The Espuelon
January 2005
Fighting cocks have razor sharp barbs attached to their
legs called an "espuelon". When cocks battle in the ring they
fly up and attack one another. Without the espuelons the battle would
just be a matter of two posturing birds and one bruised ego. Only because
of the espuelon.does the fight lead to death.
— Anonymous Corcoran prisoner
For my entire adult life, the prison staff have pitted prisoners against
one another like fighting cocks armed with crimson espuelons. Divide
and conquer may be the justifica-tion, but sadism is the deeper motive.
Men are territorial by nature and when they are detained in tiny boxes
and then released like rodeo bulls, full of pent-up rage, the explosion
of violence is inevitable. In Corcoran State Prison’s Security
Housing Unit
(SHU) the gladitorial games were in full swing. The guards and gunners
placed their bets on the outcome of the bouts they had arranged. The
fix was in and no matter which combatant won, they lost, and were shot
with 9mm exploding bullets, 37mm block guns, and suffered whatever wounds
t hat the fight itself inflicted upon them. Then there was the time
loss of up to 360 days for fighting. And a prisoner could even be charged
in
court for assault and receive an extended prison sentence. Often that
sentence was a life term to be served after the prisoners existing term.
To add insult to injury, the warriors in the arena were
charged with a bill for the expended rounds. The area is a small wedge-
shaped concrete pen with twelve-foot-high walls overlooked by a gunner
armed with a 9mm rifle. On the day of conflict the pugilists are strip-searched
by escort guards for yard exercise. I was housed in the deepest and
most restrictive building of SHU, bedrock, and as a result I was body
searched at the cell door. The two escorts took my boxer shorts, tee-shirt,
shoes and socks, and towel through the keyed open tray slot.
Once those articles were searched, I was ordered to go through the motions
of being examined in the nude. Raise the arms, show both side of the
hands, shake out the hair, lift each ear, open the mouth and stick out
the tongue, run fingers through mouth, raise the testicles, turn around
and raise the feet to show the bottoms, squat three times, bend over
and spread the buttocks and cough. At that point, if you pass inspection,
your clothes are handed back to you and you get dressed and
back up to the opened tray slot and get handcuffed. The cell door is
then opened and you are walked to the arena chute and uncuffed through
the door slot. As you await the yard door’s electronic release,
you size up your foe through the window.
Awaiting yard is a nerve-wracking experience. The fight
itself is not the concern. Bruises and lacerations heal, but bullets
kill. In a few years Corcoran gunners shot more prisoners than all of
the prisons in the U.S. for the same period. It makes no difference
if you are engaged in a fight or are merely a bystander. The arena is
too circumscribed to escape the flying missiles loosed by the gunner.
One yard day I was looking on as two prisoners fought. I was the only
other person in the ring. I went to the back wall by the open toilet
and shower area. Laying on my stomach and supporting myself on my elbows,
I attempted to make myself less of a target for bullets. The actual
fight was an uneven match as the bigger man pounded
upon the smaller man. The little guy ducked a punch and it was a right
cross so the momentum of it carried the big cat into almost a waist
high bent over posture. At that instant a rifle shot discharged and
whizzed by the spot where the big dude was a split second before. The
bullet hissed by my right ear so close that I felt it’s current
as it exploded into the wall directly above my feet stinging my legs
with the shards of concrete. Astounded at my luck, in a daze, I stared
at the bullet cavity. In a few seconds the fight ended with the combatants
a bit beat up. The gunner and supporting staff yelled, "get down!
get down!", and
the fighters complied. I was already down and very nearly out. Staff
hit the floor and emptied the area one by one placing the prisoners
in separate telephone booth sized holding enclosures called "shark
cages" in convict argot. Thus proceeded nearly every yard exercise
period in Corcoran SHU.
