Era of Higher Tension Seen at State Prisons : Inmates: Officials are revoking privileges as ‘three strikes’ adds to crowding. Some fear more unrest.

California’s overcrowded and often violent prisons are entering an even more perilous era.

With pressure mounting from an expected deluge of “three strikes and you’re out” prisoners, the Department of Corrections is pressing for approval of a $168-million “emergency” building program that would add enough new dormitories and double and triple bunks for 20,000 more felons at the state’s 29 prisons.

Authorities also are revoking long-held inmate privileges, from access to weightlifting and pornography to conjugal visits, as the number of inmates approaches 130,000.

Taken together--the new flood of inmates, the longer sentences required by the “three strikes” sentencing law, the loss of privileges--the changes are all but certain to heighten tension in the nation’s largest prison system.

“You crowd more people into a small place, take away their outlets, and it’s a time bomb,” said Henry Sianez, a convicted murderer serving life at New Folsom prison. “I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it’s a potential.”

Veteran correctional officers such as Al Gervin see the possibility of unrest, too, although Gervin, like many line officers, believes the new hard-line approach to privileges is long past due.

“The potential for violence against staff is going to increase,” said Gervin, of Centinela State Prison in Imperial County. “Inmates don’t blame each other because they lost their pornography. They blame the staff.”

Corrections Director James Gomez said he doubts inmates will react to the rule changes, noting: “They understand the mood has changed. The public is speaking and if it is done in a non-punitive, non-hurtful way, I think they will accept it.” But Gomez also said: “As you become more crowded, the tensions are more difficult. That is real life.”

The Legislature opened the way last year for the department to repeal privileges by watering down the so-called inmates’ bill of rights, a statute signed into law by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1968, when rehabilitation was a higher consideration than it is today.

With few exceptions, the statute gave prisoners many rights held by people on the outside, including the right to marry, and read and write virtually anything. Then-Assemblyman Pete Wilson was among the lawmakers who voted for the legislation.

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But now, more than 25 years later, Gov. Wilson has signed bills significantly limiting inmates’ rights. Today, Wilson’s Department of Corrections is wasting little time using its new authority. The department is:

* Preparing to revoke conjugal visiting privileges for murderers who have no parole dates, and inmates convicted of rape and other sexual attacks, or child or spousal abuse.

Like the inmates’ bill of rights, conjugal visiting dates back to Reagan’s tenure as governor, and was instituted as a method of rewarding good behavior, keeping families intact and limiting homosexual rape. Roughly 25,000 such visits take place annually at apartments and trailers set up for the purpose at prisons.

* Limiting inmates’ access to weights, a tradition on prison yards. Under new policies being developed, prisoners may be permitted to lift weights only if it is part of an overall exercise program.

* Starting to charge inmates $3 to file lawsuits and $5 for non-emergency doctors’ visits as a way of reducing the cost of inmate-generated lawsuits and medical care.

* Considering systemwide grooming standards for prisoners.

* Barring inmates from engaging in business or profiting from their crimes. Lawmakers pushed for the change after the rock band Guns ‘N Roses recorded a song by murderer Charles Manson, who is jailed at the maximum security prison at Corcoran. Manson could not sell future songs under the new rule.

The rule also will apply to inmates who write and sell articles or books. If the rule had been in place, Los Angeles gang member Kody Scott, serving time at the Pelican Bay maximum-security prison, would not have been allowed to sell his widely acclaimed autobiography, “Monster.”

* Banning outside writings that are deemed racist or might incite violence, even as prisons continue to show such violent films as “True Lies.” The new rule also prohibits published material that “depicts, displays or describes” various types of sexual intercourse as a “pervasive theme.”

The department long has forbidden child pornography, which is illegal, and has tried in the past to limit sex offenders’ access to legal pornography. The new restriction, however, extends to all inmates and includes legal, though raunchy, periodicals.

At Calipatria prison in Imperial County, a Jan. 13 memo from a staff sergeant interpreted the new rule as extending to “all publication(s) that either depict or describe sexual intercourse”--wording that would ban not only Playboy and Penthouse magazines, but much of popular literature produced today.

At nearby Centinela state prison, officers have seized pornographic magazines from high-security cells, including Penthouse and several lesser known magazines.

“It means more tension,” said Sianez, who stands to lose his overnight family visiting privileges with his wife and daughter. “You take away their pornography, take away family visiting; when I was first here, you couldn’t have a young guy on the yard. They’d (rape him) in a hot minute. They took it when they wanted it.”

