September 7, 2010 | 2:41 PM | By

The question of prisoners and silence

FILED UNDER: Corrections, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Gangs, Jerry Brown, Operation Street Sweeper, Prisons

Laura Sullivan, NPR

The exercise yard at Pelican Bay's Secure Housing Unit, where inmates spend an hour and half (alone and without any materials) per day.

Last week, law enforcement swarmed the Central Valley in search of gang members who’re accused of trafficking drugs and guns through California and carrying out shootings and murders. It’s no surprise that gangs are involved in the drug trade and that the drug trade is violent. What was more striking is that the highest level leaders of these operations–the ones calling the shots–appear to be doing so from behind the walls of the Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, the most secure wing of the most secure prison in the state of California–and among the most secure super-max facilities in the country.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, speaking at a press conference last week, indicated that prisoners are smuggling written, coded messages in their rectums and are also communicating by using cell phones, smuggled in by visitors and guards, to get their orders to street-level criminals.

“Prison is supposed to punish,” Brown said. “It’s supposed to be a place where people put their lives back in order and when it becomes, literally, the college of crime, our system fails.”

So what next? How do you silence prisoners who are already in the highest security, most desolate, and isolated hole the prison system has to offer? According to California Watch, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has a few things in mind:

  • Limit visits and letters. Both are already monitored by prison personnel, but CDCR believes that inmates are communicating coded information in writing and in person and that limiting visits to certain prisoners might stymie the communications.
  • Cut off bank accounts. Apparently, inmate accounts are being used to launder and move money.
  • Scramble cell signals. While currently not legal under federal law, Brown has advocated putting an “electronic net” around Pelican Bay that would stifle any outgoing cell calls.

It’s hard to believe that corrections officials have a lot of faith that these new procedures would work. If you look at the history of prisons, the issue of isolating inmates–cutting them off from each other and from the rest of the world–goes back at least 220 years, to when the first modern style American prison was built in Philadelphia. The Walnut Street Jail up until 1790 had been overcrowded, noisy, and considered more of a breeding ground for criminality than a place where criminals spurned their evil ways. So Pennsylvania constructed an addition to the jail–a penitentiary that housed inmates in individual, isolated cells, where they could contemplate their crimes, be free of the corrupting influence of their peers, be cut off from their family and friends, and hopefully, decide to repent. Overcrowding and costs killed the isolation system at Walnut Street Jail, but that wasn’t the end of innovations in isolating inmates. Just a couple notorious examples:

  • In 1816, New York opened Auburn Prison, which insisted that inmates live in complete silence. To facilitate the no-talking rule, famous Auburn warden Elam Lynds and his deputy John Cray invented the lock-step prison march, where prisoners would turn their heads away from each other so they couldn’t talk. Guards communicated to inmates not by talking, but through bell-ringing and tapping codes with a wooden stick.
  • In 1826, Pennsylvania opened Eastern State Penitentiary near Pittsburg, where inmates, when booked, had their heads covered with hoods on the way to their solitary cells to preserve the complete sense of isolation. Once there, they rarely left their cells (and only while hooded) until their release date and their only human contact was with clergy.

In both instances, it should be noted, silence couldn’t be completely enforced. At Eastern State, inmates would rap on pipes to talk with one another. At Auburn, silence could only be enforced through severe corporal punishment, which was eventually outlawed.

  • Erica

    Just like the show “Weeds.”

  • Ann

    “Attorney General Jerry Brown, speaking at a press conference last week, indicated that prisoners are smuggling written, coded messages in their rectums and are also communicating by using cell phones, smuggled in by visitors and guards, to get their orders to street-level criminals.” When these prisoners are in the Secured Housing Unit at Pelican Bay I would like to know how a visitor smuggles in a cell phone. I. Visitors pass through a metal detector and women have to where a bra without hooks or the metal detector is set off. 2. The vists are behind glass, it is difficult to pass a phone through glass. 3. If you bring pictures to share with the inmate, no writing on the back of them or they are not allowed in. 4. Visitors carry in a clear plastic bag and only limited items are brought in during a visit and they are checked. 5. Inmates are strip searched before they leave the cells, so how are messages being transferred?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NWS55WQBU4ME2YOFZRXBWF2GZY Francis

    Such things happen in all dictatorial surrounding. What do you expect inmate will learn under existing conditions? Society’s Pharisees feel authorized to punish by incarceration, prove being in fact unable to differ, and wonder when sentenced person return to community reformed, corrected, healed some ten, twenty years later. Nation with world wide highest prisoner rate possibly reconsiders old habits.

  • CaliFam

    What next?We resurrect Hilter,and put him in charge of the prisons?Geez,welcome to the good ole USA….

    Humane treatment is a basic human right,that our forefathers thought they had established with the Constitution…

    Everyone,incarcerated…or not…deserves fair,humane and consistent treatment.

  • Nora1039

    My son is in the hospital at Corcoran State Prison with severe Diabetes, Osteomylities, Wheelchair bound, and Legally blind. When I go visit him I am not even allowed to buy him a bottle water. He has had to travel in his wheelchair from the hospital room to the visiting room with not even being allowed to have water for up to three hours.

    This is crazy and must be stopped.

  • stephanie gooding

    Jerry Brown is posturing “tough on crime” so he can get the vote of law enforcement labor unions members. He and Whitman are a choice between worse and worse. There is absolutely no way that a family member can smuggle in anything metal and the prisoners are rectally examined after every visit. It is the guards who bring in contraband. Brown allows them to literally get away with torture and murder with no accountability whatsoever. Whichever one is elected will be recalled when the public sees their true colors.

  • Jessj72

    Stephanie Gooding has got to be acting nieve, or maybe it's not an act! While I'm sure there are some dirty Law Enforcement Officers in every setting (Including Corrections) we should open our eyes as family and friends of those 170,000 plus incarcerated in California. As is illistrated in the article above, it is evident that humans in isolation will find a way, even if the risk is “severe corparal punishment.” Stop blaming the “Prison Gaurds” for everything your loved ones are doing in prison. We all know the syndrome of the mother who says “Not my little boy.” People in prison and thier loved ones smuggle all kinds of things in thier rectum and that of their own children! Why don't you search your feelings and start holding yourself and your “good boy” prisoner accountable! It's really not Jerry Brown or those knuckle dragging prison gaurds!

  • Rina Palta

    Hi Nora,
    I asked CDCR about this and they said that generally, bringing food into prisons isn't permitted, to prevent folks from smuggling in drugs, etc. Are you not permitted to bring water into the prison? Or is the issue different than what I described? –Rina

  • http://informant.kalwnews.org/2010/10/report-gangs-trying-to-infiltrate-law-enforcement/ Report: gangs trying to infiltrate law enforcement | The Informant

    [...] Rina reported last month, CDCR’s effort to restrict the ability of prison gangs to communicate also involved further [...]

  • http://informant.kalwnews.org/2010/09/reader-comment-the-cell-phone-mystery/ Reader comment: the cell phone mystery | The Informant

    [...] of our readers wrote in on a previous post about efforts to crack down on prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison who are allegedly orchestrating crimes from their prison [...]