Posted: Mon 10 Aug 2009 14:45 Post subject: 250 inmates injured in riot at Calif. prison
Quote:
250 inmates injured in riot at Calif. prison
By GREG RISLING
The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES —More than three dozen inmates were released from hospitals Sunday after being involved in a racially motivated riot that badly damaged a Southern California prison and forced the lockdown of nine others.
The riot that erupted Saturday night sent 55 prisoners to the hospital and injured more than 250 inmates in all, officials said. Thirty-eight inmates were treated and were expected to return to the California Institution for Men in Chino, east of Los Angeles, by late Sunday, said Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman George Kostyrko.
Most of the injuries were considered minor to moderate, including stab wounds and slashes. One inmate suffered a serious head injury, Kostyrko said. However, none of the injuries were considered life-threatening.
No staff members were injured in the disturbance, the largest since December 2006.
As many as 80 officers responded to the riot, which involved some 1,300 inmates in seven dormitory-style barracks. A fire that ignited during the chaos caused significant damage to one of the buildings, prison spokesman Lt. Mark Hargrove said. Prison officials couldn't say how the fire started.
Authorities believe the riot was prompted by tensions between black and Hispanic prisoners. "It appears we had some southern Hispanic gang members targeting African Americans," Kostyrko said.
Officers used pepper spray, wielded batons and shot foam projectiles to remove inmates who had barricaded themselves inside the medium-security facility during the four-hour uprising. Police officers and firefighters also were called to help subdue the inmates. Eleven hours later, prison officials had cleared out the facility of disruptive inmates.
The outbreak occurred at a reception center that accepts new inmates and parole offenders being processed to be housed at the prison and sent to other facilities in the state, officials said.
Prison staff became aware of a plan to carry out a riot Thursday night, Hargrove told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. The prison was placed on a modified lockdown, which included feeding inmates in their cells and restricting movement around the property. That lockdown continued until Saturday when the riot began.
Still, the inmates were able to inflict serious damage to the facility and one another. Most of the barracks are currently uninhabitable, and inmates have been relocated to other parts of the prison.
Curt Hagman, a state assemblyman for the district that includes Chino, believes the riot was a "coordinated attack."
"They all knew what they were going to do in starting a big brawl," Hagman told the Press-Enterprise. He added that inmates used improvised weapons and broken glass to stab each other.
The prison has about 5,900 inmates; it was designed to hold 3,160.
All 10 prisons in Southern California were put on lockdown as a precaution and visitations have been suspended because of the melee, officials said.
August 09, 2009 11:41 PM EDT
Copyright 2009, The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
So much Black-Brown unity against racism, Da Man, Fight the Power, etc.
IMO, AAs need to IMMEDIATELY hold their elected [Democrat] officials accountable NOW for illegal immigration, Border Wall, etc. or KISS their racial 'special status' political dominance good-bye...
I feel like Spike Lee at the end of Skool Daze...WAKE UP!!!!
Calif. struggles to desegregate prison inmates
Gang-related rivalries delay court-mandated efforts to integrate races
Inmates Tim Heffernan, left, and Daniel Mabson, talk while sitting on their adjacent bunks at the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, Calif.
updated 6:57 a.m. ET, Wed., Aug 12, 2009
SACRAMENTO, California - The riot that ravaged a Southern California prison and injured 175 inmates began with a fight between black and Hispanic gang members, a stark reminder of the difficulty of race relations behind bars and the challenges of desegregating inmates.
In America's largest state prison system, black, Hispanic, Asian and white gangs generally don't mix. When they do, trouble typically follows.
"It isn't that everybody in the inmate population is against integration — they like their teeth," said David Miles, a 46-year-old black inmate at another prison, Sierra Conservation Center.
Mindful of that, California has for decades segregated inmates by race in their cells and sleeping areas. In general, whole cell blocks and open dormitories are mixed race.
But four years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court found the practice discriminatory, citing Brown v. Board of Education. The court said it reinforced a cycle of racial hatred and violence and ordered the state to desegregate its prisons.
At the California Institution for Men in Chino, segregation is still in place. The weekend riot started in a dormitory-style housing wing where many races are in a large room, but the sleeping arrangements are segregated. The exact cause of the riot remains under investigation.
All the state prisons were supposed to be integrated by the end of last year, but the process is far behind schedule.
Budget cuts
Last fall, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began desegregating two prisons in the Sierra foothills, southeast of the state capital. They are not yet fully integrated, and officials haven't started on any other prisons.
The delay is due in part to state budget cuts that have reduced prison staff, corrections department spokesman Seth Unger said. The system has 1,000 vacancies and is to be reduced by 5,000 positions over two years.
