting an inmate was acquitted of two felonies after a jury deadlocked 9-3 in favor of not guilty.
Weinstein of Prison Focus said the failure of the CDC to hold corrections officers to the law, and the mostly unsuccessful prosecutions of the officers that are infrequently indicted, exemplify the CDC's policy of maintaining the "status quo." When inmate abuse goes unpunished, inmates become increasingly discouraged because they feel they "have no rights and will not be listened to," he explained.
One particularly misguided CDC policy, Weinstein said, is that of putting individual gang members in isolated cells and encouraging them to snitch on their colleagues. Instead of reducing violence, the practice eliminates solidarity among inmates and pits them against each other, escalating the overall level of hostility, he explained.
Too big and crowded In addition, Weinstein said he believes the colossal, multi-thousand bed prisons recently built have proved very difficult to manage, and clearly flout a guideline recommended by the American Correctional Association that prisons have no more than 500 beds.
"We have really seen nothing to indicate that the CDC is serious about addressing violence," he said. "When efforts are made to negotiate peace in the prisons, they have been routinely scuttled by department officials in Sacramento."
Margot Bach, CDC spokeswoman, told The Light the department takes very seriously any complaints by prisoners about assault. She said recent changes have been made to address the problem: Corrections officers are extensively trained in the laws pertaining to prisoner and riot management, and are required to adhere to an oath of service.
"They know the laws, and they have a defined code of conduct," she said. Since guards must deal with gang-related problems and large numbers of violent criminals, some do break the law and are fired or - in the worst instances - prosecuted in court, she noted.
More officer training Bach explained that the CDC has developed a special "Use of Force Panel" to look at incidents of violence, has its own law enforcement and investigative units, and in 1999 expanded officer training and made the use-of-force policies equally applicable to all institutions. She also explained that the state Inspector General's office has taken over some oversight duties from the CDC. "They are in there every day, and they investigate every incident," she said.
Bach said the CDC has also taken several steps to encourage the reporting of sexual abuse of female inmates by guards. A task force has been specifically charged with looking at the problem, and educates incoming inmates on the laws governing sexual relations in prisons, which plainly state that it is a felony for officers to engage in sexual relations with prisoners, she said.
After five employees of the California Institution for Women in Frontera resigned under scrutiny for sexual misconduct, the CDC began an aggressive investigation into the site's management and installed a toll-free hotline so female inmates could have direct access to the Office of Internal Affairs. "Sexual misconduct is simply not tolerated," Bach said.
Retarded and mentally ill Weinstein, however, asserts that by largely policing themselves, the CDC has not only failed to protect the general inmate population from abuse, it has especially failed to protect the mentally ill and retarded. "The most common abuse in prisons is the daily harassment and intimidation of the mentally ill," he said. "They are often abused by guards, and taunted and exploited by guards and inmates alike."
In summarizing the state of the California penal system, Weinstein said the egregious violence at Pelican Bay and Corcoran merely flag more pervasive problems. "We have thousands and thousands of prisoners who should be socializing, working jobs, going to school, and being rehabilitated," he said. "Instead, these people are spending months in isolation, and violence has been accepted as the common fare."