#solano prison

It’s all just business. I’ve watched it. Whenever there are a few empty beds around here, you wait. You'll see a bunch of guys getting violated. They got to keep the place full. They get paid by the convict. You watch it. They fill the place up by bringing guys back in, then they go to legislature and get more money to build anew prison.

Though the prisoners’ view of how the system works is somewhat distorted, it is based in reality. Prison systems are big businesses, and many groups, such as guards’ unions, architects, construction companies, prison hardware manufacturers, and prison professionals, have an economic interest in expanding prison populations. Prisoners understand this and have developed a profoundly cynical view of the operation, which they see as corrupt and unjustly exploitative and oppressive.

There are some profit-making practices in the prison operation that directly affect prisoners and are seen as particularly corrupt and exploitative of them and their families. The most blatant of these is the telephone policy. In California prisons, pay telephones are located in all housing units and are readily available to prisoners. Prisoners may only make collect calls from these phones, which are installed and maintained by a private company, which charges an extra fee of $7 per call. This fee is paid by the person (usually a family member) receiving the call. This fee is split by the private company and the CDC. The CDC’s share goes into the state’s general fund. In the year 2000, California earned $36 million from this source. Prisoners feel that this is gross exploitation of them, their friends, and their families, who are usually poorer people and less able to pay this fee. Several prisoners told me that they believe that the CDC unscrupulously delays their mail to encourage phone use. At present, a letter may take as long 21 days to be delivered to a prisoner. Moreover, prisoners must pay an added 10 percent fee for every item they purchase through the canteen or any other source. This fee goes into the Inmate Welfare Fund along with any other money prisoners possess. This fund totaled $10.1 million in 1998, at which time some California prisoners sued the state to receive the interest from this money. The state informed the courts that the money held in the Inmate Welfare Fund had not been deposited in interest-earning accounts. Litigation continues on this issue, and prisoners in other states have filed similar suits. Regardless of the outcome of these cases, California prisoners feel the state has cheated them or has earned money on their money. As California prisoners’ attorney Herman Franck views it, the state is stealing from the prisoners, and though each convict is losing only a few dollars, when you consider the vast number of prisoners, “150,000 small thefts becomes one big, fat theft.”? In addition to aggravating prisoners’ sense of injustice, these practices corrode the administrators’ claims of moral superiority and reduce prisoners’ sense of moral inferiority and responsibility."

"In the new warehouse facilities, prisoners are governed by a vast and pervasive set of rules. These rules frustrate and anger prisoners because of the extensive and arbitrary manner in which they are enforced. First, it is difficult to know all the rules, much less comply with them. Beyond that, many of these rules intrude into prisoners’ ordinary practices and significantly interfere with their attempts to carry on their already excessively reduced life routines. These rules are seen as “chickenshit.” Dannie Martin, a prisoner in federal prison at Lompoc during its shift to a new, more regulated regimen, commented on the new rules:

As the saying goes, it’s the little things that make a house a home. To those who face the mind-killing boredom of long prison sentences, small changes take on large significance in this our home away-from-home. … He [a new warden] also managed to curtail most of the small liberties enjoyed by the convict population. Before his arrival, we had been permitted to wear our own clothes. Now we were to wear strictly tucked-in and buttoned-up government issue. And our recreational opportunities and food went from bad to worse. ... No sooner did the warden close the yard than we lost our chairs, and that hurt. For as long as most of us can remember, we've had our own chairs in the TV rooms as well as in our cells. There’s little enough in here for a man to call his own, and over the years these chairs have been modified and customized in an amazing degree—legs bent to suit the occupant, arm rests glued on, pads knitted for comfort. And the final personal touch is always the printing of a name on the back.

A lifer interviewed at Solano revealed his anger at the succession of restrictive rules passed by the administration over the last few years:

I don’t know what it would take to get us to stand up to them. They took away our family visits. They took away our weights. They made us shave our beards and cut our hair. Next they’ll tell us to bend over, so they can fuck us in the ass.

Many, perhaps most, prisoners find it impossible to obey all the new rules, and thus they put themselves in regular jeopardy of receiving “beefs” (disciplinary actions). For example, if prisoners followed the rules governing smoking, they would not be able to smoke for 10 to 12 hours at a stretch.

Many rules also require subjective interpretation. For example, there is a rule prohibiting disrespect toward employees (as well as other prisoners). After the introduction of female guards into the prison, the problem of male prisoners making sexual gestures, comments, and approaches to these guards arose. Some female guards were particularly sensitive to actions they interpret as sexual harassment This led to an infraction the prisoners refer to as “reckless eyeballing,” which is a highly subjective interpretation of disrespect. More important, the rules are enforced with considerable inconsistency and arbitrariness. One of the best examples of this is the appeals procedure, which is elaborately spelled out in six pages of the CDC Operations Manual. The description of the procedure begins as follows:

Any inmate or parolee under the department’s jurisdiction may appeal any departmental decision, action, condition, or policy which they can demonstrate as having an adverse effect upon their welfare.

The regulations go on to describe how appeals are to be submitted, the time limits in which prisoners should submit them and administrators should rule on them, the grounds for rejection or denial of appeals, restrictions and punishments for “abuse” of the appeal procedure, and, most important, “exceptions to the regular appeal process.”

The appeal process has the appearance of a legitimate, due process system; however, in reality it usually fails to conform to basic standards of due process and renders arbitrary and biased decisions. The main reason for this is that the process remains internal to the institution. If an appeal is denied and the prisoner pursues it, it passes up the through the levels of the prison bureaucracy. First, an appeal must be reviewed informally by the staff involved directly in the issue. If the appeal is not resolved to a prisoner’s satisfaction at this level, it is passed up to an “appeals coordinator.” If resolution is not achieved there, the appeal is passed on to the “institution head or their designee.” Last, it is reviewed by a “designated representative of the director.” There is no eventual appeal to an outside, impartial decision maker, such as an ombudsman, which many organizations, including some prison systems, have employed."

In 2001, approximately 20 percent of Solano prisoners were lifers. Most lifers have an indeterminate sentence, seven to life, 15 to life, or 25 to life. A minority are LWOPs. Those with the possibility of parole are serving time for first and second degree murder, kidnapping with bodily injury or robbery, and a “third strike,” that is, a third felony conviction after two convictions for “serious felonies.”

As their numbers have increased, lifers have become an important force in the informal social organization of prisoners. Lifers have always been relatively less troublesome for management. In earlier periods, when the number of lifers was smaller, most other prisoners, who were serving much shorter sentences, usually respected lifers, left them alone but shoved them aside as unimportant actors in the prison social order. However, now that they constitute one-fifth of the prison population, they are too prominent to ignore.

Lifers know the law, the prison rules, and the ropes better than anyone else. Some of them have become convict legal experts— “writ writers”—who file petitions and lawsuits for themselves and help other prisoners with theirs. They know and are known by many of the staff, particularly the sergeants, lieutenants, and even the wardens, some of whom they have been around for years. In regard to prisoner relationships to individual staff members, lifers, compared with other prisoners, have a better idea of what to watch out for, what they can get away with, and what special considerations they can obtain.

In addition, as the years go by, lifers become more acquainted with each other and increasingly pull together, forming a social network. This friendship network extends across racial and age boundaries. Lifers don’t necessarily hang together like cars of homeboys. But they do know, respect, and to some extent cooperate with each other. Consequently, they are an important presence in the convict world and constitute a body of elder statesmen. They are sought out for advice and relied upon as go-betweens in conflicts between prisoners and between prisoners and staff.