Pelican Bay Riot (20 page)

I pulled the reports through the side of the cell and realized what was happening. They’d decided to focus on Damon because they didn’t have time to focus on me since the D.A. wouldn’t pick up the charges and keep me from making my parole date. I’d be going home within 5 days according to the Title 15. With me gone, I wouldn’t be able to be a witness for Damon that he didn’t coerce me into doing what I did…

Sergeant Torrez took one last parting shot with, “If you would have cooperated with me you wouldn’t be in this mess. I could have saved your ass from living in solitary. It still might not be too late... If you give me enough good information about the gangs in here, I still might be able to help you avoid this hole for the rest of your life.”

I knew I was going home and leaving Damon to this fate. He still had 3 years left on his sentence and it looked like it might be spent in isolation.

I looked at him and watched him say, “No comment.”

A couple hours later Lieutenant Jackson showed up. He also had reports. He handed them through the side of the cell. We took our time reading them and found the Lieutenant had investigated more thoroughly and found the truth and it defended us, somewhat. We listened to him say the same thing that we were reading…“I pretty much know with certainty what happened over there to cause that riot. The Mexicans were without any leadership and there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Also, somehow, there was enough heroin on the yard to kill 100 people. From there it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the White inmate who overdosed ran up a drug debt. I also know that a year ago on the same yard the White prisoners were attacked in a riot that sent 16 White inmates to the infirmary on stretchers. It was over a drug debt. You guys were probably just protecting yourselves the best you knew how. I’ve been around these California prison corridors for 30 years and I know it’s just a system of warehouses filled with mostly drug addicts and alcoholics. I don’t like what Sergeant Torrez is doing to you Smith. He wants to become an Inmate Gang Investigator and his passion to do so pushes him too far.”

It was nice to hear but was it and the report enough to help Damon? Probably not. Lieutenant Jackson shook his head and kept being honest. “B.J. you’re going home tomorrow. Smith you’re going to be stuck in this cell, in isolation for at least 3 months while the investigation proceeds. You will probably do the rest of your sentence in here and Pelican Bay while the Administration decides if they can validate you as a prison gang leader. Make the best of it and good luck.

Chapter 4

Driving, I passed most of the L.A Mountains when I got a call from my wife. I pulled over at the base of another mountainous hill, the Grapevine.

“Hi Beautiful.”

“Hi baby, how’s the drive going?”

“It’s going okay. I’m just daydreaming about what happened to Damon…”

“I know you love him like a brother, but thank God you’re making it. Where are you?”

“I’m at the bottom of the Grapevine. I pulled off the freeway to answer your call so I can concentrate on this hill.”

“You concentrate on that hill honey and don’t forget how many hills you’ve already climbed and conquered. I’m proud of you baby. I love you.”

“Love you too beautiful.”

I pulled back on the road and started thinking about the research I’d done on Pelican Bay while driving up the hill. According to Pelican Bay State Prison’s own website and mission statement, it was designed to house California’s most serious criminal offenders in a secure, safe and disciplined institutional setting with one half of the prison housing maximum security inmates in a general population setting where inmates were able to get limited yard together, and with the other half of the prisoners housed in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) designed for inmates presenting serious management concerns. They went on to say that the S.H.U. is a modern design for inmates who are difficult management cases, prison gang members, and violent maximum security inmates.

There was too much grey area for S.H.U. confinement…

Difficult management cases could mean too many things. Prisoners who bucked the system as jail house lawyers and filed suits on behalf of themselves or other inmates were retaliated against.

As for prison gang members, it took 2 of 3 things to validate a prisoner for S.H.U. confinement currently. The first thing was self admission. You screwed yourself if you admitted you ran with a gang. I thought back to the many times I’d been in prison. Every time a prison inmate was classified to a new yard for housing in the California Prison System, a team of counselors, Inmate Gang Investigators and the Warden were present with a pen and paper and a barrage of questions like, “Do you have any enemies?”, Then, “Who do you run with?” If you were a Black inmate, “Do you run with the Crips or Bloods?” If you were a Mexican inmate, “Do you run with the southern Mexicans or northern Mexicans? If you were a White inmate, “Do you run with the Peckerwoods or Skin heads?” I had to force them to write down that I was neither and couldn’t I just be a White man born of my momma? Either the classification team was inexperienced every time, or they were overzealous to label inmates. To start the questions with, do you have any potential enemies and follow it up with, which gang do you run with for protection, is a setup. I remembered how I saw many young, first time prisoners get to the yard in a hurry to join sides and tattoo ink on their bodies to represent that protection, that belonging. Those tattoos led to a more obscure form of self admission and the second factor in determining gang validation. An often times artistic image combined with a county the inmate is from is looked at like a gang tattoo. The third possible way to validation is for 2 or more prisoners to testify that another prisoner is a gang member with a certain level of influence, hardly a credible way for the prison system to determine things.

The third factor for S.H.U. housing according to Pelican Bay-is to house violent maximum security inmates. That goes with the territory, especially considering that classification process where inmates are pitted against each other from the start. The Crips and Bloods are notorious for animosity, as are the southern and northern Mexicans and for the Whites, the Peckerwoods and Skin heads. It’s always a battle for power and control to decide who uses which showers, which side of the dayroom prisoners can congregate in, or who uses which tables, handball courts, basketball courts and workout bars on the prison yard.

