The Gulag Beat Goes On and On

Last Monday, after a poorly prepared prosecution and some curious decisions by Superior Court Judge Louis Bissig, a Kings County jury found four Corcoran State Prison guards innocent of charges that they had engineered the rape of a prisoner, Eddie Dillard, by another inmate notorious for his sexual predations.

This doesn’t close the book on Corcoran. Upcoming in a U.S. district court in Fresno is the prosecution of eight Corcoran guards on charges partly arising out of the so-called “gladiator days” first reported by Mark Arax in The Times, when guards would stage fights between inmates and from time to time shoot dead one of the antagonists. Those who predicted the recent acquittal in Kings County express similar reserve about the likelihood that federal prosecutors will win a guilty verdict, not least because the accused can argue that they were acting within Corcoran’s policy guidelines.

An optimist could argue that though Corcoran’s guards have never suffered the sanction of a guilty verdict, the publicity and investigations have improved the situation in Corcoran and probably in other prisons, too. The wave of fatal shootings has subsided.

Pessimists can point to a series of probes sidetracked or deep-sixed by state agencies, such as the Department of Corrections and the state attorney general’s office in the Dan Lungren era. All this surely encourages prison guards to conclude that they are beyond sanction.

The guards’ union--the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.--has come a long way since it won its representation election in 1980, amid the first surge of the prison building boom. Back then it had 1,600 guards; today, it has 28,000 guards, a $17-million budget, 17 staff attorneys and huge political clout. When Greg Strickland, district attorney of Kings County, prosecuted some Corcoran guards for the infamous “greet the bus” incident (when new prisoners were beaten), the union put $30,000 behind his opponent in the next election. Strickland went down.

Last July, Bill Lockyer, California’s current attorney general, tried to put through a bill giving his office power to police the prison system. Lockyer told legislators that local district attorneys had admitted that they dare not go up against the CCPOA. Lockyer found out what they were talking about. His bill sailed through the state Senate, then sank in the Assembly. Lockyer quoted one Assembly member, Jim Battin (R-La Quinta), who later denied it, as saying: “I’m sorry, but I’m whoring for the CCPOA.” Battin got $105,000 from the guards union in the last four years.

Can anyone curb the power of the prison guards? Don’t look to Gov. Gray Davis. He collected an endorsement plus $2.3 million from the CCPOA for his 1998 campaign and more since. He’s said thank you several times: He vetoed a bill that would have shifted parole violators to community-based programs, which would have lessened the need for prison guards; he vetoed a bill rescinding the ban on journalists’ interviewing inmates face to face, and he narrowly failed in a bid to give the CCPOA $4 million in public money for its legal defense fund.

So here we have the gulag paradigm. The “war on drugs” plus savage sentencing laws engender an ever-bloating prison population, hence more prison guards, whose increasingly powerful union presses for even stiffer sentences and yet more prisons to provide yet more jobs--all this at a time when the “lock ‘em all up forever” hysteria is finally beginning to subside. It will take a lot of political courage of the sort displayed by Lockyer to stop that kind of malignant institutional momentum.