COLUMN ONE : A System Strains at Its Bars : The state prison population is exploding. Taxing the facilities are violence, labor disputes and a rising number of ill and infirm inmates.

This is the gaping maw, the jaws through which convicts pass to be evaluated and processed before they are spit out once again and force-fed into California’s swollen prisons.

Every day of the week, buses from jails throughout Southern California roll into Chino to disgorge their forlorn and often dangerous passengers behind the faded beige walls of this Reception Center. And every day, buses roll out of Chino loaded with newly processed convicts bound for prisons throughout the state.

“It’s a machine that will chew you up,” lifer Luis Rodriguez said from Pelican Bay State Prison. “It doesn’t care a damn thing about you. There is no sense of rehabilitation. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry, and we’re the commodities.”

Prison guards are scarcely less bitter. Many view their jobs as dangerous, thankless and ultimately futile.

“We take all the responsibility away from them (prisoners),” said Correctional Officer John Baird, “then kick them out and tell them, ‘OK, get a job, pay your bills.’ We’re not correcting a damned thing. The (Department of Corrections) should be renamed the Department of Confinement.”

Baird, a veteran of 22 years who now transports prisoners, and Rodriguez, a convicted killer of two highway patrolmen, have little in common--except the knowledge that prison time is largely dead time, filled with fear, scheming, monotony, hopelessness.

Inmate-on-inmate violence is down compared to a decade ago. But California prisons remain dangerous. Knifings are common. Convicts kill four or five of their fellows a year. Guards kill a like number. In the past decade, officers have shot 36 inmates to death while breaking up fights, more than three times the number killed by their counterparts in the other major U.S. prison systems combined.

Despite an unprecedented construction program that has created 16 prisons, 126,000 inmates are crammed into space for only half that many. Under “three strikes” sentencing laws, the real crunch is yet to come. As the prison population balloons, this already strained system will be tested.

Officials will grapple with tens of thousands of physically and mentally infirm inmates, contentious labor-management relations and felons who are likely to become more rebellious as their sentences grow longer, and privileges are revoked. For example, inmates at one overcrowded prison went on strike in July after the warden decreed that they had to give up their 13-inch televisions for ones with 9-inch screens.

“At the point where any individual has nothing to lose, they act out,” said David Tristan, deputy director of corrections in charge of institutions. “That’s human nature.”

The Chino Reception Center--one of six such facilities throughout the state--processed 32,500 inmates last year and still the buses come.

On a recent day at Chino, newly imprisoned men in orange jumpsuits stood in a sullen line before an intake sergeant. The officer recognized many of these men. They had served time before.

The men, who had just showered, stood in puddles. Nearby, a yellow plastic bin was piled high with clothing that the men had discarded. They would not be needing it anytime soon.

Prison officials assign them a place to sleep, but virtually every space is filled: cells, day rooms, gyms. In the cells, one inmate sleeps in a bunk bed, the other on a mattress on the floor. In the summer, the heat is suffocating.

In the gym, where more than 200 inmates sleep in rows, head-to-head, there’s a swamp cooler. The inmates can spend their days watching TV, shooting the bull or playing cards. There is little else to do until they are assigned to a prison.

Officials make assignments based on criteria such as the type of crime committed, the length of sentence and family ties. Options range from Level I minimum security forestry camps to Level IV prisons such as Pelican Bay near the Oregon border for the hardest cases. Between these extremes is the medium security Correctional Training Facility at Soledad.

Soledad: Bloody Past, Grim Present

The entrance is deceptively pleasant. The lawn is flanked by yellow and purple pansies and red roses. But beyond the grass and flowers is a double fence topped by coiled razor wire and studded with gun towers.

Built in 1946, Soledad once was one of the most notorious penitentiaries in the state. Its three-tiered cellblocks were home to the Soledad Brothers, convicts accused of beating a guard to death in 1969 after three inmates were fatally shot from a gun tower.

Corrections officials have not torn down old, hard-to-operate joints like this Monterey County prison because of the burgeoning convict population. Instead, they have renovated them and filled them with lower-security inmates.