I looked out the window at the Grapevine Mountain at the ravines with all the turns and twist and remembered the letters Damon sent. He’d spent an additional 18 months in the Hole-Administrative-Segregation, C-6, where I’d left him on my parole date before taking the State Prison bus to the Pelican Bay S.H.U. The original reason for his S.H.U. confinement for being a shot caller who forced that riot to happen had been thrown out. But they were still keeping him as a validated gang member. In my letters asking him how that was possible I’d found that 2 other validated gang members held captive by the Pelican Bay S.H.U. had gone through the debriefing process to get out of the S.H.U.’s isolation. After the debriefing process they had been transferred to a brand new level 4 prison built in Delano, California. The prisoners that had testified against Damon and others in writing in the debriefing papers left the cells at Pelican Bay that Damon and the others filled. Pelican Bay was now breaking a percentage of prisoners down psychologically and regurgitating them.

I thought back to how well I knew Damon. He, like me, had grown up in rich, Republican south Orange County, California where beautiful beaches and mansions peppered the landscape. He’d grown up surfing and skateboarding in high school and like many others began to experiment with drugs. He had never joined a gang.

In his letters to me he had to be careful what he said so that his words couldn’t be twisted into any more evidence in the form of self admission. Every letter in and out was photocopied, studied and put in his file. In one letter in response to my question of how the Administration determined validation, he danced just close enough for me to make out how his name was used by the 2 prisoners who had debriefed. His name had shown up into the wrong hands on the Roll Call list, through the grapevine.

I remembered the first time I went to prison on drug charges at 19 years old. It was an intimidating ordeal, being confined to a cell as the new kid on the block. Like any survivor, I studied my older cell mate and others on the tier to learn how to adapt to prison life. Within my first week in the cell my cell mate told me he needed to write my name down on a Roll Call list. He explained the list was sent to whoever had control of the yard to keep track of things in an organized way. I learned that child molesters, rapist and snitches were uncovered through this process and was impressed with the underground vigilante justice system. The Roll Call list was also utilized to keep track of the many different neighborhood gangs. On the lower level California prison yards the Roll Call list wasn’t used that much or sent upstream to the powers that determined things but on the higher level prison yards the list made it to other prisons like Pelican Bay. Prison gang members at the top of the food chain were utilizing the list to organize a way to tax underlings below them. Now, with many more prisons being built like Pelican Bay’s model of extreme isolation, it looked like the list was being used as an avenue to get out of isolation…

Chapter 5

The reason I was desperate to see how my friend Damon was holding up was because the prisoners at Pelican Bay had started a hunger strike. My letters had stopped getting to him. I knew my letters weren’t getting to him based on his letters back to me; he wasn’t answering my questions.

The first letter after he let me know about the hunger strike mentioned that after the prisoners turned down the first 9 meals, the prison guards responded by retaliating against them. He mentioned that as the media got involved and shined a spotlight on their plight, the prison guards started taking away their yard and showers. Their excuse to the prisoners were that since they were hunger striking, the Administration had to call meetings to determine how to deal with it and that there wasn’t enough staff left to escort prisoners to yard or run showers. Damon mentioned a couple of prisoners who already had medical problems. They had passed out from not eating and the prison guards hadn’t responded. Prisoners in cells had banged on their cell doors and yelled out, “MEDICAL EMERGENCY!!” An hour later prison guards arrived, and took their time, without any care.

In my letter back to him, I asked how the prisoners were doing who had the medical emergency. I asked what it was like to go without food for a week. Along with many more questions, that up to this point, he answered all of.

In the next letter I received from Damon a few days later, 9 days into the hunger strike, he didn’t answer any of my new questions. He wrote that the inmates on his tier had rebelled against their yard and shower privileges being taken by boarding up their cells. The prison guards had mounted up for cell extractions and this time to try and break their spirits, handcuffed them to their toilets and took turns stomping on their heads and kicking them in the face until they were unconscious.

I remembered what cell extractions were like from personal experience many years ago. We were in Administrative Segregation and weren’t getting our showers or personal hygiene so we boarded up our cells. Our entire group of cells decided to cover our cells completely so the guards couldn’t see inside. We did it during the head count. The head count always went to Sacramento, headquarters to California’s 36 prisons, as a double check that all the prisoners were accounted for. Not being able to count us was going to slow that process down. We were doing it in an attempt to get enough attention to talk with the Warden that our rights under California law for humane treatment were being violated. It hadn’t worked out well for us. Instead of getting the Warden, we got the cell extraction team. Many of us in cells couldn’t help but look out from cracks we created in the cardboard used to block our cell off. We watched the I.G.I. Gooners mount up in riot gear. A number of them had shields held in front of them, a few had battering rams, a few had batons, a few had tear gas grenades and others had pepper spray canisters the size of small fire extinguishers. All of them wore helmets with face shields that protected them from the gas and pepper spray along with bullet proof vest and heavy jackets and gloves. They looked like an unstoppable army as they took turns at each cell 10 deep as they administered the gas and pepper spray and then rushed into the cell. My cell mate and I rolled up our mattresses and held them in front of us and pushed them against the cell door to try and block the I.G.I. Gooners. 2 prisoners against 10 Gooners with those weapons ended in pain.

I imagined what it must have been like with the Pelican Bay inmates, tired and weary from lack of food, with their cell extractions ending in being handcuffed to toilets and being stomped on…

Chapter 6

I remembered how I went on the internet again and researched the hunger strike at Pelican Bay one last time before my road trip; I was relieved to find that other humanitarian groups and some of the media were following the strike. The prisoners were building momentum. They had articulated the reason for the strike, cruel and unusual punishment in the form of torture and had 5 core demands they wanted addressed.

The first demand the prisoners wanted addressed was the process Pelican Bay uses to validate gang members to S.H.U. terms without end. They went on to say that prisoners are accused of being active participants of prison gangs using false or highly dubious evidence, where in the isolated S.H.U, their only way out is to debrief and that it provides false information, wrongly landing other prisoners in the S.H.U, in an endless cycle.