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Citation: The Nation Feb 20 1995, v260, n7, p229(5)
Author: Davis, Mike
Title: Hell factories in the field: a prison-industrial complex.
(Cover Story) by Mike Davis
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COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1995
The road from Mecca follows the Southern Pacific tracks past Bombay Beach to
Niland, then turns due south through a green maze of marshes and irrigated
fields. The bad future of California rises, with little melodrama, in the
middle distance between the skeleton of last year's cotton crop and the aerial
bombing range in the Chocolate Mountains. From a mile away, the slate-gray
structures resemble warehouses or perhaps a factory. An unassuming road sign
announces Calipatria State Prison.
California has the third-largest penal system in the world, following China
and the United States as a whole: 125,842 prisoners at last official count.
Over the past decade, the state has built Calipatria, located 220 miles
southeast of L.A., and fifteen other new prisons--at a cost of $10 billion
(interest included). An emergent "prison-industrial complex" increasingly
rivals agribusiness as the dominant force in the life of rural California and
competes with land developers as the chief seducer of legislators in
Sacramento. It has become a monster that threatens to overpower and devour its
creators, and its uncontrollable growth ought to rattle a national
consciousness now complacent at the thought of a permanent prison class.
Last year's state version of "three strikes" legislation--an even more
Draconian variant of Clinton's crime bill--may add as many as 300,000 new
inmates to an already grotesquely overcrowded and hyperviolent system. To keep
even the most rudimentary shackles on this huge population, the state will
have to loot its higher education budget for dozens of new prisons. In
addition, there will be irresistible political pressures to reduce the cost of
this human storage through a variety of technological and marketplace
innovations. In this regard, Calipatria, which opened in 1992, is a
particularly resonant example of how the Department of Corrections is already
coping with the contradictions of its enormous success.
The Death Fence
Calipatria is a "level-4" maximum-security prison for men that currently
houses 10 percent (1,200), of California's convicted murderers. Yet the guard
booth at the main gate is unmanned, as are ten of its twelve perimeter gun
towers. As Daniel Paramo, the prison's energetic "community resources
manager," explains: "The warden doesn't trust the human-error factor in the
gun towers; he puts his faith, instead, in Southern California Edison."
Paramo is standing in front of an ominous thirteen-foot electric fence,
sandwiched between two ordinary chain-link models. Each of the middle fence's
fifteen individual strands of wire bristles with 5,000 volts, 500 amperes of
Parker Dam power--about ten times the recognized lethal dosage. The electrical
contractors guarantee instant death. An admiring guard in the background
mutters: "Yeah, toast. . . ."
The bill authorizing this "escape-proof" fence sailed through the state
legislature with barely a murmur. Cost-conscious politicians had few scruples
about an electric bill that saved $2 million in labor costs each year (a total
of thirty sharpshooters, working three shifts per tower). And when the warden
quietly threw the main switch in October 1993, there was general satisfaction
that the corrections system was moving ahead toward its high-tech future.
"But," Paramo adds ruefully, "we had neglected to factor the animal-rights
people into the equation."
The prison is just east of the Salton Sea--a major wintering habitat for
waterfowl--and the gently purring high-voltage fence immediately became an
erotic beacon to the passing birds. Local bird-watchers soon found out about
the body count ("a gull, two owls, a finch and a scissor-tailed fly-catcher .
. .") and alerted the Audubon Society. By January of last year, the "death
fence" had become an international environmental scandal. After a CNN crew
pulled into the prison parking lot, the Department of Corrections threw in the
towel and hired an omithologist to help it redesign the fence.
The result is the world's only birdproof, ecologically sensitive death
fence. Paramo has some difficulty maintaining a straight face as he points out
$150,000 of innovations: "a warning wire for curious rodents, anti-perching
deflectors for wildfowl and tiny passageways for burrowing owls." Calipatria
has also built an attractive pond for visiting geese and ducks.
Although the prison system is now at peace with bird lovers, the imbroglio
aroused the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers' Association
(C.C.P.O.A.) to change the comparative ease with which management was going
about "automating" the jobs of sharpshooters. To proceed with his plans to
electrify all the state's medium- and maximum-security prisons (at least
twenty facilities) over the next few years, Director of Corrections James
Gomez may have to negotiate a compromise that preserves more of the
"featherbed" guntower jobs.
Calipatria's 3,844 inmates, needless to say, shed few tears for either the
ducks or the sharpshooters. Their lives are entirely absorbed in the daily
struggle to survive. Like the rest of the state prison system, Calipatria
operates at almost double its designed capacity. In county jails and
medium-security facilities, squalid tiers of bunk beds have been crowded into
converted auditoriums and day rooms. In "upscale" institutions like
Calipatria, however, a second inmate has been shoehorned into each tiny
six-by-ten-foot cell.
