‘Worst of the Worst’

There were the “cagings.” A nurse testified seeing inmates locked in wire metal cages the size of a telephone booth. The cages were outside, in plain view--a sideshow. It was a cold winter day. The men were naked. Hours later, the nurse passed by a second time. The men were still there. One of them, his body covered with gooseflesh, cried out that he was freezing. He begged for some underwear. The nurse took the request to a guard. He said no, the cagings would continue: “Lieutenant’s orders.”

An inmate named Castillo refused to return his food tray. For this, he was shot with gas pellets, tasered and pistol-whipped. “When he regained consciousness,” a judge later recounted, “he was on the floor with his face down. An officer was stepping on his hands and hitting him on his calves with a baton, at which point Castillo passed out a second time. When he regained consciousness again, he was dragged out of the cell face down; his head was bleeding, and a piece of his scalp had been detached or peeled back.”

So-called fetal restraints were popular. Guards would employ handcuffs and leg irons to hogtie errant inmates. The prisoners then would be left on the ground for hours. Sometimes, an inmate would be tied to a toilet, a clever touch.

“This is Pelican Bay State Prison,” an associate warden scolded a guard who complained about the hogtying, “and if you don’t like it, get out. We’re going to do it our way.”

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Pelican Bay was opened five years ago to hold “the worst of the worst” in California. The idea was to create a terrible place that would cow troublemakers at other prisons. Here, in a deceptively banal-looking encampment of modern cement buildings, hidden behind redwoods and vines in the far, northwest corner of the state, things would be done the Pelican Bay way.

It would not be pretty. It would not be civilized. And it would not, in fact, even be constitutional. Last week, a federal judge ruled that much of what has gone down at Pelican Bay was cruel and unusual and must be stopped. In his 345-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson chose to retell many horror stories. They made for some ugly reading.

He told, for instance, of a mentally ill inmate who smeared feces on himself and his cell. Half a dozen guards held the African American man in a whirlpool tub. The water temperature was 140 degrees. “Looks like we’re going to have a white boy before this is through,” a guard was heard to say, “. . . His skin is so dirty and so rotten, it’s all fallen off.”

Indeed, a nurse later reported that “from just below the buttocks down, his skin had peeled off and was hanging in large clumps around his leg.” Why the inmate was not screaming presented a mystery. There was evidence the bath had destroyed his nerve endings. There also was the inmate’s own testimony that he wanted “to take it like a man and not let them enjoy it.”

The judge passed along his own impressions of a visit to the Security Housing Unit, an X-shaped concrete building where the worst inmates are locked away in windowless cells. They are given an hour a day, alone, in an exercise pen without any equipment. “Some inmates,” Henderson observed, “spend the time simply pacing around the edges of the pen; the image created is hauntingly similar to that of caged felines pacing in a zoo.”

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Henderson told stories of reckless, sometimes lethal gunplay by guards, of slipshod, sometimes lethal medical care and of signals of approval passed down to heavy-handed guards from the top. The trial, he concluded, had produced “proof of the most powerful, unambiguous kind that a pattern of excessive force has become an undeniable reality at Pelican Bay.”

Interestingly, for all his expressions of outrage, a tone of defensiveness seemed to run through Henderson’s documentary. It was as though he felt obliged to pause between horrors and issue reminders of why they mattered: “Those who have transgressed the law are still fellow human beings--most of whom will one day return to society. We have no duty more important than that of enforcing constitutional rights, no matter how unpopular the cause or powerless the plaintiffs.”

Such language suggested--to this reader anyway--that the judge understood he was swimming against a furious current. Make no mistake. For much of the citizenry, the atrocities uncovered at Pelican Bay will amount to little more than a case of just desserts. In our runaway fear of crime, we have become, depressingly enough, as hard and desperate as the criminals. Civilization will have to wait a while, in the Golden Land.