Chino prison warden replies to allegations of inmate mistreatment

Photo by Michal Czerwonka/Getty Images

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) tours the California Institution for Men prison with Warden Aref Fakhoury (L) on August 19, 2009 in Chino, California. After touring the prison where a riot took place on August 8th, Schwarzenegger said that the prison system is collapsing and needs to be reformed.

Steven Cuevas | KPCC

Lt. Mark Hargrove slowly steers an SUV across Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men. Reception Center West features an open field lined with eight wooden barracks.

Those barracks were built about 50 years ago to house minimum security inmate workers. Four months after the August riot, civilian workers are still fixing broken windows and mending crumbled walls and cratered roofs.

• Video of Wardens response press conference

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Chino warden responds

Warden Fakhoury and California Governor Schwarzenegger discuss their immediate response to the August 2009 Chino Prison riots and the long-term issues that contributed to the disturbance 10 days after the violence erupted.

“We’re in a construction phase right now to rebuild these units,” says Hargrove, a spokesman for the Chino prison. “What we see right before us, you know, is they’ve removed all the siding. They’re going with a fire retardant siding made out of a composite that’s less flammable.”
On Aug. 8, fires were lit in two of the dorms. None of the buildings have ceiling sprinklers. Inmates kicked out barred windows and a security door to get out of one burning dorm. More than 200 inmates housed at Reception Center West were hurt.

Governor: Prisons ‘collapsing under own weight’

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger visited a week later.”California’s entire prison system is collapsing under its own weight,” he said. “Our prisons are overcrowded and endangering the staff and the inmates. California is quite literally losing control of our prisons.”
Those conditions may have spurred what happened in the days after the riot. Several former and current inmates say the prison kept dozens of men in outdoor enclosures all day and all night for several days as authorities tried to regain control of West yard.

Sterling Werner and his fiancée.

 

“You know at night, sleepin’ under the stars,” says Sterling Werner, who was one of those inmates. “Temperature drops, wind starts blowin’ and it’s cold. And you’re sleeping out on hard concrete. I’ve just been scorched by the sun and now I’m freezing myself off at night! Sleeping on hard concrete my lower back is hurtin’, my hips are hurtin’, my shoulders are hurtin’.”In October, a prison spokesman told KPCC that the prison did hold some inmates outside, but only on the night of the riot. But a guard said dozens of inmates stayed outdoors in small recreation cages for a couple of days and nights.

Held outside for more than 24 hours?

Acting Warden Aref Fakhoury admitted that inmates were held outside in an exercise recreation area, possibly for over 24 hours.“There’s a big possibility that, yes, that they were,” said Fakhoury during an interview in his office at CIM.
“Well, after the riot we did have inmates out in open area. It’s an exercise recreation area at the Center facility. So inmates were being held in that area until they were placed somewhere else.”
Many inmates held outside say they were stripped to their underwear and not given food for a day after the riot. Others claim they’re skin blistered in the August heat. A prison doctor confirmed that his staff treated several inmates for sunburn. But Warden Fakhoury says inmates were protected from the elements.
“I saw it with my own eyes that they had bedrolls and they had blankets,” Fakhoury said. “And they were clothed with the jumpsuits or boxers and T-shirts.”

High risks of outdoor detention

Holding prisoners outdoors for several days or even just a few hours poses risks. Last May, a female inmate at Perryville Prison in Arizona died after she was forced to spend four hours in an outdoor holding cell without shade. Arizona has stopped using most outdoor cells. Several states ban them outright.Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says keeping inmates outside for more than four hours at a time requires prior approval from department higher-ups.
“There should never have been an inmate living in that environment for longer than eight hours,” said Charles Carbone, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in prison law. He says what allegedly occurred in Chino after the riot amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
“They may be there in prison for a variety of reasons, some may be minor some may be serious,” Carbone said. “But surely none of them signed up to be placed in a cage for days on end. And the social cost of violating a prisoner’s constitutional rights is great.”

Lengthy outdoor detention is ‘emergency measure’

A California Institution for Men spokesman says inmates were held outdoors for long stretches as an emergency measure after rioters wiped out roughly one-quarter of the prison’s bunk space. But some inmates say not only does the practice of holding prisoners outdoors for extended periods continue, it started months before the riot.”When I first got there they put us out on the yard and we set out on the yard all day,” said Steven Morrissette.
The 24 year old ex-inmate from Hesperia was sent to CIM in March on a parole violation. He got out in August. Morrissette says prison staff had no bunk space for him and many other inmates when they arrived. He says the first week of his incarceration was spent alternating between indoor temporary holding cells and outdoor exercise cages. Neither is designed for long term inmate housing.
“They fed us out there. The only time we went indoors is if you had a medical slip to go see the doctor or nurse.”
And, says Morrissette, to sleep on the floor of indoor holding tanks with nine or ten other inmates.
Source: SCPR.org

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.
Listen to the letters:

• Chino prison letters video montage
  

• What do you know of prison life? Tell KPCC.

