Many Don’t Believe Sentence : Life Without Parole: Hope Springs Eternal

There’s a question on the orientation form for newcomers to California’s prisons that no longer always applies. The question is: What do you plan to do when you get out?

It doesn’t apply because, about 10 years ago, California and many other states began telling certain criminals to abandon hope--sentencing them to terms of life in prison without possibility of parole.

While such terms may protect society, they also may threaten those who manage prisons. “One would predict more riots and burning and hostage-taking,” said David Lester, a New Jersey psychologist known for his studies of prison violence, because lifers-without-parole “have nothing to look forward to. . . . Starting a riot and setting fire to a couple of buildings may be the high point of their lives.”

Hope Not Abandoned

Surprisingly, however, the threat has not materialized, according to authorities in California and elsewhere--at least not yet. The reason appears to be that most lifers-without-parole have not abandoned hope. They walk a line between wishful thinking and despair, not believing that life without parole really means what it says.

“As long as I’m breathing, I got hope, you know,” said Marvin Toolate, 36, who murdered a Sonoma County dry cleaner weeks after California passed its life-without-parole law. “Might have an earthquake. Something like that. You never know.”

Fueling others’ hopes is a skepticism that society will have the moral and financial resolve to keep large numbers of people in prison forever.

Toolate’s 38-year-old crime partner, Donald Fraser, indicated that he keeps a spotless prison disciplinary record in the expectation that it will help him when the law changes. “It has to change,” he said. “About every 10 to 15 years, they change back. They go conservative. Then they go liberal.”

Guards Share View

Doubts about society’s resolve extend to guards. Corrections Lt. David Langerman, the spokesman for San Quentin Prison, said he views life without parole as an anti-crime “placebo for the taxpayers.”

“Wherever there’s life,” he asserted, “there’s the possibility of parole.”

One reason for the skepticism is the knowledge that actually keeping large numbers of inmates locked up forever would be very expensive. It would mean building more prisons because of overcrowding and, eventually, providing more nursing home and convalescent care. As things stand now, few people grow old in American prisons. Most inmates are in their 20s and 30s.

Nonetheless, terms of life without parole are spreading as part of a trend toward harsher punishments that, in less than a decade, has seen average prison terms nationally rise from 22 months to three years.

There are now 619 lifers-without-parole in California, making up about 1% of the state’s prison population, according to the state Department of Corrections, and about 5,500 in the country, according to a 1985 survey of the 27 states that then had the penalty, making up a little more than 3% of the prison populations of those states. Only a handful of states employed the penalty before the late 1970s. At least two have embraced it since the 1985 survey.

Very little data has been collected on the behavior of lifers-without-parole, but what there is suggests that they are harder to control than other long-term inmates.

Harold Williamson, director of the criminal justice program at Northeast Louisiana University, did the only published study on the subject, concerning Louisiana, which passed its life-without-parole law in 1977--a year before California. He found that true lifers had twice as many disciplinary infractions as lifers who had a chance at parole, and nearly as many infractions as short-termers.

Williamson said he took this as an ominous sign because short-termers are notorious troublemakers. They are known as “tourists” in prison because, as one student of prison life put it, “they act in uncivil, rude ways and then leave.”

“Regular” lifers, on the other hand, tend to be regarded as a prison’s solid citizens. “They recognize that they’re going to be here for a while and they want to live in a fairly comfortable atmosphere,” said Wayne Estelle, who oversees 1,100 of them as warden of the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo.

Sees Future Problems

Williamson’s conclusion: “I tend to think we’re creating ourselves a problem down the line.”

But how seriously his findings should be taken is not clear.

Authorities at Folsom Prison, which houses most of California’s true lifers, at first agreed to compare their disciplinary infractions with those of regular lifers and short-termers, but then balked without saying why. However, Derek Porter, the assistant to the warden, said his impression is that lifers-without-parole do not stand out as disciplinary problems.

