Advertisement

Christmas in Prison : The Inmate Choir Will Sing Carols, But They Won’t Have a Tree at Pitchess Honor Rancho

Share
TIMES STAFF WRITER

Last Christmas, Johnny Austin was the choir director at Love of God Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. He spent Christmas Eve leading his splendidly robed choir in holiday carols.

This Christmas he’ll again be leading a choir, except the church will be a concrete barracks, his singers will be dressed in orange jumpsuits, and Austin will be wearing a plastic wrist band that identifies him as inmate No. 1401767.

Austin went after his stepson with a shotgun earlier this year and so he will be spending Christmas with the approximately 6,800 other inmates at the massive Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho prison complex in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Advertisement

“If anyone would have told me I was going to be in jail this Christmas, I would have told them they were crazy,” said Austin, 42, as he swept the barracks behind gate No. 2, preparing for choir practice. “My wife and I had a dispute, then her 325-pound son came at me with a machete. I had a gun. I didn’t shoot him, but I shot his car.

“I have to pay for that. No one was hurt, but I used a gun.”

Austin lives in Medium South, a medium-security area. There are few trappings of the holiday season in this compound, where about 1,800 men sleep on thin-mattressed bunk beds, 90 to a barracks, separated from the “outside” by several layers of chain-link fences topped off by spirals of barbed wire. Between the fences lie wind-swept no man’s lands, watched over by roving armed patrols and deputies looking down from guard towers.

There are no Christmas trees and no decorations. On Christmas Day, relatives and friends will be permitted to visit for up to an hour, but visitors will not be permitted to bring presents other than shoes or a Bible, and those items must be approved by a member of the medical staff or one of the chaplains.

“Not much of a place to spend Christmas,” said Robert Taylor, 26, with a smile as he sat on a crowded bench in a barracks, looking away from a television that was blasting out a Lakers game. Most of Taylor’s family is in Detroit--he has not had a visitor since he arrived at Medium South in July on a probation violation, and he has no expectation that he will have one on Christmas.

“I’ve never been in prison before for Christmas, but I was here for Thanksgiving,” he said, the smile growing broader. “It was just like any other day. If we didn’t have turkey, dressing and pumpkin pie, you wouldn’t have known it was Thanksgiving.”

But if it doesn’t look or feel like the Christmas season in many parts of Medium South, at least it sounds like it in the evenings in the barracks behind gate No. 2.

Advertisement

“Let’s sing it like you mean it!” said Austin to a gathering of about 100 men in the barracks as they struggled, at individually selected pitches, through “Silent Night.”

“I know none of you want to be here for Christmas,” he told them when the song sputtered to an end, “but if we do have to be here, we can cheer up someone who is maybe feeling lonely for home at Christmas.”

Because of his previous experience in choral conducting, Austin had been chosen by Medium South prison chaplains Charles King and Alfred Little to form and lead a choir that will, if the prison administration allows, move through the compound on Christmas Eve.

“You can never make plans 100% here,” said Little, 70, who worked for the Southern California Gas Co. before he retired and became a licensed minister. “We are always on the verge of getting rejected. But we have faith that we will Christmas carol this year.”

Neither Little nor King receive a salary or any governmental support for their programs, although Little’s prison work is partly subsidized by donations from King’s son, a businessman. They are members of the Christian Chaplain Services, a Los Angeles organization that provides Protestant chaplains to prisons.

“Two years ago we had more access,” Little said. “The security is getting tighter all the time. We used to be able to take groups in to mingle with the inmates, but not anymore.”

Advertisement

“We can probably take only up to 15 inmates on the caroling,” said King, who is also 70, and retired from teaching at Van Nuys High School. “But it will not just be a pickup group. They will be trained singers this year. That’s because we have someone who is experienced to lead them.”

“We all know that preachers can fall too,” Little said, and they both laughed.

Back at choir practice, Austin explained that in the next couple of days he will have to pick his 20 best singers to do the caroling. “We need 15, but we’ve got to get 20 in case someone has to go to court and can’t be here,” he told the men. “Now let’s do ‘Silent Night,’ again, and this time sing it for Jesus!”

Inmate James Warren, who had come by to help set up the sound system, turned on a tape to provide musical accompaniment, but it was hardly needed. This time, with Austin urging them on with broad gestures, the men sang loudly, if no more in tune.

Chaplain King stood to the side, beaming. “Music is so important to our work,” he said. During Christmas week he will start all his daily church services with a recording of the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah.”

“We started that tradition last year,” King said. “Many of the men are not familiar with what we would call good music. At first they react like we would in the presence of rock music. You can see them fidgeting.

“Then you can see them settle down. By Christmas Eve there will be tears in their eyes.”

The tears might not be just a reaction to the music.

“This time of year is a very hard,” said Jessie Fierro, 36, of El Monte who has been in and out of prison since he was a teen-ager. This time he faces up to 12 years in Medium South or another prison. But Fierro, like several of the men who come to the church services the chaplains conduct, said prison life has been different for him since he underwent a religious conversion.

Advertisement

“I have dedicated myself to the work of God,” Fierro said. “I may be in bondage physically, but that is not important. I feel at liberty within.

“Without the Lord, this time of year would be heartbreaking.”

He paused and looked out at the men singing “Joy to the World.”

“Even with the Lord, it’s not easy.”

It is not hard to figure out what these men would most like as a Christmas present. And at least one of them got it. Just before choir practice began, an inmate came into the barracks soaking wet.

“Looks like you got baptized!” said Fierro. The inmate was so excited he could hardly talk as he walked toward the men, his jumpsuit dripping onto the floor.

“I’m going home,” he said, grasping the hands of the other inmates.

He was being released under the “early out” that was instituted in the crowded prison to make way for incoming inmates.

“I was already starting my job in the kitchen when all my friends came in and said: ‘You are going home! Get out of here! Go!’ They gave me what we call a shower party,” he said.

He gave Fierro a hug and headed back outside toward the release line and the bus that would take him to freedom.

Advertisement

After he was gone Warren looked toward the door. “Everyone else out there wanted their two front teeth for Christmas. All he wanted was a ride home.”

Advertisement