Prison Told to Resume Mixing Gang Rivals

Corcoran State Prison will resume the practice of mixing rival gang members in tiny recreation yards even though some high-ranking officers say the policy has had deadly consequences, a Department of Corrections spokesman said Wednesday.

The integration policy has resulted in countless fights between rival inmates, leading to dozens of shootings in which guards fired to break up the fights and sometimes hit the wrong targets, said the former supervisors at Corcoran’s security housing unit.

A Times story Wednesday detailed the officers’ accounts of staged fights and inmates being shot by mistake. The FBI has been investigating Corcoran, which leads the nation’s prisons in shooting deaths, for more than a year. A federal grand jury is meeting this week in Fresno to continue taking evidence for possible criminal indictments.

The integration policy in the unit, which houses the state’s most troublesome inmates, had been dictated by the Department of Corrections in Sacramento. Officers at Corcoran say the violence had eased in recent months because the prison decided on its own to stop putting rival inmates together in the small recreation yard.

Corrections spokesman Tipton C. Kindel said Wednesday that the policy was supposed to be in force and that the department has ordered Corcoran to comply. “The integration policy is still intact,” Kindel said. “It’s the way we determine if an inmate in the security housing unit is ready to return to the general population.”

Inmates do not get out of the security housing unit unless they show they can be peaceful, he said. “We’re not mixing ‘known enemies,’ ” Kindel said. “We’re mixing rival gangsters, and we need to be able to test their ability to get along in a controlled setting.”

Critics say the policy is based on the naive notion that inmates who have been declared violent disciplinary problems at other prisons, especially gang members, will change when thrown together with rivals.

“It makes no sense,” said state Sen. Richard G. Polanco (D-Los Angeles), who is sponsoring a bill to strengthen legislative oversight of state prisons. “We’re talking about some of the most hard-core, violent prisoners in the state. They’re lifelong enemies, and no amount of recreation yard is going to change that.”

The state’s director of corrections, James H. Gomez, was unavailable Wednesday to comment about Corcoran, Kindel said.

In The Times’ story, two captains, two lieutenants and a correctional officer who have cooperated with investigators described brutal treatment of inmates by prison staff who wagered on staged fights in a ritual that came to be known as “gladiators days.” Staff also abused shackled prisoners and schooled officers on how to cover up the abuses in official reports, the cooperating officers said.

All but one of the cooperating officers has retired or transferred to other prisons.

“I was stunned and very saddened that they were actually setting up the fights,” said Polanco, who added that the allegations point up the need to reestablish a joint legislative committee to oversee prison operations, which was disbanded in January 1995. He said the committee could be reactivated later this year.

“Those issues and those policies are the first things we’re going to be dealing with when the committee gets going,” he said. “For too long, Sacramento has focused on prison construction at the expense of keeping an eye on the day-to-day operations inside the prisons.”

Seven Corcoran inmates have been shot and killed since the prison opened in 1988, the most fatal shootings of any prison in the nation. More than 50 inmates have been wounded by gunfire, most of them in the security housing unit.

Reacting to the reassertion of the integration policy, guard Richard Caruso, one of those cooperating with the FBI, said, “The chaos is just going to start again, the fights and the shootings.”