Prison Tries to Put Cork in Inmates’ Illegal Brew

It is a full-bodied wine with a bouquet redolent of moldy peaches and a finish that can evoke everything from all-purpose bathroom cleaner to uric acid.

In prisons, it is known as pruno -- cellblock wine made from fruit, sugar and mess-hall punch. It is potent, easy to brew and has been around for ages.

But officials at Los Angeles County’s only state prison have come up with a plan to make pruno as rare as a 1945 Chateau Latour Bordeaux.

In October, the maximum-security lockup in Lancaster removed fresh fruit -- the preferred base for pruno -- from the boxed lunches delivered daily to the cells of its 4,000 inmates.

The goal, prison spokesman Lt. Ron Nipper said, is to reduce violent incidents at the institution. In the first nine months of the year, 102 assaults on staff and 122 inmate-on-inmate violent incidents were reported.

“With a lot of our serious incidents, the inmates are drunk,” Nipper said. “We’ve got to put a serious damper on making alcohol.”

The crackdown is not only an attempt to make the prison safer but also part of a push by the state Department of Corrections to make prisoners healthier and reduce long-term medical costs. Since 1999, the state’s 33 prisons have been phasing in standardized “heart healthy” menus that feature balanced meals, low-fat foods and fresh fruit.

But this year, Sacramento asked wardens to crack down on pruno, arguing that dietary health gains are nullified when prisoners consistently get drunk and turn violent.

The move is also part of a broader campaign to treat inmates with substance-abuse problems. About 85% of the state’s 160,000 inmates were addicted to drugs or alcohol when they committed their crimes, state corrections spokesman Russ Heimerich said.

In the last seven years, the department has increased from 400 to 8,500 the number of prison beds set aside for substance-abuse treatment. And while some prison guards once turned a blind eye to drunk inmates, they are increasingly realizing that substance-abuse treatment and tougher anti-liquor enforcement may help reduce recidivism rates.

“The idea is to get them free of what they’re addicted to,” Heimerich said. “And people who are clearheaded are more likely to make more rational choices -- including whether to commit violent acts.”

State corrections officials are considering taking the fresh fruit ban systemwide. Prisons already are prohibited from serving three popular pruno ingredients -- oranges, raisins and sugar packets. But a state report determined that creative prisoners can make pruno from yams, flavored gelatin, honey, hard candies -- anything with sugars that can be converted into alcohol in the fermentation process.

Frustrated prison officials say they can’t ban everything.

“Some institutions have tried, and they’ve found that about the only thing they can serve is meat,” Heimerich said. “You can make [pruno] out of ketchup. Some inmates were even using the frosting off of cakes. It’s pretty much an unwinnable battle.”

Lancaster prison officials say it’s too early to tell whether the new regulation is having a direct effect on pruno production. Because of a number of recent violent incidents, some of the yards have remained locked down for months, which means that for now, some prisoners receive all meals in their cells.

Though under normal conditions prisoners would no longer have fresh fruit in their living quarters, they still receive fruit at cafeterias during breakfast and dinner. It’s a solution, Nipper said, that avoids any conflict with the Corrections Department’s guideline that prisoners receive 15 servings of fresh fruit each week.

They are also hoping the policy helps them avoid a problem that occurred at Salinas Valley State Prison earlier this year. When officials there replaced fresh fruit with canned juices and fruit cocktail, inmates invoked the 8th Amendment, citing its ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Fruit Back on Menu

The state inspector general’s office conducted an investigation in March and sided with the inmates, forcing officials to reintroduce fruit on the menu, state officials said.

At San Quentin, officials rely on cell searches to combat pruno production. They also keep sugar and yeast -- which speeds the fermentation -- away from inmate prison workers, said spokesman Lt. Vernell Crittendon.

Even at Lancaster, corrections officers concede that it will be difficult to stop pruno production. The basic recipes are simple and require only a rudimentary knowledge of the fermentation process, in which sugars are broken down into ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide in the presence of yeast.

In his self-published book, “The Alaskan Bootlegger’s Bible,” author Leon Kania offers a pruno recipe that calls for sugar, water or juice, baker’s yeast and raisins or grapes.

San Quentin death row inmate Jarvis Masters calls for fruit cocktail, oranges, white sugar and ketchup in his 1992 poem “Recipe for Prison Pruno” -- a PEN award-winning work that intersperses precise brewing instructions with Masters’ execution sentence.

Most prison brewers let the ingredients ferment in a plastic bag, then share the potent results with cellmates who have contributed their fruit to the mix. The end result, by most accounts, is best gulped quickly while holding one’s nose, though Roger Howard, a former inmate of the Oregon state prison system in the 1950s, said he was able to produce a few pleasant pruno vintages.

By the time Howard, who grew up in a family of bootleggers, was sent to prison in 1952, he had already learned the tricks of his parents’ trade. He made his pruno in the prison boiler room, where he was assigned to a work detail. He and fellow inmates would smuggle it back to their cells in their boots.

Howard, now 67, still recalls the effects of pruno, which may help explain its enduring popularity. “It’d get you up and running. You’d just lay back and make sure you have a cellmate, someone to [talk] with, and not let the guards catch you. You know -- you sort of had an out, there, for a little bit.”

Charles Hughes, a corrections officer at Lancaster, said pruno consumption in state prison mirrors drinking habits on the outside, with increases at Christmas, Fourth of July and Cinco de Mayo.

In the state system, inmates caught with alcohol can receive a number of punishments, ranging from criminal charges to a loss of good-time credits.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Capt. Rick Adams, who heads the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, said that pruno is a bigger problem than drugs at the 6,800-inmate facility. For years, the jail has been so overcrowded that it is too dangerous to serve meals in cafeterias. Because all meals are delivered to cells, pruno is everywhere, he said.

“The searches are ongoing. But you know how they have to paint the Golden Gate Bridge? They have to start painting at one end before they’re done painting at the other. That’s us. We’re constantly finding gallons of the stuff.”