A Small Patch of Freedom : Prisons: For inmates at the state penitentiary in Lancaster, ‘the Yard’ represents the one spot where they have some control over their lives.

From his perch within the prison yard, convict David Garcia watches the ravens--the big, black birds whose free flight is a cruel and constant reminder of the minutes, the days and the years he has wasted behind bars.

Like indifferent prison guards, the birds roost atop imposing watchtowers. With a mocking call, they hop about the metal workout barbells, strutting with the confidence of weightlifters.

“The difference between us and them is that they can leave this place,” said Garcia, who is serving a 30-year sentence for a string of armed robberies of convenience stores. “They can up and fly away whenever they want to. But we can’t. We’re here to stay.”

Garcia is one of 2,755 inmates at the state’s newest penitentiary, in Lancaster, home to convicts doing time for crimes ranging from drug sales to multiple murders.

And despite the reminder of the ravens, Garcia knows of only one spot in this Godforsaken place to flee the fact that he is not a free man.

The Yard. The place where convicts go out to play.

Inside, they call it the Zone or the Pit. Nearly every prison has one--a barren, walled-in landscape where inmates can escape the restless rhythm of penitentiary life and step into the sunlight for a bit of exercise and fresh air.

In the Yard, rumors fly like the birds overhead, the talk coming in a colorful language created by the cons: Barbells are housed in the Iron Pit, your family is “your people,” ducats is money. And talk centers on your next date in the Bone Room, the prison area for conjugal visits.

From dawn to dusk, the Yard is the place where the prison community gathers to mimic life on the outside, to re-create the tensions of the street. And occasionally--with the blast of a high-powered gun or sudden thrust of a shank knife--to imitate the violence of the ‘hood.

Convicts and prison guards agree, however, that Hollywood’s portrayal of the Yard--a treacherous killing field with imaginary lines and shadows, a place where ruthless gangsters call the shots and where convicts turn violent daily--is not true.

“We’ve all seen our share of bloodshed,” said Conrad Joseph, a 48-year-old serving a decade for computer fraud and armed robbery; he is one of three inmates selected by officials to discuss life in the Yard.

“This is prison, not a country club. You can’t escape the violence. But veterans know the movie images just aren’t true.”

Part of the reason is that new prisons such as the one in Lancaster--about 60 miles north of downtown Los Angeles--have made penitentiary life a bit less menacing, officials said.

The Yard’s modern architecture has reduced blind spots, where inmates once avoided the gaze of the guard towers and trouble often brewed.

Still, prison officials are mistrustful, even fearful, of the inmates they oversee and of the image of prison life they might portray to the outside. During a recent visit, officials would not allow a reporter to enter the Yard without escort or to talk to inmates at random.

In the eyes of one veteran, such precautions, at least for safety purposes, are unnecessary. The Yard, he said, is like a comfortable television show.

“Day in, day out, the place is like a neighborhood bar--like that place on ‘Cheers,’ “Joseph said. “It has its characters. And, of course, we’re all regulars.”

*

The Yard.

Sometimes, it seems more like the surface of Venus than Earth. There is precious little shade. And no grass. Just a sprawling, 3 1/2-acre dirt lot--the size of two football fields--surrounded by slate-gray buildings with aqua-green doors.

On days when temperatures soar above 100 degrees, some convicts cluster in groups, huddled in the thin shade of a light pole. Some, glistening with sweat and their tattoos bared, bench press in the open-air weight pit, shrugging off the heat like an insult.

Others play basketball or handball. They do pushups, chinups. Raising a trail of dust devils, they sprint up and down the rectangular yard or jog around the ringed Tarmac pathway. Mostly, though, during their hour to five-hour daily visits to the Yard, they stand just inside the Line.

That’s the thick yellow stripe around the Yard’s perimeter, separating inmates from a row of low-slung administration buildings. Guards rarely, if ever, cross the Line. And inmates must receive permission to pass over it or risk punishments ranging from additional work duties to increased sentences.