Usually the 37mm gas gun, which looks like a small bazooka, is shot at the fighters. I was hit in the upper leg with the 37mm once and I sported a grapefruit sized dark purple bruise for a few weeks. It was not out of the ordinary to hear shots exploding from other nearby SHU yards and have shots flying upon the yard that you were on in a relatively close approximation of time. The sulpherous odor of gun powder stung the nostrils with sickening regularity.
"The vilest deeds like poison weeds bloom well in
prison air;it is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there."
- Oscar Wilde
The California prison system is like Giovanni Piranesi’s
fantastic "Imaginary Prisons". These are etchings depicting
a laybrinthine milieu of prison cells, gunwalks to nowhere, aimless
stairways, a block and tackle for no apparent purpose. The interpretation
that "Imaginary Prisons" evoked from me was that Piranesi
understood the grinding, pointlessness of prison. The leviathans erected
to wharehouse human souls are monuments to suffering – not worthy
of cilvilization. There is a method to the madness of the California
Department of Corrections (CDC) in building this gulag archipelgo. The
arranged fights are an intentional way of operating throughout the system
and that has been true for decades. That M.O. spawned the strongest
organization in the state, the California Correctional Peace Officers’s
Association, which collects around $22 million in annual dues. The CCPOA
touts these
fights, assault upon guards, and dangers of gangs before the legislature
that it has monopolized as the raison detre for more and more prisons.
It works like black magic. An A.P. article in the June 25th, 2004 Oakland Tribune notes that, "A final report issued Thursday to U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson said Alameida [the former California Department of Corrections chief who resigned last year amid accusations he covered up a prison abuse perjury probe] succumbed to pressure from the California Correctional Peace Officer’s Association and shut down investigations of inmate abuse well before their completion, and ied about it in court". The subject of that cover-up is revealed in the Wednesday, December 16th, 1998 Daily Review article from the Los Angeles Times which relates that, "A fresh team of state investigators was brought in with one charge: to stop the abuse of inmates and root out rogue guards. But, just a few months into the job, the internal affairs team was stripped of it’s investigative powers when it tried to pursue a group of officers suspected of setting up stabbings, shootings, and beatings of inmates. Documents and interviews show that this specifically relates to Pelican Bay State prison.
I have resided in PBSP/SHU for 15 years with an indeterminate
program combined with a life sentence of which I have served 25 years
on to date. Similar horrors such as, "...officers suspected of
setting up stabbings, shootings, and beatings of inmates..." were
unearthed by F.B.I.. Investigations of
Corcoran SHU as well. The PBSP/SHU and general population set-up incidents
came out blatantly at the trials of two guards who were charged with
several crimes and were sentenced to prison. Senate hearings, Federal
judges, and blue-ribbon committees have all exposed the corrupt CCPOA
and Judge Henderson is now considering a Federal takeover (receivership)
of the State Prison System which prompted
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to reply, "I don’t care. He
can take it. It’s no sweat off my back."
In that circle of hell I survive like Sisyphus in Hades.
I’ve been
behind the stone for so long that my mundane task has extinguished every
spark of hope that ever lit the flame. In the beginning I would incredulously
cry out inside, "They can’t do this!", but the cumulative
assault on my humanity eventually disabused me of that naive notion.
Virgil’s lament is true for me and the CDC, "The descent
to hell is easy, it is easy to take the downward path". There are
myriad sectarian divides among prisoners which make them easy prey for
divide-and-conquer
tactics. The overall strategy of those tactics was to build the largest
prison system in the world. The 33-prisons of California, which house
upwards of 160,000 prisoners, spread across the U.S. as things from
California have a tendency of doing. The U.S. has now surpassed Soviet
numbers of imprisonment. Prisoners will not ever cease from fighting
one
another for a wide variety of reasons.