The beginning of a desegregation effort also has hit a number of obstacles, many of them coming from the inmates themselves.
Powerful race-based gangs oppose integration and have threatened inmates who participate. That leads wardens, guards and inmates to predict it will take years to fully integrate the state's 33 prisons, which hold 150,000 inmates.
"If I hung out with this black man on the street, that's cool. But in here, the rules are different," Tim Heffernan, a heavily tattooed 41-year-old white inmate at Sierra Conservation Center.
He and Daniel Mabson, a 25-year-old black inmate, sat across from each other on bunk beds as they spoke to a reporter about prison race relations and the halting desegregation efforts.
"How can we comply if it puts our lives in danger?" Mabson said.
California's inmates are racially diverse: 26 percent white, 29 percent black, 39 percent Hispanic and 6 percent of other races.
Under the new policy, inmates are assigned housing based on their compatibility with members of another race, their age, the type of crime they committed and their physical characteristics. They are given a "racial eligibility code" showing their ability to be housed with others.
The department's regulations permit segregating individual inmates if officials can show it is necessary for their safety. For example, members of the Aryan Brotherhood are not housed with members of the Black Guerrilla Family. The divisions even occur within races: Hispanic gang members from Northern California are kept apart from Hispanics from Southern California.
Prisoners also have a long-standing practice of self-segregating.
"If you're a white inmate, you're approached as soon as you get off the bus: Here's where you eat, here's where we stay," said Lt. Jimmy Hurtado, of the Sierra Conservation Center. "It's pretty much at all 33 prisons statewide."
But with integration at the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown and Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, inmates have been required to take the first available bed. The approach was patterned after one adopted in Texas 18 years ago.
The two prisons are being integrated first because they were expected to be among the easiest. Both house gang dropouts, homosexuals, child molesters, the elderly, disabled and mentally ill, who were thought to be more amenable because they need protection from other prisoners. Sierra Conservation Center also houses lower security prisoners who hope to win a coveted transfer to one of the state's 19 inmate firefighting camps that can earn them an early parole.
Even there, trouble arose soon after the policy was implemented.
At Sierra, hundreds of white and Hispanic inmates refused to work, eat or leave their cells for up to three days after integration began. Rules violations spiked fivefold.
"To me, this is like using us like lab rats, to see if it works," said Glenn Brooks, a 44-year-old black inmate from San Bernardino. "It ain't ever going to work. All it's going to do is get somebody hurt, get somebody killed."
Imaginary line
Attempts to integrate bunk beds inside open dorms, where low- and medium-security inmates sleep, have been as problematic as trying to integrate prison cells.
Blacks, whites and Hispanics were willing to sleep side by side in beds spaced an arm's length apart. But they would rather fight or risk longer sentences than accept an inmate of another race in a bed above or below them in the same bunk.
Inmates consider each tier of bunks like a cell without walls, and that's where they draw an imaginary line.
Inmates who refuse to integrate can lose television, commissary and exercise yard privileges and have their sentences extended up to 90 days. Repeated violations can mean a transfer to a higher-security prison.
Resistance to integration is more about power than it is about race, said Rusty Otto, Sierra Conservation Center's mental health director. The race-based gangs control the flow of contraband and money, who rules each cell house and who gets a share of the profits from crime on the streets.
The number of prisoners, level of racial diversity and extensiveness of gang networks make California's prison system particularly prone to violence, meaning it's a good idea for corrections officials to approach desegregation slowly, said University of North Texas professor Chad R. Trulson, who is advising California on its integration policy.
"Prisoners are known to blow the place up over little things," he said. "And race in prison is not a little thing."
Calif. struggles to desegregate prison inmates
Gang-related rivalries delay court-mandated efforts to integrate races
Yes race riots take place in California prisons but somehow if we mix inmates of different races in the same cells thing will work out.......after a few inmates are killed or stabbed by their cell mates.
I wonder if this was done to postpone the intergration plan.
Intergrating inmates of different races and ethnicities in the same cell is one of the stupidist and dangerous ideas ever devised yet.
Quote:
Inmates who refuse to integrate can lose television, commissary and exercise yard privileges and have their sentences extended up to 90 days. Repeated violations can mean a transfer to a higher-security prison.
Using coercion to get these inmates to do something that will get them hurt or killed is the height of folly.
Quote:
The department's regulations permit segregating individual inmates if officials can show it is necessary for their safety. For example, members of the Aryan Brotherhood are not housed with members of the Black Guerrilla Family. The divisions even occur within races: Hispanic gang members from Northern California are kept apart from Hispanics from Southern California.
