CALIFORNIA PRISON SITUATIONS

If you aren't aware, there was a major riot, lasting four hours with over 80 correctional officers responding , at one of the largest men's prisons in California on August 8, 2009.

At approximately 8:20pm, inmates housed in the Reception Center of the California Institution for Men (CIM), located in Chino, CA began fighting is their assigned housing units. At that time, the Reception Center housed approximately 1300 medium security inmates. The "incident" ended up sending more than 200 inmates for medical treatment by CIM medical staff for minor, non-life threatening injuries. Fifty-five inmates, with more serious injuries, were transported to local outside hospitals for treatment. The incident was primarily between black and Hispanic inmates. (This information was provided via the CDCR Star corrections clips, an email news report yours truly receives daily.)

Now, lets talk about what some of this information means.

A RECEPTION CENTER is where new (and returning) inmates are first received and processed when entering prison. In California, an inmate is not entitled to visits or phone calls during the time he/she is assigned within the Reception Center. Processing includes an evaluation for the level of security assignment (determined by a number of factors which includes the nature of the crime for which he has been sentenced to prison as well as any previous criminal history, certified, prison gang affiliation, not to be confused with unconfirmed or street gang affiliation, education level, and a myriad of other factors).

There are several security levels to which an inmate can be assigned and each one carries limitations and privileges within the prison setting. Depending on the eventual security level assigned to an inmate, he/she may be transported to another prison or to a facility within the prison associated with the Reception Center. CIM has a large prison associated with this particular Reception Center. Not all prisons in California have Reception Centers.)

The length of time an inmate can be kept in the Reception Center without visits or the ability to make outside phone calls depends on the number of inmates being housed within the Reception Center and the number of Correctional Counselors available to conduct the classification process.

Correctional Counselors are not the same as Correctional Officers. BTW, Correctional Officers is the correct name - not guards. Correctional Counselors are a higher classification than Correctional Officers. That means their starting pay is higher than an officer's starting pay; they usually have college degrees in criminal justice or sociology or psychology or related areas and are case managers. Some officers eventually become Correctional Counselors.

In order for Correctional Counselors to complete the process of classification, numerous documents (regarding the specific inmate and his case) are required such as the sentencing judge's final documents and the inmate's crime summary, usually from the prosecuting attorney's office. These are not always included in the packets accompanying the inmate when he is transported from the sentencing county jail. Obtaining the required documents from the appropriate and authorizing jurisdictions can hold up the correctional classification process. Unfortunately, sending these documents doesn't always seem to be a priority for the sending jurisdiction.

While Correctional Officers are automatically placed on overtime to keep the institution safe and secure, it is difficult to obtain sufficient funding or to hire enough Correctional Counselors to handle the ever increasing number of Reception Center inmates, or to obtain enough funding to pay overtime for the Correctional Counselors on hand to move the inmates through the process. Think "bottleneck" - and then add racial and overcrowding tensions. What you can plan on is what happened August 8 at CIM's Reception Center.

In addition to the injuries, what damage was done? According to the daily posts I received, the following occurred:

"Hundreds of inmates using pipes and shanks as weapons trashed..the prison, burning a courtyard, ripping beds to shreds and tearing bathroom sinks from walls." "They literally tore the buildings apart," said a spokesperson for the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation (CDCR). While the New York Times stated the institution had "a record of poor maintenance, shoddy safety protocols, dangerous overcrowding and riots, according to three inspection reports since 2006", it is interesting to note there is no mention of how many times the CDCR, formerly known as the California Department of Corrections (CDC) submitted major capital budget requests to the California Department of Finance (CDF) specifically regarding repairs and upgrades for the older prisons in California and were turned down.

It will be interesting to see how CDF responds now to the need for the estimated "$5Million to $6Million to make the repairs and clean up debris" to seven housing units and possibly more if the institution decided to rebuild one of the units destroyed by fire. According to the CDCR Star, more than 1,100 inmates have had to be transferred to other prisons and CIM correctional staff have been transferred to those institutions to assist in the additional security required to oversee those inmates. It's reasonable those re-assigned staff are on per-diem expenses and that's more money too.

What's that old adage, "Pay me now or pay me later." ?