Recent Story on Overcrowding and Chino Prisons

NEW YORK TIMES STORY _

In a California Prison, Bunk Beds Replace Pickup Games
Ann Johansson for The New York Times

A gymnasium has been converted to house inmates at the California Institution for Men in Chino. Inmates on Tuesday watched soap operas on television.
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: May 24, 2011

CHINO, Calif. — The basketball hoops jimmied up to the ceiling prove that this dingy space was a gym once upon a time. But for years now, the windowless space has served as a de facto cell for dozens of prisoners at the California Institution for Men.

California’s Overcrowded Prisons
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The rows of bunk beds, just a few inches apart, covered almost every empty space on the floor Tuesday afternoon. The gap between most beds allowed only the thinnest of inmates to stand comfortably. A few prisoners wandered around, but most simply rested on their thin mattresses, reading or dozing. As a rule, they go out to the yard just two or three times a week.

Ominous messages stenciled on the walls signaled the tension: “Caution: No warning shots will be fired.” Two guards mind the 200 prisoners, while another, known as a gunner, watches from up high, ready to intervene at any moment.

It would be hard to call the cavernous cell anything but crowded. Still, there are fewer people in it than there were just a few months ago, when triple bunk beds lined the wall. Now, those have been converted to hold just two inmates.

“That helped,” said Michael Collins, a 49-year-old inmate who sits a few feet from a dank corner converted into a group of metal toilets and open shower stalls. “We have less people using the bathroom now. If you just mind your business and stay in your bed, it’s O.K.”

But according to a Supreme Court ruling issued Monday, California — which has the highest overcrowding rate of any prison system in the country — must eliminate rooms like this at its facilities across the state, shedding some 30,000 prisoners over the next two years.

The problem is not new. For decades, the prison population has steadily risen, largely because of tougher mandatory sentencing laws. The overcrowding has led to riots, suicides and killings of inmates and guards over the last several years.

Matthew Cate, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said conditions had actually improved since the filing of the lawsuit in 2006 that ended with Monday’s court decision. There are now roughly 143,000 inmates in the state’s prisons, down from 162,000 in 2006, in part because the state has sent some 10,000 inmates to out-of-state facilities.

While there were once nearly 20,000 inmates in spaces not meant for housing, commonly referred to as “bad beds,” that number has dropped to 6,600.

“It’s not perfect, but we haven’t been at those kinds of levels since the early 1990s,” Mr. Cate said. “The standard that I use personally is: are the prisons clean, are the staff positions filled and are prisoners complaining about care? I think that conditions are good on a day-to-day basis on the basics.”

But critics say that it is impossible for the state to deal with such a glutted system. The lack of space can make it impossible, for example, to move inmates from one prison to another for their own safety.

Mr. Cate said that the state was “the birthplace for every major prison gang in the country,” but that the overcrowding paralyzes wardens from switching prisoners to defuse racial and gang tensions.

“It’s an unacceptable working environment for everyone,” said Jeanne Woodford, a former director of the state prisons and a former warden at San Quentin prison. “Every little space is filled with inmates and they are housed where they shouldn’t be housed, and every bed is full. It leads to greater violence, more staff overtime and a total inability to deal with health care and mental illness issues.”

One major impact of the overcrowding, and a centerpiece of the Supreme Court’s ruling, is the lack of adequate health care for prisoners with mental illness or other chronic medical conditions.

In 2005, a federal official began overseeing California’s prison health care system after a judge ruled that the state was giving substandard medical care for prisoners. Now, Mr. Cate said, roughly 90 percent of all clinical positions are filled, although that rate varies among the prisons.

Donald Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office who argued against the state before the Supreme Court, said that medical care was still wanting.

“There are not enough beds for the mentally ill, you have prisons all over the state who are flunking by every measure in taking care of chronic conditions like H.I.V. and diabetes and high blood pressure,” Mr. Specter said, citing several recent reports by the state’s inspector general.

Mr. Cate concedes that the state is doing little to rehabilitate prisoners and has almost no space to run programs that would keep them from landing back here again.

“There’s far too much idleness, and that’s the thing that concerns me the most,” he said. “When you have lockdown as often as we have to, it’s not setting anyone up for anything good.”

Many of the prisoners here are serving sentences of less than a year for parole violations. According to California law, any parolee caught violating the terms of release could be sent back to state prison, creating a situation that many call the “revolving door.” Under a plan Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed, those inmates would instead be sent to county jails.

Robert Caldera, 52, has spent much of his life floating in and out of the prison system, most recently arriving at Chino after he did not report to his parole officer. Mr. Caldera was convicted of second-degree robbery several years ago, he said. Now, he spends his days reading the Bible with a group of inmates. He, too, said the conditions had improved, but like nearly everyone else here, he said the real problem is the bathroom.

“It’s nasty pretty much all the time,” he said. “There are holes in the walls that have feces in them. It’s damp constantly so you don’t ever feel clean.”

Even from several feet away, it is possible to smell the scent of an overused locker room. There is something that looks like mold on each of the walls and one guard said they are constantly battling broken pipes and leaks.

The conditions at other California prisons have led to outbreaks of viruses, causing officials to quarantine hundreds of prisoners at a time.

Correction officers in Chino say that while the crowding has eased, guarding as many as 70 prisoners at a time is unspeakably stressful. Several said they looked forward to the day when they would have a more manageable number of inmates. But it can be hard for them to muster sympathy for their charges.

“It’s worse than this in the Navy and you don’t hear those guys complaining,” said Robert Spejcher, an officer who oversees a room converted to hold 42 inmates. “We never really know what we’re dealing with and we never know how long they are going to stay.”