The Line’s purpose: separating the guards from the guarded.

“Out there, that’s their turf, and we don’t enter it unless we have to,” said Lt. J.R. Andrews, a prison spokesman. “That’s their domain.”

The Line is just one attempt to preserve the peace.

Before the first inmates arrived in February, each yard was swept with metal detectors and raked with picks and shovels to make sure that construction contractors did not drop scrap metal that prisoners could fashion into weapons.

Inmates are searched each time they enter and leave. The bottom of the Yard’s chain-link fence has been painted yellow so guards can spot attempts to cut through the barricade.

“In older prisons, there were too many blind spots,” Andrews said. “Here, officers in the tower have a 170-degree view of the Yard.”

He motions like a guide on a nature tour: “Look at that handball wall. We can see both sides at the same time. The toilet? Same thing. Now, everywhere an inmate goes, someone can see what he is doing.”

Still, the Yard can be dangerous. More than 90% of violent acts committed in prison take place there, experts said.

Much of that hostility stems from a prison’s ethnic makeup. At Lancaster, for example, 35% of the inmates are African-American, 23% are Anglo and 36% are Latino--a volatile mix that prison officials said could boil over at any moment.

The types of inmates are also shifting. Drug-related sentences have risen twelve-fold from 1980, statistics show. And the number of gang members in prison is also on the rise.

In the Yard, the old prison hierarchy still prevails: Murderers command the most respect, sex offenders the least.

“Hatreds are acted out here,” inmate Garcia said. “We’re just waiting for that child molester, waiting to see him die in prison. The cells or the Yard, wherever it happens.”

*

With the butt of a high-powered rifle resting on his knee, Correctional Officer Ralph Lopez scans the Yard like an owl at dusk.

He watches for any show of force, for one group of inmates to cluster in the center of the Yard--a sign of an impending rumble. Although inmates are searched at the gates of the Yard, he still must watch for convicts hiding a cell-chiseled sword or shank.

For Lopez and other officers, the $30,000-a-year job causes tension. Many guards just don’t like convicts. They don’t like the jokes: After the Lancaster prison hired its guards, one went, there wasn’t a fry cook to be found in the entire Antelope Valley.

Lopez knows that his job is not easy. Nationally, prison yards have been an infamous site for bruiser brawls and attempted escapes. Last year at a Central California prison, convicts used barbells to pummel one another in a fight that injured 20.

“It’s tough,” Lopez said. “You try to get cooperation from these guys by using the megaphone. All they do is stare at you. They flip you off. Or they cuss at you. They’ve got no respect.”

*

There they were, 200 convicts standing in the middle of the Yard earlier this year, necks craned, gawking upward at a bungee-jumper ready to leap from a hot-air balloon launched from outside the prison walls.

Like New Yorkers gathered under a distraught ledge-walker 40 stories up, they yelled and they cajoled.

“Half of them, they were yelling for the guy to jump. The others were screaming for the cord to break,” said Joseph with a laugh.

Such entertainment is in short supply, but the Yard nonetheless brings relief from the cramped, 10-foot-by-6-foot cells, where the putrid smells of the cell block drift and the yells and taunts from fellow inmates echo.

In the Yard, they can hear the roar of jet engines and listen to the chirp of birds. Looking northward, they can see the peaks of the nearby Tehachapi Mountains.

“It’s the only place where you have a freedom of choice,” said Joseph. “When I run, I decide if I want to stop. Nobody makes that decision but me. No guard. No inmate. Nobody. That’s the thing about prison. You make no decisions here.”

After a decade in prison, Garcia has become a patient observer of his grim confines, a witness to the agonizingly slow tick of prison’s emotional clock.

At dusk, he strolls the Yard in long straight lines, ignoring the men, the sounds, the smells and the controlled chaos all around him--dreaming about what life will be like when he finally gets out.

And when darkness falls, “You know that one more day in prison is behind you, another 24 hours behind bars down the drain,” Garcia said.

“And that helps you sleep at night.”