For These Youths, It Wasn’t Another Day at the Office

While other youngsters around the country spent Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day touring law firms and sales offices, 13-year-old Branden Brittain joined his father at the Lancaster state prison and learned how to make a crude knife using only a cigarette lighter and a Styrofoam cup.

Branden was among 20 or so children of prison personnel who spent a few hours Thursday learning about the challenges and dangers their parents face every day at work.

They learned about the homemade prison wine called “pruno,” and sampled a prison-made lunch. They also signed a form explaining that they shouldn’t expect negotiations if they were taken hostage.

The children, ranging in age from 12 to mid-teens, laughed uneasily about the form and at first seemed a little overwhelmed by the desert prison. But by day’s end, they had asked a series of questions worthy of a state Senate hearing:

How are inmates punished if they attack someone? Where do they get all that contraband? And what’s your annual budget?

The children never got near the cells and spent time in the administration building, a classroom or on a bus touring the prison well outside its lethal electric fence. From that safe vantage, tour guides showed the youths where the guards check out their rifles, where the inmates hone their bricklaying skills, and where a staff member was assaulted this month.

“Prisons are kind of a secret thing,” Branden’s father, guard David Brittain, said as the children piled off the bus. But “it’s important for kids to come in and see what their parents do. We protect society.”

Despite its no-nonsense primer on the violent realities of prison, the children-to-work program has been a hit at Lancaster and some other prisons around the state for years, demonstrating how deeply the corrections system has worked itself into the fabric of Californians’ lives.

At a time when California’s prison system is barraged by criticism -- that it can’t manage its money, that it’s a revolving door for criminals, that the guards union wields too much power -- Thursday was a chance for Brittain and other personnel to show their children that they’re on the side of the good guys.

Lt. Charles Hughes, a guard and president of the local chapter of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., said he feared that recent criticism of the prison system and his union left an impression that guards were “just idiots, and we’re just walking around dumb.”

California operates the largest state prison system in the nation, incarcerating 162,000 inmates and employing nearly 50,000 people. Lancaster’s prison alone provides north Los Angeles County with 1,200 well-paying jobs -- a fact that has tempered safety concerns that have lingered among locals since the prison opened in 1993.

Lynn Harrison, a physical plant supervisor and former Lancaster mayor, has been running the prison’s children-to-work program for the last five years or so. The effort, she said, was part of the prison system’s bid to go “mainstream.”

“Why should we separate ourselves from the mainstream culture?” she said. “Other parents take their kids to work. These children understand that their parents work in a prison. It’s not like Disneyland ... but it’s a positive impact for the community.”

On the other hand, there were prison personnel like Hughes, who said he liked the idea of the children-to-work program but declined to bring his own children.

“I do a very dirty, tough job,” Hughes said. “I work with some of the worst [inmates] in the world. Do I really want to expose my family to that environment?”

Others are drawn to the program because it both demystifies prison and promises sobering interviews with convicts -- a “scared straight” approach that appealed to the mother of Javon Smith, 12.

The mother, who didn’t want her name used, works in the hiring department at Lancaster; her husband is a guard there. But she said Javon’s biological father is serving a 25-to-life murder sentence at Centinela State Prison.

“This is to let him see both sides of it,” she said. “The employee side and the inmate side. And to make sure he stays on the right side.”

Indeed, Javon followed the three-hour program Thursday with eyes that never seemed to blink.

“It’s scary,” he said at the end of the day. “I don’t want to do what [my father] did.”

Harrison pointed out that taking children to a maximum-security prison was different than taking them to the bank.

She launched into a discussion of the prison’s physical plant. She also talked about all of the bad things their parents encounter inside the prison: attacks, threats, extortion, drug smuggling.

The students watched a video called “A Career for the New Millennium,” a Corrections Department recruitment film. It promised “challenging” and “rewarding” work in prison that never got boring.

Another video was a local TV newscast about the prison’s “honor yard,” where prisoners can live if they promise to renounce drugs and gang violence. It included footage of a gang member slashing another inmate’s throat.

After about an hour, Officer D.J. Williams clomped into the room, his uniform pants tucked into black combat boots.

He opened a large wooden box full of handmade prison weapons that guards had confiscated through the years. The students peppered him with questions. That one is made of soap, he said. That one of old wires. That one of sharpened turkey bones.

Williams seemed to catch himself as he taught the children how to make a stabbing weapon with a lighter and a Styrofoam cup. Maybe, he said, they could use it as a “camping tool” in a pinch.

The inmate guest speakers almost didn’t make it. Their minimum-security facility had just been locked down due to a fight. When they showed up, they spoke convincingly about the perils of heroin, alcohol and armed robbery.

Robert Hugo, 43, serving time for a parole violation, said he kept getting in trouble. “I won’t pay attention. I don’t listen to my parole officer. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Hugo told his young audience that he wished he had stayed in school. The children watched in silence.

As the morning drew to a close, the children said they were impressed.

Branden said he was considering a career in law enforcement. He said he liked the idea of being “kinda like, taking control -- being the top guy kinda thing.”

Twins Ghaliah Fakhoury and Danna Fakhoury, 15, said they had a new respect for the work their father, Associate Warden Aref Fakhoury, did every day. But they were pretty sure they wouldn’t be looking for a job in prison after college.

When asked for an explanation, Danna made a face that looked like she had just spent the day at an insurance adjuster’s office.

“This seems really boring to me,” she said. “I’m not into this stuff, really.”