“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

 

Behind the Prison RIot in California

Pat Nolan
Vice President of Prison Fellowship
Posted: August 12, 2009 11:38 PM


The bloody riot at California's prison at Chino raged for 4 long hours, injuring 175 inmates, with 55 with such serious wounds that they were rushed to local hospitals. 16 inmates were still hospitalized on Monday. Inmates suffered vicious stab and head wounds as prisoners attacked each other with makeshift weapons including shards of glass and broken water pipes. Sixteen inmates remained hospitalized Monday.
This violence was predicted in 2007 by the former director of the Texas Prisons, Wayne Scott, based on his evaluation of the prison at Chino. "If the prisoners wanted to take over the dorm they could do so in a second and no one would know," Scott reported after he visited Cleveland Hall located in Chino's West Facility, where Saturday's riot occurred. The dorms were built in the 40's during World War II. They house 198 inmates, guarded by only two officers, one of them separated from the living area in an office. The bunks are so close together that there is no way that the officers can observe the entire dorm at once.
Inmates arrive at Chino to be assessed as to the danger they pose to staff. After they are classified, they are bused to one of the 33 prisons in California sprawling corrections system. Inside the prison at Chino the inmates range from low level offenders doing time for check kiting or technical parole violations to murderers and rapists returning to prison after multiple prior stays. Violent prisoners are mixed with vulnerable offenders in dorms where there are no cells and no place to hide. The prison, originally designed to hold 3,000 prisoners is now bulging at almost double that number - 5,900.
Imagine the conditions in which these prisoners are held. The prison is in a hot, desert with the Sun baking the compound and its inhabitants. Packed inside are twice as many inmates as it was designed for. A constant flow of bodies jostle through the narrow aisles between the sea of bunk beds. The inmates hassle over toilets and wash basins because there are only half as many as are needed. With the men stacked like cords of wood, the noise, heat and smell of sweat is overwhelming.
In this roiling cauldron of tension add the twin curses of loneliness and boredom: the inmates spend hour after hour liked rats in a cage with nothing productive to occupy their time. The budget cuts have eliminated the educational and addiction treatment programs that used to fill their hours and give them hope. Then add in the racial tensions that permeate our inner cities and our prisons and you have an extremely volatile mixture.
This was the atmosphere in Chino's Cleveland Dorm when it exploded in violence last weekend. When the officers finally took back control, many inmates had been permanently maimed.
Don't blame the corrections officers for these conditions. They are merely carrying out the policies adopted by the legislature and the governor. Unfortunately, meting out long sentences gets more adoring headlines than appropriating the money to pay for them. Corrections leaders have warned of the dangers of crowded prisons for years, but the legislature and the governor haven't responded with enough money to solve the problem.
Comments on several news sites suggest that we shouldn't care about these inmates. Some writers said that the guards should have held back and let the inmates fight until they had all killed each other. My hunch is these attitudes would be very different if one of their sons or brothers were housed in Chino.
When the government incarcerates an inmate it strips him of all control over his life, even the ability to defend himself. The inmate has no choice over where he sleeps, whom he lives next to, when he gets up, where he goes, where and what he eats. If the lights are out in the shower room - a very dangerous situation - he can't shower somewhere else and can't fix the light. He is prohibited from arming himself. He is vulnerable. When the government takes away all ability of an inmate to defend himself, it assumes responsibility to keep him safe. In many cases, the government has failed in this responsibility. It certainly failed at Chino last weekend.
And some in government don't seem to care. The local Assemblyman for the Chino area, Curt Hagman, commented, "By nature prisons are violent". With a shrug he accepted the stabbings and broken bones, the eyes gouged out and the heads cracked open that occurred over the weekend. Assemblyman Hagman's remark reminds me of a similar callous remark by a Massachusetts Corrections Official who, when asked about prison rape, said, "What can I say. It's prison."
Actually there are prisons where violence is not a problem and where beatings and rapes do not occur. Rather than shrugging off the violence, leaders like Assemblyman Hagman should be supporting corrections leaders who are trying to make prisons safe and restore the programs that allow prisoners to prepare to live contributing and law-abiding lives after they are released.
Prisons can be safe. In Louisiana, Angola State Prison is the largest maximum security prison in the US. Until a few years ago it was also America's most violent prison. The inmates slept with metal plates or phone books on their chests to prevent stabbings to their chests.
Under the leadership of Warden Burl Cain, all that has changed. Angola is now the safest prison in the US. Cain shows the men respect. Although 98% of the inmates will die in that prison, he promises them good food, good medicine, good fun and good praying. I have visited Angola and have seen the difference in the prisoners. They look you in the eye. Most inmates in maximum security avoid your eyes out of fear. At Angola, the inmates are taught how to prepare delicious food for their fellow prisoners by New Orleans chefs. There is a seminary in the prison, training men to become pastors for their fellow prisoners. The inmates have a great time at the annual rodeo, which draws thousands of local residents who get a chance to see that the inmates are human just like them.
As a member of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and also a member of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's prisons, I had the chance to learn from corrections professionals what steps can be taken to make prisons safe rather than descending into violence. Leadership is a critical element in establishing a safe environment for staff, inmates and volunteers. But good leaders have a harder time if the inmates are packed liked sardines in a can. Both commissions identified prison crowding as one of the key factors leading to physical assaults and rapes in prisons.
All of us should care what happens to inmates while they are incarcerated because 95% will serve their time and be released back to our communities. When they are released, what kind of neighbors will they be? The skills the inmates develop to survive violent prisons like Chino make them dangerous when they are released. You can't cage men like animals and then expect them to be model citizens when they return home.
The next time a politician promises to lengthen sentences, ask him if he is willing to support more money to house the increase in inmates caused by the longer sentences. Hold your representatives' feet to the fire. If they aren't willing to spend the dime, they should not be voting for more time.
Here are more resources on the impact of violence in our prisons and ways to stop it:
Prison Violence
Prison Rape
Warden Burl Cain

