Agency’s Trouble-Shooter Finds Himself Under Fire

When a popular counselor was slain at the state’s largest juvenile corrections facility in the summer of 1996, an up-from-the-ranks superintendent was dispatched to straighten out the institution and beef up security.

Now, his tenure is at the center of a probe ordered by Gov. Gray Davis at the California Youth Authority facility in Chino, where investigators say they’ve found a pattern of abuse and brutality against inmates.

“I was told to go down and fix the place because it was broke and they [his superiors] knew it was broke,” said Steve Chatten, the veteran youth authority official who was sent in to do the job. “I’m being sacrificed.”

In 1998, then-youth authority Director Francisco “Frank” Alarcon, an appointee of former Gov. Pete Wilson, nominated Chatten for a national warden of the year award, citing his “excellent” management style. This year Chatten was promoted to acting chief deputy director of the youth authority by the new director, Gregorio Zermeno, a Davis appointee.

But within a few months, Chatten was reassigned to another agency, stripped of his right to carry a concealed weapon and quizzed by agents from the state inspector general’s office about a variety of events that occurred on his watch at the Chino facility, the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility.

The agents have turned up a series of improper punishments directed by staff at inmates, especially in a lockup section referred to as “the rock.” Davis administration officials say it was there that employees forced rival gang members to confront one another in a ritual called “the Friday night fights.” These sessions were reportedly a way of testing whether the inmates, ranging in age from 18 to 25, could get along in the prison’s general population.

Youth authority officials said the sessions--officially called “phase III unrestrained group programming”--were discontinued Sept. 24 when Davis issued an order to end a number of improper practices. Besides the fights, the misconduct allegedly included the use of a potentially lethal riot control gun at close range, injection of anti-psychotic drugs by nonmedical staff and disregard of inmate grievances.

One high-ranking Davis administration official said Chatten--who has not been publicly accused of improper actions--was transferred from his new executive post partially because of the alleged misconduct at Stark during his two years as its superintendent.

Zermeno declined to say why he removed Chatten from the post. Zermeno would say only that he had found “issues that caused me to lose confidence” in his former deputy.

Sitting in the living room of his apartment, Chatten, who now plans to retire, said last week that Stark was a troubled institution before he arrived and after he was promoted to Sacramento.

“When I got there it was about 100% [messed up] and when I left it was about 80% [messed up]. . . . We’re going back to the ‘50s that this place has been mismanaged,” Chatten said.

Chatten said he is willing to shoulder responsibility for what happened during the two years he was superintendent. “If there was an incident where there was physical abuse and I didn’t know about it, then shame on me,” he said.

The Davis-initiated probe is continuing and is expected to focus on other state-operated youth facilities.

The inquiry grew from the governor’s desire to safeguard inmates from excessive force and brutality at prisons and youth authority facilities, according to administration officials. It started soon after Davis named Steve White, a former Sacramento County district attorney, as inspector general.

The Legislature last year broadened the authority of the watchdog post after The Times reported that the state had ignored brutality by guards at Corcoran State Prison and that the result of two state investigations was a whitewash.

With nearly 8,000 inmates, California operates one of the nation’s largest juvenile justice programs, and Stark, with 1,347 inmates, has more than any other juvenile detention center operated by the state. Altogether, the youth authority runs 11 institutions and four camps.

Although the state’s prison system is designed to punish wrongdoers, youth authority has a twin mission: to offer both discipline and education. These goals can sometimes clash as teachers seek freedom in their classrooms and guards seek stricter discipline for increasingly violent wards of the state.

The need for stronger security was underscored by the August 1996 slaying of counselor Ineasie M. Baker. Her body, which allegedly had been stuffed in a dumpster, was found two days later, partly wrapped in a blanket, in a Pomona landfill.

An inmate, James Ferris, a convicted murderer, was arrested and charged with the slaying. His trial is scheduled to begin early next year.

Mike Ramos, a San Bernardino County deputy district attorney, said that around the time Baker’s shift ended she was seen with Ferris entering a storage room. Ferris’ palm print was later found imprinted in her blood on a box in the room, and Baker’s keys were discovered in an Ajax can in his room, Ramos said.

Baker’s family has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the youth authority and several of its staff members, alleging that the officer was beaten, stabbed and strangled by Ferris, who was free to move about the facility at will without supervision.

“This loud, violent and brutal attack took place over a period of many minutes” just a few steps away from where prison officials were working, according to the action filed in federal court in Riverside.

The state attorney general’s office, representing most of the staff, would not comment.

Don Baker, the dead woman’s husband and himself a correctional officer at a state prison, said that in the wake of his wife’s killing, Chatten beefed up security.

“This guy came in and made changes that were needed,” Baker said.

Chatten said he installed video cameras in the facility and sought to be more vigilant when he saw breaches in security, such as parents being allowed to visit inmates in non-visiting areas.

Several current and former Stark employees told The Times that Chatten was “an Old West” cowboy who repeatedly kept wards in cells, where they could not receive education and other training.

The staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the problem at Stark was that the lock-down unit in “the rock” had very little oversight from top-level managers such as Chatten.

A staff attorney for the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, which monitors juvenile facilities, said there was plenty of blame to go around for what went wrong. “The whole culture of the youth authority has been expressed in just those kinds of repressive measures,” said Sue Burrell.

“It would be a real mistake to think that moving him [Chatten] out of position would make this a better system. The problem is that the system has lost sight of the [rehabilitative] purpose it’s supposed to serve,” she said.