The keepers of California learned to ride that vehicle
all of the way to the bank. Antagonists condemned to prison are plunged
into a bottomless chaos of fight-or-flight predicaments with nowhere
to fly to. Simply put; a prisoner so situated must fight or endure abject
and degradating victimhood, harm, and even
death. Penned like animals for longer and longer sentences, in hell
holes not fit for human beings, prisoners internalize society’s
loathing of them, and project their self-loathing upon each other in
extreme violence. Dehumanized-prisoners consider themselves animals
or pseudo-heros in Ragnarok fighting Armagedons. Everything in a prisoner’s
reality supports this sense of doom, and society’s denial of his
reality
exacerbates the entire prison problem in the smallest and largest ways.
As neurologists know, the fight-or-flight reaction triggers the release
of cortisol and elevated levels of cortisol are a major cause of depression.
Two depressive equivalents are wreckless behavior and violence. When
an environment of constant fight- or-flight hopelessness is combined
with the extreme concentration of energy that SHU induces, then psychological
integrity falls prey to the necessities of survival. I have existed
in this environment for 25 years. Prisoners can be pitted
against one another until the end of time, as Solzhenitsyn noted in
"A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich":
"Who is the prisoner’s worst enemy? The guy next to him. If they didn’t fight each other, it’d be another story."
What would be the solution? A holistic approach that balances
human rights and public safety. Solely relying on punishment has reaped
the whirlwind of brutality throughout America and the world, as Abu
Ghraib revealed. If reason and democracy mean anything more than political
rhetoric, then the entire agenda of American penology must shift toward
reintegrating prisoners back into society with their dignity intact
so that those ex-prisoners can function in the world. Neuroscientists
study
the human mental map of the self to discern how the self-image is affected
by the physical objects in its environment. That study concerns the
"body schema", for example, how a person in his SUV perceives
that SUV as part of his peri-personal space. My peri-personal space
is a bone white bathroom sized closet with a toilet/sink about two steps
from my concrete slab of a bed with a flat, hard, 3 inch thick plastic
covered mattress. I have a TV which I paid for. The cable is paid for
by prisoners via the Inmate Welfare Fund. I have a few books and a pen
and
paper. The steel cell front parts as the electronic door opens and I
exit alone across the grey floor to the shower at the front of the four-celled
upper tier. When I’m finished showering, that electronic door
opens and I walk back into the mausoleumlike vault of my interment.
When I get an occasional visit from my mother, the cell door electronically
opens. I walk to the pod gate and go through the strip-search motions
outlines earlier. Then I’m handcuffed and escorted down Blade
Runnerlike corridors to a visiting cage the size of a phone booth. I
am then uncuffed through the closed door slot. My mom and I speak on
a telephone through a plate-glass window for a couple of hours,
as we have done since 1980. That begs the question: what is my body
schema? The only human contact I have had is violent contact of that
sort I have described herein. How do I remain social when I have been
deprived of caring human contact?
"To deprive a person of social contact is to deprive
that person of their sanity, to take away their soul." -St. Thomas
Aquinas
Other than the welcome respite of visits which replenish my soul by
virtue of a mother’s undying and unconditional love, I am in the
cell 24/7. I do not go into the 12' x 28' concrete yard with 30' high
walls. ‘Yard’ is a misnomer for a a concrete dog run that
blocks out the sun. A prisoner in the box may catch a few wayward rays
of the sun as it passes over and struggles through the mesh wire ceiling
which is half covered in plastic. That’s about as good as it gets.
So, how do I remain social,
human, integrated? I have my mother’s love, my brother’s
love, a niece that I love, and my grandma whom I love as well. I have
beautiful friends whom I love dearly. Seeing and experiencing the horrors
I have known made me realize the fundamental importance of human rights
for prisoners. The State simply must not be allowed to create monsters
by housing prisoners in hellish conditions.
The monstrous California prison system is a public safety catastrophe.
I want to give back to society by sharing my experience and hopefully
by showing the youth of our communities ways of avoiding drug addiction
and
incarceration. I came to realize that I am either a part of the problem
or a part of the solution. I have opted for the solution.