Prison a Hotbed of Industry : Penal system: Chuckawalla facility is the state’s warmest cooler. Inmates sweat out terms working in agriculture and sprucing up desert town of Blythe.

This prison, named after a fat, two-foot-long lizard, is located in a remote slice of the Southern California desert baked by the blistering sun, where temperatures often soar into the 120s and regularly exceed 100 degrees, even well into the fall.

And September did not offer much respite. Each day last month, high temperatures at the prison--three miles south of busy Interstate 10 in the bone-dry, sweltering desert between Blythe and Indio--ranged from 100 to 112 degrees.

Of the 21 prisons in the state system, this is the only one situated in the desert.

“It’s the hottest prison in the state,” said Bob Briggs, chief deputy warden at the medium-security facility.

Despite the oppressive heat, inmates do not spend most of their waking hours sitting around in the air-conditioned comfort of prison buildings.

At Chuckawalla, most of the prisoners work and much of that work is outdoors.

Chuckawalla, perhaps the only prison on Earth named after a lizard, also may be the only one with prisoner-operated jojoba bean and date farms and citrus orchards.

The prison also runs an important cotton boll weevil research project, keeps 10 miles of the Interstate 10 shoulder clean and has been a boon economically to Blythe, 17 miles to the east.

“Our streets, alleys and parks have never been so clean, looked so good as they do now. And, it’s not costing the city a penny,” said Mayor Doris Morgan of Blythe, an isolated desert town along the Colorado River. “It’s all because of (the prison). Prisoners are doing the work.”

Every day at 6 a.m. buses leave the prison carrying five “community” crews each with a correctional officer and 10 inmates, who clean and maintain the parks and alleys and seal cracks in streets.

They spend the morning and early afternoon in Blythe, avoiding the late-afternoon sun. Chuckawalla’s chief doctor, John Culton, 56, said that staff and prisoners are given ample instructions on how to cope with the heat and that there have been “virtually no heat-related problems to date.”

Lois Wu, information officer for the state Department of Corrections, said each state prison has community projects of various types. But the level and variety of work at Chuckawalla is said to be unique.

Morgan said that since the prison opened nearly three years ago, the median family income in Blythe has increased from $15,800 to $19,000 a year because of the salaries paid to the prison staff.

“This town was dying on the vine,” the 60-year-old mayor said. “Many businesses were going broke.”

Now, she said, “we’ve had 150 housing starts the last three years compared with one to three houses a year before that.”

One hundred and fifty Blythe residents went to work for the prison when it opened in December, 1988.

And special legislation effective last June 1 granted Blythe permission to annex the 1,730-acre prison site as part of the city even though it is 17 miles west of town. The measure allows the city to count the 3,074 prison inmates as residents of Blythe. The increase in population--to 11,574--gives the small city an additional $150,000 in state funds each year.

But the most visible impact of the prison is the community work program, in effect since May, 1989.

Nearly everyone in Blythe initially objected to having convicted burglars, robbers, drug addicts and other felons at large in town.

“I was concerned along with everybody else,” said Police Chief Robert Feemster, 50. “But the program has come off without a hitch. There have been no incidents, no escapes, no problems whatsoever. There has been minimal interaction between residents and inmates. . . . And our parks and alleys are the cleanest they’ve ever been.”

Feemster said that a Chuckawalla prison guard is with each community work crew at all times.

At the city’s fairgrounds and Blythe’s three main parks, inmates do maintenance and repair tasks that range from tending gardens to painting buildings.

“Families come here from other towns with Little League teams. They tell us we have the best-maintained Little League grandstands and fields anywhere, thanks to the prisoners,” the mayor said.

But the inmates’ efforts are not only directed at sprucing up Blythe.

On the prison grounds, 46 inmates tend a 230-acre jojoba bean plantation, inherited by the state when it bought the property.

“It’s a very exciting project, the only one of its kind in the world within a prison,” said Hannah Derr, 44, who is in charge of prison industries. “Last year inmates harvested 6,000 pounds of jojoba beans sold to cosmetic companies.”

As the three-mile road leading to the prison from Interstate 10 nears the 52-building complex, it is flanked by 450 date palm trees--another prison industry. Inmates harvest the dates as an additional source of prison income.

In a scientific laboratory inside the prison, inmates work under the direction of Charles Beasley, a UC Riverside agriculture research scientist conducting the boll weevil project. The aim is to find ways of ridding cotton fields of the pest.

For Chuckawalla inmates, work is voluntary, but 95% are busy earning 8 to 95 cents an hour, plus a day off their sentence for every day of work, said prison spokesman Eric Flamer.