New Rules Limit Co-Ed Interaction at Prison : Camarillo: The superintendent upholds a ban on contraceptives while battling illegal intimacy.

The California Youth Authority’s coeducational compound in Camarillo has a new superintendent--and a strict new set of rules aimed at halting forbidden sexual encounters between male and female inmates.

“It was almost 100% co-ed. Now it’s just limited to school and Sunday worship,” said Manuel Carbajal, who oversees the CYA Ventura School’s 600 males and 250 females. Carbajal, 47, took over at the facility on Tuesday.

“Work crews working together, recreation-type activities together, parties, volunteers with co-ed programs--that’s now stopped.”

The facility’s inmates, ages 14 to 24, have long been permitted no contact more intimate than hand holding. But CYA officials acknowledged to The Times last month that, since March, 1987, prisoners have paired off to conceive eight times in custody. Since June, 1988, officials said, 27 cases of consensual participation in sex acts have been reported.

The Camarillo facility, which holds prisoners convicted of crimes from misdemeanors to homicide, is the CYA’s only coeducational institution. It keeps virtually all of the Youth Authority’s female prisoners, housing them in separate buildings from males and overseeing the combined population with a staff of 450 and a network of video monitors.

Officials and prisoners said most illicit contacts have occurred behind foliage in the 113-acre, campus-like compound or in unmonitored bathrooms.

Several other coeducational juvenile institutions across the country, most of which serve populations of 300 or fewer, have reported no on-site conceptions. Youth Authority officials have described the situation as a symptom of the facility’s size and prisoner population. Several CYA critics, however, have blamed the problem on the Youth Authority’s unwillingness to allow birth-control pills or contraceptives.

Carbajal, a 21-year CYA administrator whose last assignment was as superintendent of the Karl Holton School in Stockton, said illicit prisoner contact can be solved almost immediately. He said the ban on birth control and contraceptives would continue, because to allow them “would be condoning” illicit sex.

Most of the changes the institution did adopt, Carbajal said, were devised before his arrival by a team of management officials at the Camarillo facility and approved by him.

“You have to do some sanctions when things don’t go right,” said Tony Cimarusti, assistant director of the Youth Authority. “It’s sort of like everyone’s on restriction.”

Assistant Supt. Kate Thompson, who temporarily took over the facility after the heart-attack death of Supt. Sylvester Carroway in April, estimated that male and female prisoners will spend only a fraction as much time together as in the past.

Thompson said the facility would ban “coeducational invitationals,” in which prisoners invite other prisoners for supervised social visits, along with coeducation presentations from volunteers. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings are now separated by gender, she said, as are Bible study and choir meetings.

In addition, Thompson said, the institution has segregated most of its prisoner work crews by sex and revised its administrative system so that male students use hall passes in the morning and females use them in the afternoon.

Further plans, Carbajal said, call for greater emphasis on sex education in health classes and more discussion of the consequences of casual sex.

“We’re going to talk about what happens when you become parents,” Carbajal said. “There’s going to be a lot of intensified-type counseling.”

Carbajal described the CYA’s Camarillo facility as “the Cadillac of all institutions. The professional staff, the climate. . . . It’s one of the most complex, multiple programs I’ve seen. We’re really good. How many people would take the chance of opening a co-ed institution?”

Carbajal is a product of East Los Angeles who became the first in his blue-collar family to attend college. He began at East Los Angeles College on a football scholarship.

“I’m a small guy--I’m about 5-10--but I held my own,” he said. “I had to play against guys like Big Ben Davidson,” who went on to play for the Oakland Raiders as a 275-pound lineman, “so that’s why I developed, I suppose, my attitude toward achievement: If you want to do it, you do it.”

Carbajal, now married with a 19-year-old daughter in college, went on to undergraduate studies at Cal State Los Angeles and received his master’s degree at UCLA. He began his CYA career as a night supervisor at the Fred C. Nelles School in Whittier.

“I had a kid throw a chair through a window one time,” he recalled. “That scared the hell out of me. Then I had a kid attempt suicide, and that was more scary than anything I had seen. He cut his wrists, and then he saw the blood and started screaming. I had to hold him down.”

Carbajal “makes it his business to know as many of the young people out there as he can, and make himself available to them,” said Walt Friesen, who served as assistant superintendent under Carbajal for seven months at the Holton School.

As for the reaction among prisoners at Camarillo to his arrival and the stricter rules, Carbajal said, “they’re kind of mad” about the suspension of coeducational events.

The new restrictions on inmate activities, Carbajal added, could be eased eventually, if the institution adopts a new system for security in the halls. But that, he said, would be “several months down the road.”

Well before then, Carbajal is scheduled to face another aspect of the new reforms. On Aug. 7, he said, he is scheduled to meet with the eight prisoners who make up the institution’s Ward Advisory Council.

“I’m going to tell them all the actions I took and why I took them,” Carbajal said, “and tell them that I’m not punishing all of them and that we’re doing it for everyone’s betterment.”