Jail Team Helps Keep the Peace by Cell Division

His name was Candy. He was a striking 6-footer, 170 pounds of manliness, except for the breast implants. He’d been arrested for beating up some of his family.

The deputies at Ventura County’s main jail took one look and realized they couldn’t simply toss Candy in with the rest of the male inmates. He would surely be attacked.

Candy tried to convince them he was a she and belonged with the other females, but the jail guards didn’t like that idea any better. So they snapped a green plastic band around his wrist, signifying he was an administrative segregation inmate entitled to his own cell.

It was the right call. A few weeks later, Candy began wearing a white teddy under his inmate jumpsuit.

“That kind of thing doesn’t seem to go over well with the macho supermen we have in here,” said Deputy Bill Ayub, 31, with a smile.

Ayub’s job is keeping the Candys and the supermen apart. As one of 10 deputies assigned to the jail’s classification unit, he is a peacekeeper among lawbreakers. He decides which inmates should be housed together, which ones should be kept apart, and which should be isolated.

Some of the calls are easy: Skinheads can only share cells with whites. Oxnard’s Colonia gang members can’t be housed with Ventura Avenue gang members, who in turn can’t be housed with Santa Paula’s 12th Street gang members.

Child molesters and the mentally disturbed must be locked up alone.

But other cases require a keen eye and an ear for jailhouse gossip. Is an inmate targeted for a beating? Which gangs are joining forces behind bars and who are their rivals?

Any slip-ups could mean bloodshed.

That’s why Ayub and his partner, Deputy Scott Sedgwick, 26, spend time talking to inmates every day, taking note of distinctive tattoos. Like the 187, the penal code section for murder, plastered across one inmate’s forehead. Everything they find out is tucked away in computer files along with the inmate’s address and date of birth.

“I love this job,” said Sedgwick, who considers his unit the CIA of the jail world. But Sedgwick expects a promotion soon that will take him out of the jail and into a patrol car. “If I could, I wouldn’t go to the streets.”

On a busy weekend night, classification deputies are scrambling to stay on top of the steady stream of inmates--often well over 100--flooding into the jail.

“It’s nonstop,” said Deputy Dean Worthy whizzing through a hectic Friday night. Though not a classification deputy, Worthy is in charge of new arrivals until they are given a housing assignment. And he knows the kind of traffic passing through the jail on a busy weekend night.

“It’s just pat them down, book them, move them and just keep it moving, keep it moving,” Worthy said.

Making sure it all happens the way it’s supposed to are classification deputies such as Joe Mulrooney. During his 12-hour shift, he sits behind at a computer running background checks on every new inmate.

The system is logged into the Department of Justice and the FBI, allowing Mulrooney to find out within minutes if an inmate has a violent criminal history and should be issued a red wrist band. That’s the mark of an aggressive inmate who can only be placed with other violent offenders.

Other wrist band designations: yellow, psychiatric; orange, protective custody; white, an unsentenced, general population inmate; blue, sentenced, minimum security.

It wasn’t always done this way.

At the old jail on Poli Street, the only classification was racial. In special cases, jail staffers with good memories helped with housing assignments.

“We might have a deputy on duty who would remember a guy coming in and say, ‘Oh, yeah, you can’t put this guy in jail. He has TB,’ ” said Sgt. Arnie Aviles, supervisor of the classification unit. “But that was about it.”

But with the onset of AIDS, more gangs and a generally more violent jail population, Aviles said, devising a sophisticated system for housing inmates became a must.

“When I was first working the jail back then,” Aviles said, “if we had three murderers, that was surprising. Now we’re just packed with them. . . . Some of these people are going to be in prison for life, so they have nothing to lose. We can’t just keep them with someone who came in for a nonviolent crime.”

The classification unit was created in 1981, when the new Ventura jail opened at the County Government Center on Theiss Street. The Poli facility was composed of several large dormitories, but the new, larger jail has a series of two-person cells, allowing deputies to control who would be housed together--and who would be kept apart.

The system, authorities say, significantly reduced jail bickering and brawling.

It is not, however, entirely up to authorities where to house inmates. On occasion, the other inmates within a section force the decision.

Ayub and Sedgwick were greeted one day by an inmate standing at the door of a jail section in his boxer shorts, holding a box containing his meager jail belongings, his mattress rolled under one arm.

“The other guys in there took his clothes and told him to get out,” Sedgwick said.

He was a white inmate assigned to a predominantly Hispanic section. In his cell, another inmate found papers covered with racial slurs. It turned out he was a white supremacist and his cellmates were not going to tolerate his presence.

“It’s just safer for us to move him out,” Ayub said. “If he’s in there with 24 other inmates that don’t want him there, he’s in trouble. So we moved him.”

The inmate’s classification was changed to protective custody--something not always welcomed by those the deputies are trying to protect.

To inmates, the orange band signifying protective custody means one of two things: a child molester or a snitch.

“To the guys in here, that’s the lowest of the low,” Sedgwick said.

For the white supremacist inmate, the PC badge caused fellow supremacists in the jail to turn their back on him, assuming he had ratted somebody out. Desperate to shake free of the orange band stigma, the inmate cut a deal with deputies.

“He grabbed one of us and said, ‘Look, I’ll tell you whatever you need to know, just get me out of protective custody,’ ” Sedgwick said. “And we did.”

Sedgwick and Ayub believe the fear of protective custody kept one inmate from acknowledging he’s been in danger since an inmate uprising in January.

A small riot broke out in the section for violent offenders after an inmate was doused with pepper spray during lunch. Other inmates protested by shouting, breaking food trays and smearing shampoo on the floor.

The inmate Ayub and Sedgwick believe has since been in danger is suspected by the others of giving up too much information to deputies investigating the riot. Word in the jail, Ayub and Sedgwick say, is that other prisoners want to “reach out and touch this guy.”

But seated in front of the deputies, the inmate insisted he didn’t know what they were talking about--no one was out to get him.

“No, no, everything is fine,” he said, casually slouching in his chair.

The deputies believe that rather than admit his predicament, the inmate has chosen to “take it like a man.”

“It’s their own system of justice in here,” Ayub said. “In the inmate world, if he steps up and he takes it, then they might just say, ‘OK, he took care of business,’ and that’s the end.”

Classification deputies must walk a line between being friendly enough that inmates will use them as confidants, yet never compromising their role as law enforcers.

“Sometimes [other deputies] will see us smoking and joking with inmates, and later they’ll say, ‘Oh, how’s your buddy?’ Some people have a hard time with that,” said Sedgwick. “But as long as we talk to these people every day, every once in a while we’ll come across some information, something good--something that may even end up saving someone’s life.”