Lawmakers Now Pushing for Prison Reforms

For more than a decade, as California undertook the biggest prison buildup in American history, the state Legislature largely ignored the violence that came with a doubling in the number of prisons, inmates and poorly trained guards.

Over the past three weeks, a panel of state senators and assembly members has tried to play catch-up with a prison system which, according to its own past administrators, has grown wayward and unmanageable.

The panel’s five days of oversight hearings, while focused on brutality and cover-ups by administrators at Corcoran State Prison, also shined an unflattering light on policies and officials steering the state’s entire 33-prison system.

Now, with powerful testimony from whistle-blowers still fresh in mind and the legislative session running out of time, some lawmakers are pushing forward with proposals and recommendations to ensure that a Corcoran-like breakdown never happens again. From 1989 to 1994, seven inmates were shot to death by prison guards in exercise yards and 43 others were wounded, making Corcoran the deadliest prison in the nation.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) is calling for a commission to explore ways to combat the climate of violence inside state prisons. Others are urging that the state Department of Corrections beef up its internal investigation unit assigned to root out corruption or transfer that watchdog role to a new independent agency. Still others are advocating more training for guards, and one legislator, state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), has called for the firing of top corrections officials who ignored Corcoran’s troubles.

In addition, the Department of Corrections, agreeing that its investigation of the shootings at Corcoran was inadequate, has launched a new review of 36 serious and fatal shootings.

One proposal under discussion behind the scenes would create an independent inspector general to keep watch on state prisons. In the wake of the hearings, this idea seems to be gaining bipartisan support.

Some Changes Made

It is unclear if any legislative reforms will be adopted before the current legislative session ends Aug. 31. And even if legislation were approved, it is uncertain whether Gov. Pete Wilson would sign it. Even so, some lawmakers are hoping that Wilson’s current director of corrections, Cal Terhune, will implement key changes on his own, such as strengthening protections for whistle-blowers. Terhune has already beefed up the internal affairs unit.

“No one who participated in these hearings could walk away not knowing there was a problem at Corcoran and that the possibility exists that similar problems may have occurred in other prisons,” said Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), the GOP’s No. 2 leader in the Senate.

Brulte noted the reforms that Terhune has instituted, but he said committee members must ask themselves whether the measures are “enough to ensure that the abuses at Corcoran never take place again.”

“Most of us want to wrap up,” Hayden said. “The question is whether we end with a bang and pass some reforms or we end with a whimper and come back next year.”

The hearings were originally scheduled for two days but legislators and committee consultants were overwhelmed by former Corcoran officers who wanted to tell their tales of brutality and cover-ups--accounts previously detailed in The Times and other newspapers.

The testimony, while long-winded and meandering at times, did offer an unusual peek inside the psyche of a sprawling prison bureaucracy with its own codes and language and tawdry nicknames for guards, wardens and inmates. Among them: “Bone-crusher,” “Mushroom George” and the “Booty Bandit.”

When it came time for corrections officials to answer the charges, some legislators grew frustrated and incredulous at a succession of top bureaucrats who pleaded ignorance to the hows and whys of Corcoran’s meltdown.

For instance, the former director of corrections conceded that he learned years after the fact that guards at the San Joaquin Valley prison were allegedly setting up inmate fistfights and then using the fights as pretext to shoot the combatants. Former director James H. Gomez also told the panel that it took him and other top officials several years to recognize that the department’s integrated yard policy was only increasing violence by pitting rival inmates face to face in small exercise yards.

‘Should Have Known’

It was flaws in the integrated yard policy, testimony showed, that helped turn Corcoran into the nation’s most violent prison.

Gomez and others “were charged with management of our prisons,” said Vasconcellos. “Either they knew or should have known; there are no excuses.

“Ten years of indefensible practices--it took a correctional officer and a lieutenant and exposes in the mass media before anyone in the corrections department would seriously review policies and procedures that made no sense.”

The hearings were prompted by a two-part series in The Times that examined the role of local and state officials watching over Corcoran during its most violent years. Court records and interviews revealed that the escalating violence at Corcoran failed to set off alarms at the Kings County district attorney’s office, the Department of Corrections, the attorney general’s office and the governor’s office.

Gov. Wilson finally asked corrections officials and Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren to investigate Corcoran in 1996, seven years after the first fatal shooting and only after a story in The Times detailed allegations of set-up fights and cover-ups. But the twin state probes ended in mid-1997 with no criminal charges filed against any officers and only a handful of guards given administrative discipline.

Meanwhile, after a lengthy FBI civil rights probe, a federal grand jury in Fresno had indicted eight Corcoran officers for engaging in brutality and cover-ups.

The hearings were called by Vasconcellos, who heads the Public Safety Committee, and Sens. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) and Ruben Ayala (D-Chino), who head separate committees on prison operations and management. They had expressed hope that the first in-depth legislative review of prison violence in more than a decade would steer clear of party politics.

But from the first day, the hearings split into two and sometimes three bickering camps, with Democrats seizing upon the accounts of whistle-blowers as evidence that Wilson and Lungren had failed in their duties to watch over the state’s vast prison system, and Republicans hammering away at the suspected motives of whistle-blowers and The Times.

The Times had obtained 10,000 pages of reports generated by the special corrections team dispatched to Corcoran last year by Wilson. The documents, along with accounts of several high-ranking team members, showed that representatives of the Wilson Administration limited efforts to investigate brutality by officers and mismanagement by top corrections officials.

Guards’ Contributions

The team members said the powerful state prison guards union, which has contributed $667,000 to Wilson and $159,000 to Lungren in recent years, was allowed to stymie almost every attempt to question key officers about a broad range of alleged crimes and cover-ups.

The governor’s point man on the probe, Del Pierce, ordered the team to steer clear of the 50 fatal and serious shootings and the policies sent down from Sacramento that led to violence, investigators said. They were told they could not compel key officers to talk about their knowledge of any brutality or cover-ups.