From what I've read and seen on countless episodes of MSNBC's "Lockup" Northern Hispanics can get along with black inmates but not white, while Southern Hispanics can get along with whites but not blacks.
Also, there are all sorts of rules and regulations governing how the races interact, which are established and enforced by the prison gangs.
Here's an article by a former prison inmate from California:
Why Prisons Can't Integrate
By Joshua Englehart, Joshua Englehart lives and works in Northern California.
March 11, 2005
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that California's policy of segregating incoming inmates by race should be scrutinized closely because otherwise it could "undermine our unceasing efforts to eradicate racial prejudice from our criminal justice system."
But I'm a white man who served 37 months at San Quentin (for the manufacture of methamphetamine) and eight months more (on a parole violation) at the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, and I think that the court is well intentioned but misguided.
California prisons separate blacks, whites, Latinos and "others" because the truth is that mixing races and ethnic groups in cells would be extremely dangerous for inmates.
I don't say this because I'm a racist; I honestly believe that I'm one of the least prejudiced people I know. But prison is an undeniably racist place, and court rulings aren't going to stop it. Inmates who value their own safety must quickly learn to put political correctness aside and to follow certain clearly defined, if unwritten, rules for survival.
Rule No. 1: The various races and ethnic groups stick together.
Inmates face a huge amount of racial tension every day in prison. Living in such close proximity to others of different backgrounds and cultures -- and the fact that these people, whatever their race or ethnicity, are likely to be from the least educated and most violent segment of society -- makes minor differences that might normally be overlooked larger and more significant.
If a black inmate attacks a white inmate in prison, it is considered the responsibility of other white inmates to respond. This provides some measure of protection for those inmates who are not members of any gang but who do not wish to become prey for those who are. You and I may not like it, but that's how it is.
The court ruling will mainly affect prisoners in "reception centers" who are in a "sorting" or processing period before being sent to the prison where they will serve out the majority of their sentences. This includes returning parole violators as well as those going to prison for the first time. Once they leave a reception center, most of them will go to prisons with dormitory-style housing because the costs of housing inmates in cells is much higher than keeping them in dorms. Cells are reserved for the most violent inmates, inmates who have especially long sentences ahead of them and those who are considered escape risks. But until they're sorted out, all inmates live in cells -- cell living is every prisoner's introduction to prison life.
New inmates -- known as fish -- are terrified; they don't know how they are supposed to act. They have no friends, they don't know the rules and they have no one to stand up for them if they break the rules through ignorance. Typically, the person who helps a fish learn the unwritten rules that he must follow if he is not to be ostracized (or worse) is his cellmate.
The fish will follow his "cellie" to chow and sit with him rather than confront a dining area filled with cliques, all potentially unfriendly, where any move could break some taboo or cause offense, like a nightmare version of a high school cafeteria. Because so many of the taboos involve race, only a person of the same race can be an effective guide.
If the authorities break up this system and mix races during processing, it will leave newcomers with no protection. The only other option would be to join a gang, which provides inmates with protection from other inmates in exchange for obedience.
The court seems to think that it can change the way race and ethnicity color everything in prison. But it is clear at every moment that violence between the races could break out at any time in prison. While I was in a cell at San Quentin, one table in the prison yard was used by whites; the blacks had theirs over by the basketball courts. A couple of black inmates decided they could sit wherever they wanted and headed for the white table.
There may have been other black inmates who thought that what these "youngsters" had done was stupid, but they were obliged to back them up unless a representative from the white side met with a black "rep" and tried to get it resolved. But before any discussion could be had, skinhead whites demanded that the blacks leave. When they refused, a fight broke out.
After the fight, the yard was cleared and the inmates were returned to their cells. The whites concluded it was all caused by the blacks, and the blacks blamed prejudiced skinheads for ignoring the proper channels for "justice." Tension climbed, and the next day a full-scale riot broke out.
Staying neutral is not allowed in such circumstances.
When such a thing happens, the prison is "locked down," and activities and movement are restricted until the threat of violence has subsided. If the races were mixed in the cells, the tension and fighting would be carried right back there with them.
And remember, integration could be applied not only to those who most need to make same-race alliances and learn the ropes but also to high-security inmates, the other group living in cells rather than dorms. Those are the prisoners most likely to cause trouble of all kinds, including across racial lines.
In my experience, the current system of segregating inmates in cells is looked on by no one -- of any race -- as oppressive or as a way of promoting racism. It is done for their own safety, and they know it.
This is not about prejudice; it is not about equality. It is about the ability of inmates to survive in bad circumstances. This ruling will strike dread in the hearts of all California inmates when they read about it.
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