The administration is proud of its vocational programs teaching such skills as furniture making, print shop and upholstery. But there are not enough training slots or jobs, and 40% of the inmates at the prison are idle. Some are on waiting lists. Others choose to do nothing.

Soledad is not exceptional. Slightly over half the inmates in California’s prisons are assigned to jobs or educational programs. And as “three strikes” takes effect, idleness is expected to increase.

Currently, there are only 71,500 assignments available for 126,000 inmates. More than 40,000 inmates are deemed either too sick or unruly to be given such assignments, or have no interest in them. This despite the fact that inmates can earn time off their sentences by working or studying.

“Our time clock goes from meal to meal,” said Vincent Cervantes, a burglar and robber from the Los Angeles area who is back in prison for a parole violation. “That’s when we know our day is over, when we finish our last meal.”

What kind of judgments do Cervantes and his fellow prisoners make about the laws that are passed to keep them in longer? Or to keep them from coming back?

Cervantes, who has spent nine of his 34 years in prison, says he was sentenced in 1985 to five years for robbery with a knife. Strike one. Soon after he got out, Cervantes was locked up again for first- and second-degree burglaries. The first-degree burglary--breaking into an inhabited dwelling--would have been strike two, but Cervantes says that conviction was set aside on appeal. Second-degree burglary doesn’t qualify as strike two, but Cervantes doesn’t know that. He thinks he will be sent away for 25 years to life if he is convicted of another felony.

And that, he says, makes him even more dangerous.

“Let’s say,” he explains, “that I get out there and my kids get into a fight. Let’s say I blow it and retaliate and hit someone. I wouldn’t let them take me in. . . . If lives are at stake, it’s going to be someone else’s life, not mine.”

Problems in Lancaster

Nearly 300 miles and light-years away in penal technology is the gleaming new state prison at Lancaster. It is the only prison that California corrections officials have managed to open in Los Angeles County, even though nearly 40% of the state’s inmates come from the county.

Located in the high desert at the edge of dry brown mountains, the prison’s off-white cellblocks with turquoise doors shimmer eerily in the heat.

The Lancaster prison, which opened in early 1993, has not operated smoothly despite its electronically operated cell doors, its glassed-in control booths and its modular, semicircular cellblocks.

There have been two wardens and two interim wardens at the prison in its first 18 months of operation. Two lifers escaped but were quickly captured. At least four inmates were wounded by guards’ gunfire during brawls or altercations last winter. One inmate, who has filed a claim for damages, was shot in the foot last February after allegedly taking an “aggressive stance” in the cellblock.

About one-third of the inmates at Lancaster are idle. But one inmate who has tried to use prison to improve himself is Hector M. Aldaz, a 26-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico City, one of at least 15,000 undocumented immigrants serving time for committing crimes. Aldaz is serving 11 years for attempted murder in a shooting on a San Bernardino County freeway.

Aldaz learned to speak English in the prison’s school program, and a few months ago, passed a high school equivalency test. He hopes to get out of prison in 1998. “If they don’t deport me,” he said, “I will try to get a college degree so I can progress.”

Outside the classrooms, under the hot sun that bakes A Yard, 300 inmates stroll, play cards or lift weights. They segregate themselves according to race.

Standing in the iron pit with a group of white and Latino inmates was William S. Munson, in the last days of his sixth state prison term, a three-year sentence.

Munson is a 41-year-old drug addict from the Los Angeles area, the kind of habitual criminal that legislators probably had in mind when they drafted “three strikes.” He has served sentences for burglary and a number of armed robberies.

Munson’s mother was imprisoned for selling heroin when he was 2 years old, and he went from foster homes to juvenile hall to county jails, and finally to prison. “I’m a product of the state of California,” he said lightly. “I’m literally a state baby.”

If Munson is convicted of another felony, he faces 25 years to life under “three strikes.”

“I’m going to a state,” he said, “that isn’t set on locking up half their population and giving the other half the job of looking over them.”

