County Jail: The Storm Inside : Santa Ana inmates live in a brutal world, where violence is often ignited by racism or loathing--or sometimes just saying the wrong thing to the wrong prisoner

In January, several inmates at Orange County Jail called The Times to report increased racial tension within the jail and at least two major fights in which some prisoners were hospitalized.

In an attempt to determine the accuracy of that information and to gauge the frequency of violent incidents within the jail, The Times requested, under the California Public Records Act, copies of all jail “incident reports” from January, 1987, through mid-January, 1988. By law, the sheriff’s deputies who run the jail are required to file an incident report after every known fight.

The request for the documents was limited to the main men’s jail in Santa Ana, which houses about 1,400 of the nearly 4,000 prisoners--many of whom are only awaiting trial--in the county jail system.

The Sheriff’s Department refused to comply with the request, saying that it would cover about 5,500 reports and that the process of deleting sensitive information from those reports would be too burdensome for it to undertake.

After a second, more limited request, however, the county counsel’s office agreed on behalf of the Sheriff’s Department to provide copies of all incident reports for the County Jail in Santa Ana during one month--January, 1988.

In providing those documents, the Sheriff’s Department deleted the names of the deputies and inmates involved in the incidents. The reports also do not include information on the extent of injuries to prisoners who were sent to outside hospitals to be checked for possible broken bones.

It was lunchtime at the Orange County Jail in Santa Ana, and the steel doors in Tank 24 had been electronically unbolted by a guard in a glass control booth.

Prisoners in orange overalls were filing out of the cells and lining up for the chow hall when one, bruised and his face bleeding, approached a deputy. The inmate was new at the jail and evidently had stepped over one of the many invisible boundaries that exist behind bars. He had said the wrong thing to the wrong person.

He had asked his cellmate if he could have a light for his cigarette, and “for no apparent reason, this (cellmate) began hitting him in the face with his fists and kicking him,” sheriff’s deputies wrote in their report.

The 32-year-old inmate, diagnosed by jail nurses as having a broken nose and cheekbone, was one of at least 40 prisoners who required medical attention for injuries suffered in fights at Orange County’s main men’s jail in January, according to Sheriff’s Department records. Those records, from which all names had been deleted, were obtained by The Times under the California Public Records Act.

Like a one-month diary of violence, the records reveal tales of inmate bravado and hair-trigger tension that erupted once over the cigarette request and again over a bottle of shampoo. They describe episodes of racism that led to major brawls in which inmates were stabbed with makeshift knives and sharpened toothbrushes--or beaten with broomsticks and thrown off the second-floor concrete walkway known as “the beach.”

Still, state officials and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department say this jail is not considered unusually violent. On the contrary, the Sheriff’s Department has received good marks from the state Board of Corrections for its work in controlling violence.

This week, the county is expected to release a comprehensive report on the condition of its jails, done at the suggestion of a federal judge who has monitored overcrowding problems for more than 10 years. Its author, Lawrence Grossman, said in an interview that he has found that the incidence of jail violence in Orange County “is most likely less than other places in the country.”

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the Orange County Jail in Santa Ana is an angry and brutal environment. In preparing his report, Grossman said, he studied more than 1,000 of the “incident reports” written by deputies after each known fight in the jail covering November, December and January. He also examined more than two dozen written complaints from inmates charging brutality by deputies against prisoners.

The records obtained by The Times were some of the same incident reports Grossman reviewed, but they were limited to the month of January. The violent picture those records paint begins before dawn on the second day of that month.

Jan. 2, 4:50 a.m.

It was just about wake-up time in Tank 2 when an inmate reported a “man down” in Cell 5.

A deputy went to the cell and found a prisoner “lying on the ground holding his head (and) bleeding from his left ear. There was a small pool of blood underneath him,” the report said.

“I helped (the inmate) stand up and walked him out of his tank. (He) was complaining of dizziness and was disoriented. I asked (him) what happened. He said, ‘I fell and hit my head on a bunk.’ ”

It is a common response to a deputy’s question about a fight. Even when the prisoners are bloody and still out of breath, they usually obey the prisoners’ code of not cooperating with the authorities.

The injured prisoner was taken to the UCI Medical Center to check for a possible skull fracture. The deputy returned to Cell 5 to interview the other prisoners and check each one for signs of a fight.