Most authorities surveyed for this article contended that it was too soon to tell how troublesome lifers-without-the-possibility-of-parole will be.

“The people in on these sentences have only been in for five or 10 years,” said Ernest Cowles, director of classification and treatment for the Missouri Department of Corrections. “So up to this point, they’re still a (relatively) short-term population.”

Cowles, who is heading a federally sponsored study on management of long-term prisoners, said the full effect of the sentence will not be clear for 15 or 20 years, “when normally they would have been getting out.”

Prisoners typically work on appeals for five or 10 years, experts said, holding out hope that their convictions will be overturned.

But gradually, Cowles predicted, appeals will be denied. “Then we’re going to see a question of: What is there to lose?”

In California and most other states, there will be some hope for executive clemency even then. Those sentenced to life without parole in California before 1982 automatically have their terms reviewed by the state Board of Prison Terms, which can recommend clemency to the governor for “good . . . cause” after 12 years; those sentenced after 1982 must wait 30 years. No such reviews have yet been held.

Maintaining Hope

“There’s always a hope in the back of their minds,” said Robert Buchanan, former warden of Illinois’ maximum security Joliet State Prison, where men such as mass murderer Richard Speck were serving terms so long that they amounted to life without parole. “Most . . . are walking a very fine line between adjusting to confinement and having too much hope.”

Regular lifers face an easier adjustment. In California, they can settle down knowing they are eligible for parole after serving two-thirds of their minimum sentence. For example, an inmate convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life is eligible for parole after 16 years.

Shorter-termers typically know precisely when they will get out. In overcrowded California prisons, they are told that they will do half the time that the judge prescribes. They will be given two days of credit for every one day served if they work at a prison job and, according to some corrections employees, even if they don’t.

This can make them terrors.

“Some of them only got five or 10 years,” Fraser complained. “And they’re getting cut in half no matter what they do. . . . So they come in here and they interrupt the program for the majority of lifers. . . . They have no respect for another person. None.”

Those sentenced to life without parole in most states, including California, are mainly killers who have been found guilty of first-degree murder with one or more “special circumstances.” These circumstances include lying in wait, killing more than one person and killing someone during the commission of a felony.

Fraser and Toolate were convicted of murdering a Santa Rosa dry cleaner while burglarizing his house. Fraser did not want to talk in detail about the crime, but Toolate was game.

Everything about Toolate was as sharp as an exclamation point: his chin, his anger, his intellect; the matter-of-fact way he punched out words to explain why he killed.

“I’m not a killer. By nature,” he said. “OK?

“I’m more known to be a fighter. I like to fight.”

Proprietor Shot

But, he said, when he and Fraser broke into the house, the dry cleaner pulled a gun, and Fraser shot him.

“Once I seen him shot, you know, I’m thinking long run,” Toolate said. “I can’t let this guy live and testify against me in court and get me sent to jail. So I killed him.”

The same circumstances that can bring life without parole can bring the death penalty if a prosecutor seeks it and a judge and jury agree. Although no one has been executed in California since 1967, 231 men are now awaiting the gas chamber at San Quentin’s Death Row.

Sonoma County Dist. Atty. Gene Tunney sought the death penalty for Toolate and Fraser, but a jury decided life without parole was more appropriate.

The district attorney said in a recent interview that he is not sure the jury was merciful. “Myself,” he said, “I would find doing life without possibility of parole far less appealing than going to the gas chamber.”

But Fraser and Toolate, who were interviewed separately at Folsom Prison, scoffed at that.

“He’s a politician,” said Fraser of the district attorney, not bothering to conceal his disdain. “I’m a survivor.”

Fraser survives in a world that consists of a concrete-walled prison yard and a cellblock--a five-story structure of concrete and steel that houses about 500 men, two to a cell, in cells too small to meet American Correctional Assn. standards.