For all its problems, the prison at Lancaster is at least relatively close to a metropolitan area, an advantage for staff as well as the families of prisoners.

Corrections officials recognize the value of visitation in maintaining the family and community ties of inmates, but point out that prisons are seldom welcome in metropolitan areas, which are home to most convicts.

“We tried diligently to place a prison in metropolitan Los Angeles,” said corrections spokeswoman Christine May, “and the community fought us in the court system. We would love to have more prisons in metropolitan areas. They seem to be more difficult to site there.”

Newness No Relief at Calipatria

Most new prisons are in places like Calipatria, where one opened in 1992 amid cotton fields of the Imperial Valley. If there were no traffic, the drive from Los Angeles would take five hours. The nearest town of any size is El Centro. Temperatures commonly hit a humid 110, and there are swarms of insects.

“When it’s hot, your level of patience is limited,” said Officer John Childers, who recently transferred to another prison. “Your temper is limited. You get grouchy. You get angry. You get fatigued. You’re just miserable. And the whiteflies. My God.”

Add to that an unruly group of 3,800 convicts. Gangs are engaged in war. Fights are vicious. In July, one inmate kicked another in the head so hard that the victim went into convulsions.

A sergeant tried to break it up, but his gun misfired. A second officer tried to fire, but forgot to pull the bolt back, according to a prison report.

“The officers are inexperienced. The supervisors are inexperienced,” said Dave Moschetti, local president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. “The inmates are violent, and they’ve been around a while. No one wants to come here (to work).”

The union at Calipatria is enmeshed with prison administrators in bitter disputes over disciplinary actions, pay and job safety.

Incident reports offer a guard’s-eye tour of a hellish side of prison life. Between April and July, Calipatria officers found 17 weapons: darts made of sewing needles and pen barrels, deodorant containers melted into knife blades, sharpened pieces of plexiglass.

They found nine stashes of drugs, including a shipment that came in a package with a lawyer’s return address, 10 balloons of heroin concealed in a bar of soap, and hand-made hypodermic needles.

Officers fired eight warning shots to break up fights. Still, 13 inmates were stabbed or slashed. In one attack, two prisoners rushed to a neighboring cell, and stabbed their targets 20 times.

In a two-week period this summer, two officers were stabbed. Officers endure bites, kicks, punches, and being doused by a brew of toilet waste that is tossed through cell door openings. Officers call it “gassing.”

Moschetti said dozens of Calipatria officers want transfers. Many have already moved across Imperial County to the newly opened Centinela State Prison. There, Warden Rosie Garcia said three-fourths of her officers are fresh from the academy. Most front-line supervisors have three or four years on the job.

As for the future, Garcia sighed, “It’s going to get a lot harder.”

Prison’s Feminine Side: Chowchilla

If it weren’t for the coiled razor wire, the nation’s largest women’s state prison might be mistaken for a college campus.

Inmates, in street clothes or prison-issue blue, lounge on the lush green grass of the big yard. Others walk toward dormitories trimmed with cheerful magenta awnings.

“We’re in touch with our feminine side here,” said prison spokesman Toby Wong. “The only thing we don’t have is curtains.”

The Central California Women’s Prison at Chowchilla in Madera County is a world apart from the violent state prisons for men, but--beneath the pastels--it is plagued by severe overcrowding, isolation from inmates’ families and allegedly substandard medical care.

“Three strikes” sentencing legislation is not expected to have as great an impact on women’s prisons as on those for men because females are not as likely to commit the most serious felonies. Even so, corrections officials estimate that with “three strikes” and other get-tough legislation, the statewide total of women prisoners will grow from 7,900 to more than 13,000 over the next five years.

Irene Padilla is determined not to be among them.

The 30-year-old woman from East Los Angeles said she was at the end of her second prison term for robbery and spoke of her fears of “three strikes.”

“The next time, if I ever do it,” she said, “I’ll never, never, never be able to set foot in society again.”

The short, tough-looking inmate with “Jackie” tattooed on her neck had just spent three years without seeing her two children who live in Los Angeles, 240 miles away. The prison is too remote, she said, for her family to visit.

