One-Way Trip in Chains : Chino Express: A Cold, Lonely Ride to Prison

The bus pulls out of downtown San Diego at 5:15 in the morning, and some of the passengers vow never to come back to America’s Finest City.

No loss, because most of these men would make your skin crawl. You don’t want to sit next to them, and they probably don’t want to sit next to each other, but they didn’t have a say in the matter.

This bus has bars on the windows. The men are in chains, and the driver and his two co-workers have guns. You’re just going along for the ride.

You’re sitting toward the front of the bus with a dope dealer and a child molester on your right, a check forger and a murderer on your left. They don’t have much to do with one another, except that they all are headed for the same place: state prison.

Sitting behind you are who knows what. They look at you as if you are the criminal because you’re a free man and they’re looking at some hard time behind bars. You want to study their faces but you feel self-conscious, so you steal glances over your shoulder by pretending you’re watching the scenery go by. You let your eyes drift over each of the men and hope no one is staring at you. Every once in a while, your eyes and a convict’s lock, and before you pull away, you wonder how he got himself into this position and whether he has any regret because push has come to shove and he’s being taken to prison.

Prison. Most of us have only been there on television. These men are going to live there.

They are passengers on the Sheriff Department’s Chino Run, an escort service for 100 or so felons who each week are taken to the California Institution for Men at Chino. They call the Chino facility a “reception center”--boy, what a misnomer--because that’s where convicted felons are evaluated to determine where--San Quentin, Soledad, Folsom or one of the other prisons--they should be separated from the rest of us.

Chino is also the place where prisoners who have not yet been sentenced are told to spend a few weeks so that they can be watched by corrections experts who will determining how well they would cope with prison life and then report their recommendations to the judge.

The prisoners are wearing street clothes--in most cases, the same clothes they were wearing weeks or months earlier when they were booked into jail for their crimes. It’s cold, but some guys are wearing shorts, T-shirts and sandals.

Check forger Abe, 34, actually a pleasant looking man, and Bulldog, 29, the murderer whose name is probably too generous for his appearance, are both looking at a few years behind bars. The dope dealer, Mark, 32, who has wild eyes and wild hair, and the child molester--a frail, tender-looking man in his early 40s whom we’ll call Joe because he didn’t want his name in the paper--are simply going up for evaluation.

You pull out your notebook and pen. Right away, a guy asks, “You a newsman?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure you are. I seen you on Channel 39.”

Hardly, but you don’t argue. What’s the point?

Deputy Gary Steadman is one of the three deputies on board, and he gives you a quick rundown on the bus, not that you asked: “It’s a ’77 with 300,000 miles on it. Last week we took two buses to Chino, and one of them broke down in Corona. The other bus went to Chino, dropped its load, and came back to Corona to pick up the rest.”

Imagine a broken-down bus filled with convicted felons on a Corona street corner. Steadman said local police were notified and came over to guard over the vehicle and its contents.

“On the way back to San Diego, the second bus broke down,” Steadman said, continuing the story. “Preventive maintenance is not in the dictionary for these buses.”

It’s 5:30 and the morning sky over Sorrento Valley is turning from pink to blue. Steadman smells cigarette smoke. Smoking is not allowed on the bus--not that these guys care--so Steadman turns on the air conditioner to circulate the air. Some men complain about the sudden cold, using the kind of language you’d expect. Steadman ignores them.

Most of the men have their eyes closed, as if they’re asleep.

“How ‘bout the radio, man?” demands one of the riders.

“Radio doesn’t work,” Steadman yells back.

“Where we stoppin’ for breakfast?” someone else yells out, and a couple of them laugh.

Bulldog says he’s from Louisiana. “But I came to San Diego to rob people. I love money, man. That’s the easy way--robbin.’ ” He said he killed for money, and his attitude said it was no big thing.

Someone yells out, “Hey, man, it’s gettin’ cold back here!”

“Don’t smoke, then,” Steadman says. He doesn’t care if it’s cold back there.

Joe complains that a public defender talked him into pleading guilty to his crime, but he won’t admit to what it was. (The deputies say later that he is a child molester.) Joe spent time at the County Jail in Vista and says he is looking forward to going to Chino.