When "double-celling" was first introduced into the system a decade ago, it
fueled a new wave of inmate violence and suicide. Civil liberties advocates
denounced the practice as "cruel and unusual punishment," but a federal judge
upheld its constitutionality. Now inmates can routinely expect to spend
decades or even whole lifetimes (34 percent of Calipatria's population are
lifers) locked in unnatural, and often unbearable, intimacy with another
person. The psychological stress is amplified by the drastic shortage of work
for prisoners, condemning nearly half the inmate population to serve their
sentences idly in their cells watching infinities of television. As behavioral
psychologists have testified in court, rats confined in such circumstances
invariably go berserk and eat each other.
The War Is On
The radical abolition of privacy is an explicit objective of so-called
new-generation prisons like Calipatria. Each of its twenty housing units is
designed like a two-story horseshoe with a guard station opposite. Yet another
variation on Jeremy Bentham's celebrated nineteenth-century "panopticon," this
"270 plan" (so named for the extent of the guards' field of vision) is
intended to insure continuous surveillance of all inmate behavior. Official
blurbs boast of a "more safe and humane incarceration" and an end to the
"fear-hate syndrome" associated with prisons that tolerate zones of
unsupervised inmate interaction.
Even if that were true, panopticonism has been compromised by construction
shortcuts and chronic understaffing. Although toilets sit nakedly in the
middle of recreation yards as symbols of institutional omniscience, there are
still plenty of blind spots--behind stairs or in kitchen areas--where inmates
can take revenge on staff or one another. As Paramo warns visitors when they
sign the grim waiver acknowledging California's policy of refusing to
negotiate for hostages, "the war is on."
For a quarter of a century, California prisons have institutionalized
episodic violence between inmate guerrilla armies. Today there are more
diverse gangs--including rising Asian and Central American factions--but the
carnage is centralized in a merciless struggle for power between blacks and
the East L.A.-based Mexican Mafia (or E.M.E.).
In part, this reflects the recent dramatic shift in the ethnic composition
of California's prison yards. In 1988, new admissions were 35 percent black
and 30 percent Latino; five years later, the proportions were 41 percent
Latino and 25 percent black. As a result, the entire system now has a slight
Latino plurality (although blacks remain the largest group in Calipatria).
E.M.E. reportedly has used this new clout to attack the black monopoly on the
sale of crack cocaine both inside and outside the walls. Calipatria's
gang-intelligence officer claims that the recent death of Joe Morgan, the
E.M.E.'s legendary founder and sometime prison statesman, cleared the way for
a younger, more ruthless leadership.
In Calipatria, the last riot between blacks and Latinos occurred in July,
when thirteen inmates were stabbed. As one guard described the melee--which
apparently started in the central kitchen and spread to the housing
units--"E.M.E. blindsided the Crips." as a result, the prison was locked down
for four months, and the day rooms have been abandoned as too dangerous for
mixed use. Paramo keeps a display of some of the captured weapons in his
office; they include what looks like an obsidian dagger but is actually a
"shank" made from melted black garbage bags.
To deal with such explosions of violence, California's highest-level prisons
have introduced extreme sanctions. Each institution now has its own "SERT"
squad--a kind of internal SWAT team capable of countering outbreaks with
staggering amounts of firepower. These paramilitary units have been widely
praised for preventing inmate holocausts like the terrible butchery that took
place in the New Mexico State Penitentiary in 1980. California does, however,
tolerate extraordinary levels of official violence. Over the past decade,
trigger-happy guards here have killed thirty-six inmates (including one in
Calipatria)--more than triple the number killed in federal penitentiaries and
the six other biggest incarceration states combined.
Where sheer force fails to deter prison gangs, the Department of Corrections
has another option: a gulag of deprivation along the Redwood coast known as
Pelican Bay State Prison. Although its infamous Security Housing Unit, or
SHU--a total-isolation bloc described by prison historian Eric Cummins as a
"place of pure psychological destruction"--was recently criticized by a
federal judge, it remains a popular model for other states as well as for the
U.S. Bureau of Prisons' new "high-tech Alcatraz" in Florence, Colorado. "The
necessary evil of the SHU," as Daniel Paramo sees it, "is that, for the first
time, we can truly isolate the ringleaders and instigators from our general
population."
Yet, as Paramo also concedes, putting the godfathers in the deep freeze has
had a negligible impact on the growth of prison-gang membership. Indeed, as an
off-duty guard points out, "Removing the veteran leadership merely opens the
way for wilder and more violent youngsters--who have none of the common sense
of traditional convict culture--to take charge." As a result, he predicts an
even more violent road ahead. "We will never defeat prison gangs. They come
with the turf, and like it or not, they grow and prosper with the system."