Lawyer Steve Fama of the Prison Law Office in San Rafael is considering filing lawsuits over some of the new policies. The restrictions on pornography, for example, go far beyond what federal law allows, he said, noting that a San Quentin inmate had a letter confiscated because it was sexually explicit.

Gomez called the changes “incremental,” adding that relatively few inmates will be affected. While pornography is common in prisons, he said, inmates will not rise up over its loss. But he did note that the systemwide grooming standards would affect all prisoners. On that, he said, he will be “much more deliberative.”

The rules are being tightened as the Department of Corrections pushes for funding for 20,000 more prison beds in existing prisons, plus six new prisons. By June, 1997, the prison population is expected to reach 167,700 inmates, an increase of 41,700 from the current count.

In its proposal seeking legislative approval of the 20,000 “emergency” beds, the department is unusually blunt, both about the future need and the current situation.

“The state prison system is already overcrowded to an unmanageable level, with no feasible options for reacting to natural disasters or other emergencies that could reduce available bed space,” the proposal says.

If the Legislature fails to approve the new beds, the department warns that the state will “face an emergency housing requirement even more dire than the current situation, with no time or money to cope with the problem.”

“It is imperative,” the memo says, “that (the department) take immediate action to address the space needs and avoid the potential early release of felons that could occur if courts intervene with population caps, thereby defeating the intent and purpose of the new sentencing laws.”

To accommodate “three strikes” inmates, most of whom will be men, the department plans to convert an 800-bed women’s prison in Stockton to a men’s prison, sending the women to other women’s prisons, which also will become more crowded.

Currently, high-security inmates in men’s prisons are double-bunked in their cells. But under the emergency bed proposal, these inmates will be sleeping in double bunks in floor space outside cells. In prison gymnasiums, which already serve as dorms, inmates will sleep in triple bunks.

Last year, when crime dominated the political talk in Sacramento, no lobby had a stronger voice than the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. The prison guards union pushed to repeal the inmates’ bill of rights, and for the “three strikes” sentencing law.

This year, the union is engaged in negotiations with the department to increase staff to handle the ever-more-cramped prisons. Corrections officials say 4,000 to 5,000 more officers and other employees will be needed to manage the 20,000 additional inmates at existing prisons.

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“When they start putting beds on the floors (of day rooms), you’ve got real (security) problems,” union President Don Novey said.

As if the pressure from inside were not enough, the department also faces renewed scrutiny from the outside. State Sen. Dan Boatwright (D-Concord), the new chairman of the Senate Prison Oversight Committee, is vowing to slash prison costs, and committee member Sen. Tom Campbell (R-Stanford) is pushing to privatize prisons.

Boatwright said that while the department may need some of the emergency beds, he is convinced that it builds “Cadillac” prisons. He made the comments as a Department of Corrections official prepared to testify about the need for another $2 billion to build six new prisons, a first installment on the 15 to 20 new prisons the department says it will need for all the convicts who will be sentenced under “three strikes” in coming years.

“I can absolutely tell you that unless the cost of prison construction per cell is cut in California, at least during the next two years, there will be none approved,” said Boatwright, who is in his last two years in the Senate. “I don’t intend to run for anything. No one can threaten me. No one can make me do anything I don’t want to do.”

The department is also under attack from courts. A federal judge in San Francisco issued a scathing opinion last month about the treatment of inmates at Pelican Bay, and appointed a monitor to oversee the high-security prison.

The FBI is pressing a criminal investigation at Corcoran, where officers have killed seven inmates since the institution opened in 1988. Altogether, California prison guards have shot 37 inmates to death during the past decade, more than three times the total at all other federal and state prisons in the country combined.

Gomez, who is trying to cut the number of fatalities, has added to the guards’ arsenal of non-lethal weapons, giving them pepper spray to temporarily disable unruly prisoners, and shotguns that fire beanbags. In coming months, he said, he hopes to introduce videotaping to monitor officers when they must forcibly extract inmates from their cells.

Gomez has also revised the use-of-force policy, specifically stating that officers cannot fire lethal rounds to break up fistfights, unless life is in jeopardy. Guards have wounded six inmates so far this year, including at least three who were involved in fistfights.

“We need to look at our policy in terms of lethal force,” Gomez said. “We believe officers need more alternatives.”

Among guards, however, there may be resistance to Gomez’s efforts. The union is negotiating with the department over the new use-of-force policy. Said Novey: “There has to be more sensitivity to the officer carrying the weapon. That officer has to have the final call. We can’t afford to lose a facility. They have to have the freedom to fire, and we have to back them.”