Chino prison inmates complain of being incarcerated outdoors

AP Photo/Reed Saxon

Lavatory and dormitory facilities lay in ruins during a tour of the California Institution for Men in Chino, Calif., Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009. Blood-soaked mattresses, singed bedding and abandoned backboards and medical supplies littered the campus of the Chino prison, a testament to the violence of the riot that shut down part of the institution and injured nearly 200 inmates.

 

Rumors of violence swirled for days before the riot exploded inside the Chino prison’s Reception Center West.

Guards had taken to serving meals to small groups of inmates, rather than entire dorms.
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“The tension, you can feel,” said former inmate Sterling Werner, who talked about the riot while he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes on the balcony of his Anaheim apartment recently. “And when officers are doing controlled feeding one building at a time two days prior to the riot, you know. Something is wrong.”

“You know, total chaos. We’re talking about window panes coming off and being thrown. Pieces of glass being used like Ninja stars. Kicking, fighting, punching. So much blood. So many people just trying to get out of the way.”
It took authorities until sunrise to contain the violence. More than 200 inmates at the California Institution for Men were injured. Two housing blocks were demolished, making the prison’s bad overcrowding problem even worse. Each dormitory was at double capacity. About 1,300 inmates were left without bunk space. Hundreds of prisoners were immediately moved to other institutions across the state.
In an interview in his office at the California Institution for Men, Acting Warden Aref Farkhoury defended his staff’s response to the riot.
“Both custodial and medically, response at CIM level was outstanding,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the training that we have provided our staff and all the tools we have available to them, this would have taken longer and we would have had a lot more seriously hurt people, and possibly death.”

‘They housed 10 of us per cage’

But dozens more inmates claim they were handcuffed with plastic zip-ties, separated by race and marched into outdoor recreation cages. The inmates say they remained in these cages all day and night, for up to four full days. Werner says most inmates were stripped to underwear, socks and shoes.”They housed 10 of us per cage,” he said. “We tried to cooperate. OK, we know it’s probably going to be maybe a few hours. Well, it extended to days and nights. Freezing cold. The only warmth I was able to get was from leaning my body against another inmate. They are only supposed to be used about two hours at most while the ad-seg people have rec time. They’re animal cages.”
Each enclosure is about 20-feet long and 10-feet wide, with a toilet and a sink. Werner says nobody fed the inmates for a day after the riot. They were given no soap, no blankets – and no complaint forms.

Guards non-commital about inmate treatment

When KPCC asked about the allegations over a month ago, a prison official denied them.But on a visit to the prison, two guards in the Chino prison’s administration segregation unit said that inmates were held outdoors for hours after the riot.
“As far as what I remember being in here, we would bring them out here during the day so we can do our daily process to try and get some of these guys out and try and give them medical,” said Lt. Eddie Hernandez. “And then at night, probably be around 9 at night when we would bring them inside.”
Lt. Gerard de los Santos said that initially, the inmates might have been held outside for up to two days in order to “let the dust settle and find out where we were gonna house inmates.”
“They were out here initially because we had no place else to put ‘em at,” De Los Santos said. “But we gave them blankets and everything else, jumpsuits so they can stay warm. They were not here with just boxers on and nothing else.”

Letters tell of post-riot treatment

After the riot, Chino’s daytime temperature soared into the upper 90s. The holding cages provided little shade. Some inmates were sunburned after hours in the outdoor rec cages.Werner says the skin on his back blistered and peeled. The prison’s chief physician confirmed his staff treated sunburned inmates after the riot.
“They stripped us down to our boxers and had us there for about three days,” said Charlie Padilla, reading a letter from a relative incarcerated at Chino at the time of the riot.
Sitting in her Los Angeles County home, Padilla reads the letter – one of dozens of letters sent to her by inmates at the Chino prison. Last month, she launched a Web site: www.intheriot.com. Padilla began corresponding with inmates after hearing her relative’s story.
“The sun burnt us during the day, at night it was real cold,” Padilla read. “I remember watching that movie ‘March of the Penguins.’ We all stood real close together like the penguins did. We looked dumb. But it worked.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do with us but I don’t see freedom getting any closer.”
Padilla said many prisoners talked about the riot as a “nightmare.”
That’s all anybody talked about,” she said. “He didn’t give me a lot of detail about blood and what he saw. I’ve gotten that from other people.
Five years ago, a group of Chino guards complained that some inmates were held in small holding tanks for days at a time. They called it “cruel and dangerous.”
Inmate complaints after the riot reflect a similar practice.
Source: SCPR.org

 

Report indicates rise in number of preventable California prison deaths since 2006

A federal receiver in charge of California’s prison health care released a report Monday on inmate mortality. It says the inmate death rate has declined for a second year in a row. But as KPCC’s Julie Small reports, the number of deaths prison doctors might have prevented is up.