The White Flies
Margaret Hatfield doesn't fret much about prison violence or the thousands
of felons who live down the road. The "death fence" is a reassurance, and,
besides, as city clerk of the tiny municipality of Calipatria (population
3,356), she has far more serious things to worry about, like the white fly
epidemic.
Like an Old Testament plague, the white flies threaten the very foundation
of the Imperial Valley's latifundian social order. In late summer, dense
clouds of the tiny insects can sometimes be seen from planes approaching L.A.
They are omnivorous and avidly attack all the local cash crops. Because of the
flies, the melon crop, a mainstay of the local economy, wasn't even planted in
1993. Growers are losing $100 million every year and the valley is nearly
bankrupt. The resultant layoffs have raised the local unemployment rate to
nearly 40 percent.
So Hatfield and other local leaders "thank God for the California Department
of Corrections." Besides bringing 1,100 jobs to Calipatria in 1993, the C.D.C.
has opened another, 4,000-inmate facility in the town of Seeley, making
prisons the largest employer in Imperial County. (The corollary: One out of
every twelve county residents is now a prisoner.) The department, moreover, is
talking about adding a third prison, possibly for women, on the 2,000 acres of
land it owns in Calipatria.
Calipatria is a loyal member of the Association of California Cities Allied
with Prisons, and Hitfield is proud of the micro-renaissance that the prison
has brought to the town. She points out the new grocery and video stores on a
main street that otherwise looks like the forlorn set of The Last Picture
Show, and wonders aloud if the city could have afforded to light the Little
League field without tax revenue from the cornucopia of prison wages. Still,
she concedes, "there have been a few problems."
Although the C.D.C. has committed itself to an eventual goal of 40 percent
local hires, most of the high-wage guard and management positions have gone to
outsiders. As these people have moved into the area (fifty-eight new homes
since 1993), property values have increased by as much as two-thirds. This has
been good for landowners, but bad for younger and poorer local families who do
not have prison jobs. The population boom, in addition, has led to serious
overcrowding the schools, and since prisons are exempt from paying local taxes
there is no offsetting revenue big enough for expansion of services.
Most troubling to Hatfield, however, are the prisoners' families--largely
from the inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles, five hours away--who descend
on Calipatria every weekend. Unlike their husbands and fathers, who are only
abstractions to the locals, the families are tangible embodiments of urban
disorder. Their misdemeanors, from sleeping in their cars to smoking pot in
public, fill town gossip with new apprehensions. In Hatfield's words, "they
erode our image of safety."
It is hard to know how accurately Hatfield reflects public sentiment.
Although Calipatria is 75 percent Mexican, there is only one Spanish surname
in city government. Imperial County, with five Anglo supervisors ruling an
overwhelmingly Mexican population, has long been nicknamed "California's
Mississippi" for its exclusionary politics and oppressive labor relations. A
similar pattern of electoral imbalance is found in the other depressed farm
towns of the Colorado River and Central valleys that have welcomed medium- and
maximum-security facilities in the past decade: Avenal, Blythe, Corcoran,
Delano and Wasco.
The prison boom is having a complex, and perhaps unpredictable, impact on
agricultural caste society. On the one hand, local Anglo elites are being
integrated into the spoils system operated by the Department of Corrections.
There is considerable evidence, for example, of sweetheart deals involving
land acquisition and construction. On the other hand, prison employment is
producing a new Latino middle class in valley towns. Those gray fortresses,
after all, are the first large, unionized employers that most of rural
California has ever seen.
The Politics of Super-Incarceration
The prison staff at Calipatria speaks with measured awe of Don Novey, the
former Folson guard who, as president of the C.C.P.O.A., has made the
correctional officers the most powerful union in the state. Under his
leadership the C.C.P.O.A. has been transformed from a small, reactive craft
union into the major player shaping criminal justice legislation and thereby
the future of the California penal system. Part of the secret of Novey's
success has been his willingness to pay the highest price for political
allies. In 1990, for example, Novey contributed almost $1 million to Pete
Wilson's gubernatorial campaign. The C.C.P.O.A. now operates the
second-most-generous PAC in Sacramento.
Novey has also leveraged the union's influence through his sponsorship of
the so-called victims' rights movement. Crime Victims United is a satellite
PAC, receiving 95 percent of its funds from the C.C.P.O.A. Through such
high-profile front, groups, and in alliance with other law-enforcement
lobbies, Novey has been able to keep Sacramento in a permanent state of
law-and-order hysteria. Legislators of both parties trample one another in the
rush to put their names at the top of tough new "anti-crime" measures, while
ignoring their impact on prison capacity.