“I inspected everyone’s knuckles and saw that (one inmate’s) knuckles were bruised,” the deputy wrote. “(He) also had scratches on his face and a swollen lip. I asked if (he) had hit (the victim), and he said: ‘Yeah, I hit him a few times. He started punching me while I was sleeping in my bunk.’ ”

Jan. 6, 6:40 p.m.

A “prowler” is a deputy who roams the jail on patrol, looking for problems and responding to calls for help. Just after dinner, a prowler was outside Tank 10, a medium-security area with eight four-man cells. There was yelling, and it was coming from the day room, an area in which inmates watch a black-and-white television mounted on the wall or play games, such as dominoes, on stainless-steel tables.

The deputy walked along a catwalk above the day rooms to get a better look, according to his report, and heard, “ ‘Get them niggers’ . . . along with the yelling. And I could hear sounds of fighting.”

The deputy ran back to the guard station and called for help. “I could tell that it was a racial confrontation between black and Mexican inmates,” he wrote.

Several deputies responded from throughout the jail, and as they arrived at the day room, the door was electronically opened from the guard station. When the deputies got inside, the fighting stopped.

“Both the Mexican and black inmates were separated and in aggressive fighting stands.”

The deputies moved the black inmates into the shower area and closed a door separating them from the day room. At the same time, some deputies searched the tank for weapons and others escorted the injured prisoners to the jail’s medical ward.

At least one inmate was taken by ambulance to UCI Medical Center. Deputies said he emerged from the fight with a head injury and appeared “hurt, dizzy and weak.” He was given oxygen and intravenous fluids by the jail’s medical staff.

“He was not able to say much (except) he was hit with a broom handle,” the report said.

At least four other inmates were treated for such minor injuries as cuts and bruises.

In subsequent interviews, most inmates again declined to cooperate with the deputies. But one prisoner said, “It all started with (one inmate) and some Mexican guy over shampoo.”

Jan. 7, 12:30 a.m.

The lights had been out in Tank 12 for about three hours when deputies heard the yelling. Tank 12 is a dormitory-style section of the jail in which 68 prisoners sleep in the same room on stainless-steel bunks that are bolted to the concrete floor.

The lights were still out when the sheriff’s deputy on guard opened the door to the tank. A prisoner ran past him and out the door, chased by eight to 10 other inmates.

The gang caught up with the fleeing prisoner on an upstairs concrete walkway and tried to throw him over a second-floor railing. But the prisoner broke free. Deputies responding to the fight turned the lights on, and the attackers quickly ran back to their beds.

The victim was treated for a swollen nose and cuts on his face and body. He told deputies later: “They want me out of there, but I’m not going to tell you who. If I do, they will make me (a snitch), and I don’t want that.”

Jan. 7, 6:45 a.m.

Jail inmates are awakened as early as 4:45 a.m. to have time for cleaning and breakfast before some have to be ready for the bus to court by about 7 a.m. This morning, yelling started in a tank that contained five eight-man cells. The cells are on an upper and lower tier.

The deputy on guard said he saw two inmates running down the steel stairs from the upper cells to the floor level “flushed in the face and (with) scratch marks on their chest, back, arms, hands and face.”

A third inmate stepped out of Cell 2 with a bloody face.

Two of the inmates had minor injuries. Jail nurses said the third had a severe cut over his eye, a bloody nose and bruises. He was sent to the hospital for X-rays.

Deputies asked how the fight started. “I don’t know anything about anything,” one inmate responded. “I asked him how he got blood all over himself,” the deputy wrote. “He said, ‘I got no idea.’ ”

Jan. 9, 11:45 a.m.

The concrete walkways outside the cells on both the upper and lower tiers are called “the beach.” It is jail slang that has become so common it is used in the deputies’ official reports. In Los Angeles, the same areas are called “the freeway.”

This Saturday morning deputies looked out at the Tank 24 beach and saw a 25-year-old prisoner on the ground, his face bleeding, and “doubled over in pain.”

While they watched, another inmate walked over and kicked the victim in the chest and “then walked quickly down the tier to his cell. . . . He was smiling,” the deputy wrote.

The attacker “sat on his bunk and lit a cigarette. He dragged heavily on the cigarette and kept looking out of his cell in a nervous manner.”

The victim was taken to UCI Medical Center for X-rays and treatment for cuts on his face and chest.

According to the report, he told deputies: “I was coming out of my cell, and I looked over my shoulder and I saw a white guy with long, dirty-blond hair and a mustache closing in on me. Then the guy jumped on me and hit me twice in the face, knocking me down. While I was down, he kicked me in the back, ribs, chest and shoulder. After that, I started to pass out.”

