(Marc Campos/Staff photographer)
The glass is broken on a door to the processing center at the California Institution for Men in Chino. It’s one of many repairs needed at the 65-year-old prison. (Marc Campos/Staff photographer)
Posted on 07/25/2006 6:28:38 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
It’s not a good sign when cell windows at a state prison are broken. But that was the situation just last year at Reception Center-East, one of four facilities at the California Institution for Men in Chino.
Officers had complained about the windows repeatedly, but nothing was done to fix them – until an inmate was caught after slipping out his window in an apparent escape attempt.
After that, officers began 24-hour patrols outside East as officials waited for Sacramento to approve funding for repairs. The facility is less than a half-mile from a housing development under construction.
‘‘We’re gonna spend at least as much money walking the perimeter as we will eventually spend ... to (fix) the windows,’’ said Martin Aroian, president of CIM’s local officers union, last year. ‘‘Wouldn’t it have been a lot cheaper ... years ago to fix those windows?’’
East’s broken glass is fixed, but the problem persists. Windows in other housing units are broken now.
They’re only the most visible sign of a serious, ongoing situation at CIM: The aged prison is falling apart.
Many of the buildings date to the facility’s original construction in 1941, and the wear and tear is evident. Paint peels off nearly every surface. Roadways are little more than gravel pits. Many walls are covered in graffiti – hardly a surprise at a place that’s home to thousands of felons.
Inmates regularly complain of mold and vermin in their cells. In February, prisoner Matthew Cramer filed a complaint attached to a plastic bag containing two cockroaches he’d killed that morning.
Prison officials were not amused, but the housing unit was sprayed with pesticide two weeks later, Cramer said.
Roaches aren’t the only unwanted guests. ‘‘About the rats,’’ wrote Leonard Rocha, an inmate at Reception Center-Central, in a letter to the Daily Bulletin. ‘‘There are so many that I have one I call Spike, and my friend has one as a pet.’’
The plumbing at the prison is also problematic. Toilets leak regularly. The water pressure fails for weeks at a time, meaning prisoners must bathe out of 5-gallon buckets.
Cramer, serving time for a parole violation, filed a complaint about the broken showers in the Cypress Hall unit in November 2005. Two months passed before repairs were completed.
When the water does work, it’s rarely comfortable.
‘‘It never really gets hot,’’ said Tommy Jacquett, a minimum-security inmate interviewed in January. ‘‘It’s, like, lukewarm.’’
Warden Mike Poulos hopes to change that. He plans a series of repairs at the prison, and many repairs have already taken place, such as improvements to cell doors in some of the older facilities.
He also intends to install new plumbing throughout the prison’s oldest facilities, making hot showers a possibility again.
But it’ll take more than that to clean up CIM’s drinking water, which has been found to have toxins at levels higher than EPA standards, according to the California Department of Health Services and the Chino Basin Water Master.
Nitrate levels are high in groundwater because of the decades of agricultural use on the land surrounding CIM. But other contaminants are present: chloroform, tetrachloroethylene, toluene, carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethane. Many employees drink only bottled water.
Asbestos can be found in dozens of CIM’s buildings, according to surveys by the Division of the State Architect, including chapels, dining areas and the prison hospital.
A memo to staff from 2004 notes the building materials pose no threat unless there’s deterioration or damage to infrastructure – which is exactly the case in the hospital, according to employees and inmates there.
Many walls have cracks or holes in them, exposing staff and inmates to asbestos, said Melodee Lewis, a former prison nurse.
‘‘It is all over the hospital,’’ Lewis said. ‘‘It’s in the rooms, under the sink in the nurses’ station.’’
Yet the hospital is still a popular destination for inmates, said Capt. W.D. Welch.
Prisoners fake illnesses to be sent there, he said – especially during the summer months, when temperatures can soar to more than 100 degrees. Many housing units at CIM lack any sort of climate control.
‘‘People manipulate to get here because it’s air-conditioned,’’ Welch said.
The heat can be a problem for officers as well, especially those required to wear heavy protective vests all the time.
‘‘When it’s 100 degrees outside, it’s 110 inside,’’ said Aroian, the union official.
Similarly, during the winter months, inmates in Reception Center-Central say temperatures drop precipitously at night.
Cramer, who was released in March, said he was in Cypress Hall with several HIV-positive inmates who struggled through the winter. Broken windows let in frigid gusts of wind, yet inmates had just one blanket apiece, he said.
‘‘They’re not going to die from AIDS. They’re going to die from pneumonia,’’ Cramer said. ‘‘It’s inhumane.’’
LETHAL WEAPONS
The decrepit buildings at CIM don’t just subject staff and inmates to extremes of weather and nature. Thanks to years of deferred maintenance, resourceful prisoners have countless opportunities to get their hands on material that can be fashioned into makeshift weapons.
Nearly any small piece of metal can be sharpened into a blade or stabbing device by rubbing it against the concrete floors or cell walls. Such metal is not hard to come by.
When a correctional officer was stabbed to death last year, officials believe an inmate wielding such a weapon committed the crime. At the time, one part of Reception Center-Central was on lockdown because a piece of metal was found missing from a light fixture.
In some places, electrical wiring and other hardware can easily be removed from the walls and fashioned into weapons – then hidden back in the crumbling walls they came from, said a former inmate who would not give his name.
Contraband such as drugs and cell phones also can be hidden in the walls.
After the officer’s killing, investigators searched dozens of cells and found more than 30 weapons stored in the spaces between toilets and walls. Maintenance workers resealed the toilets so nothing could be hidden there, according to a subsequent investigative report.
That report also found broken cell windows allowed prisoners to ‘‘fish’’ items back and forth by tying them onto a string and swinging them from one cell to another. Investigators with the Inspector General’s Office noted the paint outside the windows was worn in an arcing pattern, suggesting fishing had gone on for a long time.
WORK WAITS
Like most problems at CIM, poor maintenance has been a fact of life for years. In a 2000 report, the Inspector General found 344 outstanding work orders at the prison. More than 75 percent of them had been on file three months or longer.
Lt. Tim Shirlock, a former CIM spokesman, said asbestos and lead paint used in the prison’s original construction means that even simple repairs can turn into lengthy, complicated projects.
Even the parts of the prison operation that aren’t connected to the original buildings seem to be falling apart. Lights along the perimeter routinely malfunction, and the vibration-sensing escape alarm on the fence around the minimum-support facility was only recently repaired.
Officers complain that cars they use to patrol the prison or accompany inmates to outside hospitals run poorly.
Officials at CIM acknowledge some of the problems and are making improvements. Repairs are under way in some facilities to upgrade cell doors and replace stairwells that have blind spots where inmates could hide.
Those improvements could have been made years ago, said Poulos, the warden. But as population pressures and budget shortages dominated administrators’ concerns, fixing the prison’s infrastructure and making other cosmetic changes were never a priority.
‘‘We haven’t painted the (administration) building in 40 years, because we can’t,’’ Poulos said. ‘‘I want to change these things.’’
You ought to come to Boston a/k/a Bozotown where the road, bridges, buildings, tunnels, you name it, are all falling apart.
Decaying public buildings is a sign that we are slipping into 3rd world status.
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