This cynical bidding war has had staggering consequences. Joan Petersilia, a
researcher at the RAND Corporation, found that more than 1,000 bills
toughening sentencing under felony and misdemeanor statutes had been enacted
by the legislature between 1984 and 1992. In aggregate, they are utterly
incoherent as criminal justice policy, but wonderful as a stimulus to the kind
of carceral Keynesianism that has tripled both the membership of the
C.C.P.O.A. and the average salary of prison workers since 1980. From the
beginning of the prison boom, at the end of Jerry Brown's administration in
1982, a host of critics have tried to wean the legislature away from its
reckless gulagism. They have produced study after study showing that
super-incarceration has had a negligible impact on the overall crime rate
(which, in any event, has not significantly increased); and that a majority of
new inmates are either nonviolent drug offenders (including parolees flunking
mandatory urinalysis) or the mentally ill (a staggering 28,000 by official
estimate). They have also repeatedly warned that a day of reckoning would come
when the state would have to trade higher education, literally brick by brick,
to continue to build prisons.
That day, indeed, has come. While California's colleges and universities
were shedding 8,000 jobs between 1984 and 1994, the Department of Corrections
hired 26,000 employees to guard 112,000 new inmates. But instead of hitting
the brakes, the legislature went full throttle. Last spring's "three strikes"
law doubles sentences for second felonies and mandates twenty-five years to
life for "three-time losers." To make the law constitutionally invulnerable to
reform (except by an almost impossible two-thirds majority), it was also
presented to voters as Proposition 184 in November. Proponents of the
measure--led by the C.C.P.O.A. and Michael Huffington--outspent opponents
(primarily the California Teachers' Association) 48 to 1 ($1.2 million versus
$25,000). Moreover, since most Democratic candidates, including Kathleen Brown
and Dianne Feinstein, supported the measure or were silent, voters had little
opportunity to hear opposing arguments or weigh the epochal consequences of
the law. The proposition passed easily.
It's a measure of their complicity that prior to the election the Democrats
refused to publicize the damning official estimates about the impact
Proposition 184 would have on prison capacity. These were issued last March by
the C.D.C.'s Planning and Construction Division. Simply to house the projected
1999 inmate population at the already intolerable 185 percent occupancy level,
the state will have to build twenty-three new prisons (beyond the twelve
already authorized). "This would require construction of more than four and
one-half prisons per year in each of the next five fiscal years," the planners
wrote. Within ten years, they predict, the penal population will increase 262
percent, to 341,420 inmates (compared with 22,500 in 1980).
Commenting on these projections, a spokesman for Governor Wilson simply
shrugged his shoulders: "If these additional costs have to be absorbed, I
guess we'll have to reduce other services. We'll have to change our
priorities." Which "priorities" were clarified in October, when researchers at
RAND published an exhaustive fiscal analysis that concluded: "To support
implementation of the law, total spending for higher education and other
government services would have to fall by more than 40 percent over the next
eight years.... If the three strikes law remains in place by 2002, the state
government will be spending more money keeping people in prison than putting
people through college."
It is sobering to recall that the C.D.C., with twenty-nine major "campuses,"
is already more expensive than the University of California system, and that
young black men in Los Angeles or Oakland are twice as likely to end up in a
prison as in college. Proposition 184, moreover, promises a dramatic
escalation in racial disparities. In the first six months of prosecutions
under the new law, African-Americans (10 percent of the population) made up 57
percent of the "three strikes" filings in L.A. County. This is seventeen times
the rate for whites, say public defenders here, although other studies have
shown that white men commit at least 60 percent of all the rapes, robberies
and assaults in the state.
For State Senator Tom Hayden, who vigorously opposed Prop 184, California is
sinking into a "moral quagmire" reminiscent of Vietnam: "State politics has
been handcuffed by the law-enforcement lobby. Voters have no real idea of what
they are getting into. They have not been told the truth about the trade-off
between schools and prisons, or the economic disaster that will inevitably
result. We dehumanize criminals and the poor in exactly the same way we did
with so-called `gooks' in Vietnam. We just put them in hell and turn up the
heat."
Back at Calipatria, meanwhile, the administration is already tinkering with
the thermostat. Daniel Paramo cheerfully acknowledges that, faced with the
Proposition 184 population explosion, the C.D.C. is considering putting a
third inmate in each mad-rat cell. "We'll simply pack in as many inmates as
the state orders. And, if the courts finally impose a limit, I guess we'll
just build some new prisons."
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