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| Prison held gang members in lockdown for almost 2 years |
| By Los Angeles Times |
| Published: 04/08/2004 |
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For 20 months, scores of Latino gang members at Folsom State Prison in California were locked in their cells around the clock and deprived of regular exercise, visitors, religious services, hot meals, telephone calls and frequent showers, internal documents show. At least one top Department of Corrections official has concluded that the extended harsh restrictions - known in prison parlance as a lockdown - amounted to violations of state policy and the inmates' constitutional rights. Imposed as an emergency measure after a gang riot in April 2002, the lockdown continued month after month, even though inmates filed more than 100 grievances. Restrictions on exercise, visits and hot meals were eased in December, but even now some limitations remain in effect. Newly appointed Corrections Director Jeanne Woodford confirmed that an internal department inquiry was underway. She would not discuss it, but called the length of the lockdown excessive. National prison expert Craig Haney said, "a lockdown for two years is just about unheard of." Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychology professor, added that "to confine inmates under those conditions for that long really presses against the psychological bounds of people's survival." Haney - and some state corrections administrators - say the lockdown underscores the department's struggle to manage an ominous problem: the expanding power of gangs within the sprawling prison system. The department estimates that more than 100,000 inmates - about two-thirds of the population - belong to gangs or splinter groups. Although officials have tried to limit violence by isolating leaders at a few maximum-security housing units, gangs - and scores of splinter groups - have continued to flourish, battling each other in a constant war for turf and control. When riots occur, officials routinely impose a lockdown while they search cells for weapons and identify instigators. Such was the case at Folsom, where all 3,500 inmates were locked down after the 2002 melee. Gradually, groups of convicts were released from lockdown after agreeing not to initiate further violence, officials said. But one group - members of assorted Northern California Latino gangs - would not make such a pledge, a department spokeswoman said. Those were the inmates who ended up on lockdown for 20 months. |
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