Jan. 10, 10:30 p.m.

The report attributed this fight to “anger, racial prejudice.” It was the first of two major brawls in Tank 10 between black and Latino inmates. Tank 10 has six four-man cells. This day, two of the cells contained black inmates and four held Latino prisoners.

The deputies opened the cell doors that night to dispense the evening medication. As the inmates told it, there was a lot of name-calling back and forth before the doors were opened. Minutes after the doors were opened, the fighting broke out.

An inmate was punched and then thrown over the railing from the upper beach to the concrete floor on the lower level. Deputies watched from the guard station as an inmate leaped over the same railing to the floor, where a broomstick was tossed to him.

The cleaning closet had been raided, and several inmates were using broomsticks as weapons.

Three inmates were sent to the hospital. One had a head injury; another had a possible dislocated jaw. All three said they were beaten with broomsticks and fists.

Jan 11, 12:45 p.m.

Deputies had moved eight more black inmates into Tank 10 “to balance blacks to Mexicans.” But the tension from the fighting of the previous night was still high.

In a telephone call to The Times, inmate Hector Reyes said, “You could feel the tension right when they opened the door. Usually, everybody is relaxed. But one minute we were sitting there and then it just went off.”

Another inmate, who was taken to UCI Medical Center after the fight, said in a telephone interview the next day that the battle began when he was braiding the hair of another inmate in the day room.

“I saw a Hispanic walk around me, and he came around and hit me (in the face) with a sock full of dominoes,” Max Swain said. Swain said two inmates jumped up to protect him and both were stabbed, one in the side and the other in the arm.

The guard in Tank 10 reported a “Code Alpha,” the signal that a riot is in progress. At least 24 deputies from throughout the jail responded, including some who were dressing to go home.

When the deputies entered the tank, some of the inmates were already on the floor, face down, hands behind their backs. The deputies ordered the others on the floor and put handcuffs on all of them. The two sides were separated, one group taken to the chow hall for questioning and the other to a holding area.

Two inmates had stab wounds. Two prisoners were taken to an outside hospital. And at least 10 prisoners were treated for cuts and bruises.

In searching for weapons later, deputies said they recovered two “razor-type” knives and two toothbrushes whose handles had been sharpened.

Jan. 15, 4:30 p.m.

While the rest of the tank was lining up for dinner, deputies noticed that a deaf inmate was still in his bunk. The deputies entered the tank to gesture the prisoner to the chow hall, but he became agitated, the report said.

“I have communicated with him in the past via written notes,” the deputy wrote. “(I) began to write a note to him about his behavior. It was then (that he) came towards me, yelling with his hands waving wildly.”

The deputy tried to put the inmate in a wristlock, and, with the help of three other deputies, “took him to the ground.” The inmate was treated for a bump on his head and scratches on his wrist. Jail doctors put him in a padded cell.

Jan. 30, 12:57 a.m.

The grapevine in Tank 5 was working early that Saturday morning, an inmate said later. A 24-year-old prisoner, new to the tank, was going to be jumped about noon that day, and the word was going out for others to join in the attack.

When the time came, about seven prisoners surrounded the victim in a wide circle outside his cell. There was an argument, and then one stepped forward and punched him in the face. Immediately, the others joined in, punching and kicking.

A sheriff’s deputy watching from a glass control room called for backup officers before entering the tank. Over a loudspeaker, he ordered the inmates to stop the fight.

Deputies said that as the attackers dispersed and the victim staggered away from the scene, an inmate stepped up and punched him in the face one last time.

The inmate was treated at the jail’s medical ward for bruises on his back, cuts on his face and swelling on his head. He told the deputies he was attacked because he had lost his booking slip, which listed the offense for which he had been arrested.

Without the slip, the other prisoners assumed he was hiding the fact that he was a child molester.

Actually, he was in jail on suspicion of assaulting his wife.

JAIL VIOLENCE

At least 40 inmates required medical attention after 26 fights in the County Jail in Santa Ana in January. During that month:

Twenty-six inmates were treated at the jail medical ward.

Sixteen were treated at UCI Medical Center

Weapons were used in at least five of the incidents.

All but three of the fights occurred during the day.

About one-fourth were one-on-one encounters between inmates.

Sheriff’s deputies were involved in six of the fights.