Each man has his own bunk--a steel slab topped by a thin mattress--and his own shelf at the back of the cell, over a shared small toilet bowl and sink. There is not enough room for a fat man to turn around without brushing the wall. But most cells sport two portable TVs.

Sweeping Duties

Fraser’s job is to sweep his tier. “That’s it,” he said.

He said he is very bored. But despite his good prison record, he cannot get a more meaningful job because his sentence makes him too much of an escape risk, authorities said. So he sweeps every hour or two during a six-hour shift.

His supervisors are guards with semiautomatic rifles slung over their shoulders who face the tiers on a concrete platform about 15 feet away. They stand behind a Cyclone fence topped with rings of concertina wire designed to discourage inmates from lunging at them from the tiers. The wire is white from decades of dust.

Occasionally, the guards shoot. Last year, they shot to death six of the 6,700 inmates at Folsom. Authorities said that, in each case, the inmate was stabbing another. Stabbings and other serious assaults are common. Last year, authorities recorded about 150.

Fraser said Folsom is a place where an inmate can get stabbed over very little--a pack of cigarettes, perhaps. Because of that, he said, he tries to mind his own business and structure those aspects of his life he can control.

“When I get up,” he said, sounding like a finicky old man, “I want to go out to the yard or I want to go to the hobby program. Then I want to come back. I want to be able to rest, watch my TV. Write my letters. You know? I go to sleep at a certain time, and I get up at a certain time.”

Fraser was quick to point out that he still has contact with the outside world. He has a teen-age daughter, he said. He has seen her twice in nine years.

Toolate, too, said he has a set routine. “The only time it ever changes is when somebody gets stabbed or somebody gets killed and we’re on lock-down,” he said. “Then we stay in the cell. Other than that . . . I go out to the yard. I play cards or I play dominoes. I go back in. I watch TV. And that’s it.”

Refusal to Work

Toolate refuses to work. His assignment is to help keep the prison yard tidy. But Toolate said that, because of his sentence, working will not get him any time off for good behavior, and he can make more money at other pursuits.

According to him and to the authorities, he makes his money by gambling and by selling drugs smuggled into the prison by visitors.

He is occasionally caught and punished by being sent to what the authorities call “security housing” and what the inmates call “the hole.” It means he is in a cell alone--allowed out only to exercise in handcuffs 10 hours a week.

Toolate said he doesn’t object to being punished.

“If they bust me, I’m busted. Fine,” he said. “I’m not going to squawk about it. But they got to catch me.”

Toolate, who looks 20 years older than he is, said he has had it easier than most in adjusting to institutional life because even before the murder most of his life was spent behind bars.

“I don’t see no dramatic changes in my life style,” he said at one point, looking ahead.

And at another: “I look at this place as my home.”

It takes lifers-without-parole a long time to display that kind of equanimity.

Langerman, the San Quentin spokesman, said they are usually discipline problems “early on in their sentences when they still haven’t internalized the fact that they’re going to be here, in essence, forever.”

“You take a 19- or 20-year-old,” Langerman said, “and tell him that most likely he is going to do twice as much time as he’s been on the face of the Earth. . . . That’s a lot for him to internalize. . . . That sentence has to . . . burn in.”

Prison Suicides

When it does, Langerman said, “lots of times they get despondent, and then they . . . completely withdraw from society by either going nuts or committing suicide.” (The suicide rate in prison is twice what it is outside.) “But a much greater proportion make the decision, ‘If this is where I’m going to be, I’d better get on with living.’ ”

They have to make that decision themselves. No special counseling is offered, California authorities said, although some lifers have organized their own self-help groups.

Susan Cohen, director of the California Probation, Parole and Correctional Assn., an employee group, said she has been surprised how well lifers-without-parole have adjusted.

“You take some 20-year-old kid who’s just been sentenced to life without,” she said. “He comes through the door of the reception center and some dingbat says to him, ‘What do you plan to do when you get out?’ It’s a miracle he doesn’t (explode) right there.”