“I’m not ever coming back,” she vowed.

The prison is already operating at twice its design capacity of 2,000. Each room, designed to hold four women, is jammed with eight inmates who share one toilet, one shower and two sinks. The prison gymnasium has been converted into a dormitory for 112 inmates.

But the prisoners’ most common complaint appears to be health care. Prison officials acknowledge that an inmate might wait as long as three months to see one of five physicians who serve the 4,000 convicts.

A coalition of inmates’ rights attorneys allege that medical care here is dangerously substandard. And last year the Department of Corrections paid $360,000 to settle a suit over the death of inmate Diana Reyes, 42, who died of acute pancreatitis in 1991, four hours after medical staff found her lying on a mattress on the floor of her isolation cell, caked with feces.

Teena Farmon, warden at Chowchilla, denied that Reyes died because of neglect.

“We supply a higher level of medical care,” she said, “than most of these people got before they were incarcerated.”

The End of the Line at Pelican Bay

The last stop in California’s penal system--Pelican Bay--sounds like a tourist destination, surrounded by redwoods near the picturesque fishing and lumber town of Crescent City in Del Norte County. But no prison has harder inmates--or officers. Here are some snapshots from prison and court records:

* Jay Jackson attacked his cellmate, and when guards arrived to remove the bloodied victim, he demanded to know: “Is he dead yet? Well, I tried to do him. Are you sure he isn’t dead yet?” Motive: Jackson was upset that he had been served pancakes. He hates pancakes. He got seven more years in prison.

* David Hunter, a hulking man with tangled and matted hair, was doing time for petty theft when he became angry with a guard who shut his thumb in his cell’s food slot. He splattered the officer with “unidentified liquid.” Convicted of assault in the incident, Hunter told his sentencing judge that, by way of mitigation, the concoction contained no blood. He got six years.

* In a brutality suit, a correctional sergeant sparred with a prisoners’ rights lawyer, saying: “Contrary to what you may believe, an inmate losing four teeth is not a major injury.”

Behind Pelican Bay’s walls, exercise yards are immaculate. Not a cigarette butt or a scrap of paper sullies them. The grass is green. There are softball diamonds, weight piles, a sweat lodge for Native American inmates, meandering walkways, and steel-mesh cages the size of shower stalls for inmates who get out of line.

From vantage points above the yard, officers with rifles look down. When fights break out, as they often do, guards use a public address system to order combatants to stop. If that fails, they fire warning shots. And if that doesn’t work, they shoot at the inmates. Four prisoners have been fatally shot since the prison opened five years ago.

The most difficult inmates are locked up in the Security Housing Unit. Prisoners live one to a cell, separated by three locked doors from a control booth officer armed with an M-14.

Locked in the unit are leaders of the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family and lesser-known gangs, as well as the most unruly inmates, and a smattering of others like Luis Rodriguez, who was convicted of killing two highway patrolmen.

“The SHU is no place nice,” said Rodriguez, 39, who has since moved from the unit to the general population. Inmates in cells next to his ranted into the night, making it impossible to sleep. “You aren’t seeing any sunlight, no trees, no people, nothing other than TV.”

Once a day, the control booth officer pushed a button and the cell door opened, allowing Rodriguez to spend an hour and a half in an exercise space measuring 28 by 12 feet, with 20-foot walls. He would run in circles, counting up to 635 laps.

Prisoners’ rights lawyers have sued, hoping to convince a federal judge that imprisonment in security housing should not go on indefinitely as it does now. A ruling is expected next year.

Tristan, the director of corrections, defends the policy of keeping gang leaders isolated in the Security Housing Unit for their entire terms, saying: “We know there are individuals so violent and so predatory that as soon as they got to mainline population, they would begin preying on other inmates.”

However, prisoners and psychologists testified last year that after months and years in solitary, some inmates begin hallucinating. A few become so disturbed that they smear feces on themselves--like Vaughn Dortch.