Bloody aftermath of prison riot

See Photos: Chino Valley Now blog
CHINO - Among the traces of mayhem from the weekend's violent prison riot, the blood on rags and mattresses at the California Institution for Men spoke volumes Tuesday.

The acrid stench of burned wood and scorched building materials still hung in the air at the prison on Tuesday when reporters were able to tour Reception Center West, where the racially divided riot on Saturday night injured 175 prisoners.

Six of the center's eight long wooden dorm buildings, that each house about 200 inmates and encircle a sprawling recreation yard, are uninhabitable after extensive damage caused by the melee.

"They literally tore the buildings apart," said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation.

The entire reception center, which houses about 1,300 incoming prisoners for an evaluation period of about 45 days, is empty, officials said.

Hundreds of items of prisoner belongings lay strewn throughout the dorm area, a scene reminiscent of tornado damage footage from the Midwest. A mattress lying among tossed belongings had words written in large letters: "CIM RCW (Reception Center West) 8-8-09 History!"

Swastikas were scrawled across one burned-out dorm, street gang graffiti tags lined the wall of another, and gaping holes could be seen in the roof and walls of the burned unit. Shoes and orange jumpsuits, even prisoner information cards with photos on them, lay everywhere.

Corrections officers Tuesday made a line side-by-side to comb through the recreation yard in search of additional weapons. Many makeshift weapons could be seen surrounding the damaged dorms.

The weapons were pieces broken from bed frames, glass, and anything potentially harmful that inmates could get their hands on, said Lt. Mark Hargrove, CIM spokesman. Local fire officials who responded to the incident said there were numerous stabbings, and multiple lacerations and bruised inmates.

Officials said about 10 inmates still were being treated at local hospitals for serious injuries.

The inmates at Reception Center West were housed in units that according to law are not racially segregated, though each double-bunk inside the dorms was assigned to two inmates by race. The dorms had been on lockdown since Thursday after prison officials got wind of possible impending violence at the prison.

The riot began at around 8:20 p.m. - a time when some inmates where being fed and the majority were locked away inside their dorms. Rioters who began fighting in their dorms eventually forced their way out of the locked buildings, prompting dorm guards to flee for safety and to regroup, said Hargrove.

The riot was quelled after four hours when corrections officers used tear gas and pepper spray to put down the uprising, Hargrove said. The reception center was finally secured at around 7 a.m. on Sunday. A Department of Corrections investigation into the causes of the riot is ongoing.

"Hopefully the (ringleaders) will be prosecuted and get additional time and be housed in a more appropriate security level," he said.

Thornton said about 1,155 inmates from Reception Center West were sent to other prisons including 735 sent to a separate housing unit at the nearby Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility.

Critics of CIM infrastructure, including Chino Valley city officials, have said they were not surprised by the riot considering the deteriorating and overcrowded conditions at CIM. Thornton said overcrowding did not lead to the riot, though she said it did hamper efforts to quell the incident.

"There were about 1,300 inmates in (RCW), and it's a lot easier to deal with half that amount," Thornton said. "Overcrowding didn't cause the incident but it's no secret that overcrowded inmates impacts every single thing we do."

The sides of the 1940s-era dorms are made of block and the roofs are made of wood. There is no sprinkler system inside the buildings. CIM holds 5,900 men but was designed for 3,160.