Prisons on the brink

CHINO, Calif.-It's nearing noon inside the central wing of the California Institution for Men, and it's not hard to find evidence of how this has become Exhibit A in California's prison crisis.A gymnasium is a sea of bunk beds. The 213 inmates inside are quarantined on this day, the result of worries about a swine flu outbreak. In a room like this, there is nowhere for a virus to go but directly to another inmate never more than a foot or two away. The basketball hoops and theater stage are reminders that this decaying part of the prison was never meant to house prisoners.

Likewise, a "day room" once envisioned as a place for inmates to play cards or watch TV is stacked with bunk beds, 54 beds for 54 prisoners who have little room to stand. In one corner, there is a shower and a toilet. Large fans stir the fetid air.

"This is self-explanatory," says an inmate perched on a top bunk. "We're overcrowded."

The state prison here is far from the only overcrowded, dangerous and crumbling prison in California. But by most accounts, it is as good a place as any to illustrate why three federal judges last month took the extraordinary step of ordering California to come up with a plan to shed more than 40,000 inmates from its overcrowded prison system.

Many prison officials and law-abiding citizens have little sympathy for the more than 150,000 inmates crammed into the state's prisons, saying they already get some of the best treatment in the nation. State officials plan to appeal the judges' order to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the reality for California's prison system is that a powerful federal court has concluded it is violating the prisoners' constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Beyond that, the state simply can no longer afford its overcrowding problem, struggling to find $1.2 billion to shave from its prison budget.

The situation ensures the spotlight will remain on prisons such as Chino's, which has operated at or near 200 percent of its intended capacity, brimming with nearly 6,000 inmates in a facility designed 70 years ago for half that.

Even the stretches of this prison actually designed to house inmates appear bleakly overtaxed. Inside Madrone Hall, two inmates jam into 6-by-11-foot cells meant for a single bed. A second bed chained to the wall during the day is dropped to the floor at night, flat and tin-looking to earn the name "cookie sheet bed."

The overcrowding also is causing predictable chaos. Indeed, just four days after that unprecedented federal court order, it was the Chino prison that erupted in violence. And while the Aug. 8 riot was linked to race-related tensions, it underscored how incendiary it can be to run a prison so overstuffed with convicted felons.

Jeanne Woodford, former director of California's prison system and San Quentin's former warden, says she always put Chino as "one or two" on her list of shabbiest prisons. And she considers the prison a prime example of why state leaders need to make major changes and address the court's recent orders, or risk years of continued problems in the prison system.

"I really thought I had a prison that had physical plant issues," Woodford said of her days at San Quentin. "But when I became director and went to Chino, I was shocked. How in modern-day corrections can anybody think this is OK? It's really not."

The state prison in Chino, known as CIM, is divided in four. One section is a minimum-security area, an oddly tranquil corner of the sprawling prison grounds worlds away from the elbow-to-elbow overcrowding elsewhere. Inmates mill around outside, go to work in prison jobs and sleep in dormitories.

The other three sections, however, are a Grand Central Station of inmates who flood through Chino on a regular basis, most of them shuffled back through the prison system for violating parole. They can be anyone from a low-level drug dealer to a killer, mixed together by the common ingredient that critics say causes state prisons to fill up too much and too easily: simply violating parole terms and winding up back in the state prison system.

Lt. Mark Hargrove, the spokesman at Chino, estimates 600 parole violators stream into the prison each week, and 400 parole violators are cycled out. The recent federal court order suggested the state could ease overcrowding in part by diverting many of these parole violators out of state prisons.

Sammy Featherstone and Ben Turner are repeat felons newly arrived to Chino. They press up against their cell in Madrone Hall, unable to avoid interrupting each other as they point out the pitfalls of two men their size-Turner is big enough to be an NFL linebacker-being housed in a cell meant for one.

Turner moves a few inches to the toilet, demonstrating how close he is to Featherstone's bed if he needs to go to the bathroom. "There's too many people in here, man," Featherstone says.

For the California prison system and political leaders, there are indeed too many people in prisons such as Chino, and the federal court order concluded overcrowding has reached its limit. Specifically, the three judges found that the prisons can't provide adequate medical and mental health care to inmates, violating their constitutional rights.

At prisons like Chino's, medical and mental health care is a volume business, with little space to handle the crush of inmates. Just inside Chino's central facility, where inmates first arrive at the prison, cages line one side of a corridor with inmates waiting inside for medical appointments. In the west section, where the riot occurred, inmates had to wait outside the clinic on wooden benches.

The San Jose Mercury News was not allowed to examine the medical clinics closely. But as part of the court case, experts who investigated the prison's medical care found the conditions appalling.