The report says that between 2006 and 2008, the death rate among California inmates declined 13 percent. But during that same period, the number of deaths that might have been prevented had doctors diagnosed and treated inmates rose from 44 to 66.

Clark Kelso, the federal receiver who spent billions of state dollars purging bad doctors from prisons and replacing them with more and better qualified ones, says it's not the doctors' fault.
"It’s not that we’ve got bad clinicians," Kelso said. "It’s that they’re working in a third world environment."
Kelso says there’s only so much those clinicians can do to improve care when prisons are packed to near double capacity, and when the clerks who file paper medical records are backlogged by months.
Kelso said the problem isn't that he lacks enough prison doctors somewhere, it's systemic failure.
"I don’t have health records anywhere. I have overcrowding everywhere. I don’t have facilitates anywhere," Kelso said.
The receiver’s review determines inmate deaths were preventable by noting when prison medical staff failed to follow correct procedures. Federal receiver Clark Kelso says one reason the number of preventable deaths is up since 2006 is that his office is doing a better job of identifying gross lapses in prison medical care.
One example from the report tells of an inmate who was diagnosed with asthma at one prison, then was transferred to a different prison. But the medical record that noted the asthma diagnosis didn’t go with him. The inmate had to wait two weeks to see a doctor at the new prison. On the day of his appointment, prison guards found the inmate “unresponsive” in his cell.

Prison guards try to incite riots to keep their jobs

Nevada State Prison, is one of the nation’s oldest prisons, dating from 1862.


Editor’s note: The Bay View has been hearing from prisoners around the country that guards, fearing the loss of their jobs, are enraged by budget cuts and plans to release prisoners and close prisons. In some cases they are intensifying their harassment and torture of prisoners and in others they are trying to incite them to riot. That may be a factor in the Chino State Prison “race riot” and fire on Sunday, Aug. 9, just outside Los Angeles that injured more than 250 prisoners, destroyed one dorm and made most of the others uninhabitable. The Nevada prisons are generally considered some of the worst in the country. Here’s what’s happening there:

by Raymond Watison

Prisoners at Nevada State Prison are pleading for help. We truly believe that the administration is intentionally inflaming conflict. Not only are tensions between inmates rising, but those between correctional officers and inmates are at an all-time high.

Most importantly, we are starting to become angry because of an ugly rumor that is circulating in this institution. Word is we are deliberately being used for political gain due to the budget cuts.

We are starting to believe that we are, against our own will, being pushed to the edge so that the administration can make their case for more funds.

I have no choice but to reach out with this letter because other attempts to find assistance have been spoiled by what we call abuse of authority. The prison administration is abusing the disciplinary system that is designed for the safety and security of inmates’ rights.

The administration is trying to quiet our questions about their aggressive behavior. Not only the correctional officers but the administrators too are participants.

There is a grievance complaint system in place that we can no longer trust. This administration has given correctional officers the authority to either approve or deny inmate rights by doing away with the grievance procedure and to punish us for exercising our rights.

This is causing correctional officers to become very aggressive toward inmates. They refuse to obey their own rules and regulations without fear of consequences from any of the administrators.

We here at Nevada State Prison, like so many other prisoners around the globe, learn among ourselves that we are brothers in a never ending struggle. Seeking not to cause violence, we are trying hard to remain brothers because we recognize the administration’s motives in pushing us to cause destruction.

So I ask – no, I beg – you to intervene. You are our only hope. Is there any help for a widow’s son?
How you can help

Nevada State Prison is in Carson City, the state capital. Call, email, fax or write a letter today to Nevada Corrections Director Howard Skolnik, Nevada Department of Corrections, P.O. Box 7011, Carson City, NV 89702, phone (775) 887-3216, fax (775) 887-3253, email hskolnik@doc.nv.gov. He has responded before to pressure, and he will again.

Calls directly to the prison may also help. Call Warden Gregory Smith at (775) 882-8588.

Send our brother some love and light: Raymond Watison, 1031835, Nevada State Prison, P.O. Box 607, Carson City NV 89702.