Lock ‘Em Up, Lose the Key--and Duck

From outside its fences, the Peter Pitchess Detention Center could be mistaken for a simple farm. There are hayfields and dairy barns and grazing cattle, all spread across a rolling, foothill landscape in the northern reaches of Los Angeles County. The guts of the jail are set back in a canyon, completely out of view. This no doubt pleases the real estate developers who have begun stacking salmon-colored homes up the hillsides: A jail view is never a strong selling point.

In a broader sense, the isolation of the county facility is a comfort to more than just its immediate neighbors. The zeal with which the state has embarked on its great prison buildup is matched only by the yawning disinterest in what goes on inside the concrete repositories. At this moment in the California epoch, the prevailing attitude toward prisoners of all stripes--state or county, murderer or pickpocket--is this:

Lock ‘em up, lose the key, and don’t bother us with any whining about tough conditions.

It’s supposed to be tough.

In there.

*

Tough it has been. For example, here at Peter Pitchess, more than 120 inmates have been injured over the past week in a series of brawls involving as many as 5,000 prisoners. “Worst I’ve seen in 15 years,” said a guard. He spoke through a small square window cut in a metal door. This was an unauthorized conversation--quick, covert and informative. He described the battles as essentially a struggle for control of the jail, fought with shards of ceramic tile and toilet parts and anything else handy for cutting or beating.

He told of an inmate who had been held down by four others and pummeled with a bed. The subsequent CAT scan of the beaten man’s skull resembled “a jigsaw puzzle. “And this,” the guard said, “was a guy who was only in for drunken driving. He had been a productive member of society. And now he is probably a vegetable for life. But no one cares, right? Unless it is their father or brother, who cares about what happens in here?

“Nobody pays any attention.”

Arthur Sommer had no choice but to pay attention. The 33-year-old auto shop supervisor was in jail for parole violation when the combat began. “Basically,” he said the other day, freshly released, “all you could do was duck. People were getting thumped left and right. You could hear their heads getting thumped. It went from cell to dorm, cell to dorm. It was pretty wild.”

When they talk of locking up animals and throwing away the key, remember Arthur Sommer. He’s a well-groomed young man, personable, with a good job, nice clothes and bad luck. Leaving a party, a friend slipped a small dose of cocaine into his pocket. He was caught and placed on probation. Down the line he missed a probation meeting--he said he’d been summoned unexpectedly to his job--and off he went to Pitchess. He made mistakes, Sommer will admit. Still, as a threat to society, he hardly seems worthy of the cell space. But that’s how it goes, in these days of getting tough on crime, and too bad, Arthur.

*

Everyone agrees overcrowded conditions feed the tension within Pitchess and other California jails and prisons. Racial animosities carried in from the streets feed it too. In Sommer’s view, the added presence of inmates facing “three strikes” banishment simply makes it burst. “The ‘three strikes’ guys,” Sommer said, “wear these purple ID bracelets, and they’ll wave them at you. Like: ‘Stay away from me.’ These are young guys, looking at 25 to life. They have given up on the system. They just go off, beat up anybody. They don’t care anymore.”

And so there it is. People inside--some of the meanest ones, anyway--don’t care. People outside don’t care. A crime-weary society has set out to lock away as many criminals as possible, for as long as possible, under conditions that are as miserable as possible. Rehabilitation, prisoner rights--these notions have fallen out of fashion, laughable artifacts of a softer generation.

Forgotten in all this, of course, is the fact that these now-discredited reforms have a history too. It is the story of Attica and San Quentin and Soledad, of a bloody cycle of harsh conditions and deadly riots and brutal responses. When Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the Prisoners Bill of Rights, it was not because he wanted to coddle criminals. It was because the prisons were primed to explode. In this context, what has happened at Pitchess over the past week can be seen as California’s prison future. And as it arrives, those of us on the outside won’t know the half of its horrors. Inside, a different story.