“I’ve heard from many, many guys how good it is at Chino compared to Vista,” he said. “Vista’s like a prisoner-of-war camp. The inmates are like animals. They’re heathens. And they put 30 people in a cell meant for 15.

“Now, I’m not complaining about the judge, because he’s got a job to do. He didn’t bring me in to jail; I did. And the deputies too--they’re just doing their job. They didn’t put me in jail. But those inmates--they’re animalistic heathens. I just got no peace at all.”

Abe, who’s been at Vista and at Chino, advises: “Chino’s gravy. More freedom, better food, better medical care.”

Joe: “If the board of health came in to Vista, they’d close the place down. No beds to sleep on, no tables to eat on, they keep it at 60 degrees and all you’ve got is a T-shirt. In eight months at Vista, I only got three changes in blankets. The only ones who like it at Vista are the illegal Mexicans. They think it’s paradise because it’s room and board.”

Abe: “The guys going up to Chino for the first time are scared, because they don’t know what to expect. They’ll be scared for the first few days. And if they’re smart, they’ll just keep their eyes open and their mouth shut. If you’ve been to Chino before, you know it’s OK.”

The bus has gone north on Interstate 5, cut east on Highway 78 to swing by the Vista Jail for a few more men, and now is heading north on I-15. There’s Lawrence Welk Resort Village, through the bars. Then Pauma Valley. The bus passes the Border Patrol checkpoint at Temecula and the men just laugh. Rancho California. Lake Elsinore. Corona.

Deputy Steadman leans back. “Do you smell smoke? I think I smell smoke.” He turns the air conditioner higher and the men shout vulgarities.

Joe: “This was my first offense and it’ll be my last. I don’t want any more punishment like another eight months at Vista. I made a mistake and I won’t do it again. You know, a lot of guys just make one mistake. They’re not predisposed to be criminals. A lot of these guys aren’t as hardened as the crimes they’re convicted of.”

Mark, who was convicted of possessing and selling drugs, joins the conversation. “I wasn’t trying to stick a needle in 13-year-old kids,” he said. “I had full-grown adults trying to chase me down, to give me money for something I had. I liked that idea. It was their decision. They were adults. Now, a guy who gives drugs to little kids--that’s a cold-blooded son of a bitch. Some people think I’m an animal who bites the heads off little kids. I’m not.”

Mark talks about how he’ll get by in prison: “It’s like a playground game when you were a kid. If someone pushes you and you don’t push back, you’re weak, and that softness will be used against you. If you push back, that’s OK. Most of these people on the bus are civilized people and we could get along, but if you want to survive, you can’t be a civilized person. You’ve got to take advantage of what strengths you have.”

Joe complains about the cold bus and how it was cold in jail. “I understand why they want to keep it cold, because disease breeds in warm, but why couldn’t they give us a few more blankets?”

In the bus, it’s so cold you can see your breath.

The bus approaches the prison--actually, a collection of four men’s facilities with differing levels of security. As soon as the place comes into view, a dozen men light up cigarettes. It doesn’t matter now how cold it’ll get, because they’ll be getting off the bus in a few minutes.

It’s 7:50 in the morning when the bus pulls up to the perimeter gate to add still more men to the more than 5,000 who already live beneath Chino’s armed tower. This place is officially rated to handle only 2,634 prisoners.

The men get off the bus like a bunch of wary kids showing up for Army boot camp--except that these recruits have shackles on their arms and legs. “When a bus of prisoners comes from San Diego or Orange County or L.A., we can’t tell them, ‘Sorry, we’re full, come back tomorrow,’ ” a prison worker says.

The San Diego County deputies are done. They get back on the empty bus, turn off the air conditioner and head over to the Chino Airport for breakfast at Flo’s Cafe.

Steadman, the deputy, doesn’t show any concern for the prisoners and laughs sardonically at their stories of woe and poor treatment. “So, did you hear any compassion on their part for the guy they stabbed or the man they robbed or the woman they raped?

“You know Noah’s Ark and the animals two-by-two? We’re sort of like that, twice a week. These guys are chained in pairs. We call it Duffy’s Barge.”

Last year, more than 20,000 felons were processed through the California Institution for Men at Chino.

More than 2,500 of them made the Chino Run from San Diego.