For 10 days in 1992, Dortch lay in his own waste, until other prisoners began complaining, and officers extracted him. As he struggled to bite them and ranted that he was a killer bee, they took Dortch to an infirmary and forced him into a bath.

A medical technician, Irven McMillan, was near the end of the shift when a sergeant asked him to help. McMillan had never given a bath before, and asked a supervisor to help. She refused. So McMillan went about washing Dortch. The waste was embedded in his skin, McMillan recalled. When the bath was over, Dortch stood up and his skin peeled off in sheets.

Dortch sued and won a settlement of $972,000 last year. McMillan was fired, but is suing to reclaim his job, and the guards union is supporting the action. McMillan is convinced the temperature of the bath water had nothing to do with Dortch’s injuries. He said he believes the inmate’s skin came off because he had a rash from lying in his wastes or from disinfectant used to clean his cell.

Warden Charles Marshall blames such problems on inexperienced staff and the difficulties of opening a new prison.

He has tried to tighten procedures. But as more prisons open, he predicts, wardens will face similar problems: “As long as (inmates) keep coming, and they’re coming at a rate faster than we can build, we’re going to be in that situation, and probably we’ll be looked at critically by the courts.”

A Day In the Life

Here is a typical daily schedule for prisoners:

5:00 a.m.: Inmates counted 6:00: General population wakes up. Inmates with jobs in the kitchen have been up since 4 a.m. 6:15--Breakfast 6:45--Prisoners on medication line up for pills 7-7:30--Inmate maintenance workers, students report to work or classes. 8:00--Medical call 9:15--Cells unlocked, prisoners with no program go to exercise yard, day rooms or counseling. 11:00--Yard ends. Inmates return to cells. 11:30--Lunch (sack lunch) Noon--High security inmates counted 2:00--Work day ends for inmates with jobs in Prison Industry Authority 2:30--Cells unlocked, prisoners return to the yard, day rooms. 3:30--Classes ends for inmates in education or job training 3:45--Inmates return from yard, cells locked 4:30--Mail is distributed, inmates counted 5:00--Dinner 6:30--Cells unlocked, inmates return to yard or day rooms 9:30--Inmates return to cells Midnight--Inmates counted

PERSONAL BELONGINGS

Here are some of the items prisoners are allowed to have or use:

CLOTHING: Denim jeans, blue work shirts, leather work shoes. Authorities are considering switching to soft shoes.

CANTEENS ITEMS: Cigarettes, soda, vitamins, candy, ice cream, canned food, personal care products, stationary, pens.

CATALOGUE ITEMS: Two mail-order firms specialize in sales to inmates of Corrections-approved clocks, small televisions, radios, tape players, earphones, approved clothing, and personal care items.

EQUIPMENT: Guitar, typewriter, no more than two plug-in appliances, including television, radio, electric shaver, fan, a heating element for warming food or drink.

READING MATERIAL: Law books, most general interest books, magazines. Authorities are considering limiting material deemed pornographic or racist.

CABLE TELEVISION: Reception is poor in most prisons, so the state provides cable. Prisons rent and broadcast movies via cable to inmates’ sets.

EXERCISE YARDS: Weight piles, softball or soccer fields, handball and basketball courts, a running track, body bags.

Source: Lancaster prison spokesman Kenn Hicks

Feeding the Inmates

Each California inmate’s daily diet calls for 3.700 calories: 15% protein, 55% carbohydrates, 30% fat. Here is how much food each inmate is provided annually:

Food Annual pounds Fruits, vegetables 800 Milk 445 Meat, poultry 252 Cereal 200 Fats, oils, sugar 125 Beverages 25

Here is a typical menu for California prisoners, from California State Prison in Lancaster. * Breakfast: Stewed fruit, hot cereal, scrambled eggs, turkey-ham, muffin with butter, milk, coffee. * Lunch: Turkey baloney and cheese sandwich, apple, chips, cookies, beverage pack (which when mixed with water makes punch). * Dinner: Salad, beef stew with noodles, canned peas, roll, butter, cake, beverage pack.