CA: Prisons to Curtail Racial Segregation

[Christina Marie]

December 20, 2005
Prisons to Curtail Racial Segregation

State officials will phase in a new policy in which race will be considered along with gang ties and personal histories in assigning housing.

By Jill Leovy, Times Staff Writer


California state prisons will end long-standing policies of segregating prisoners solely along racial lines under the terms of a legal settlement announced Monday.

For 25 years, California prisons have segregated the tens of thousands of inmates who arrive each year at the system's reception centers. Prisoners are segregated for at least their initial 60 days in custody. No other state has a similar policy, state officials have conceded.

Under the new policy, race may still be used as a factor in separating prisoners — a white supremacist, for example, would probably not be housed with a black inmate — but it will no longer be the primary criterion, state prison officials said.

Instead, prisoners' gang affiliations and individual histories will be scrutinized to determine how best to place them to minimize fighting, they said.

Racial segregation has persisted in California prisons even as it disappeared elsewhere because officials said it was necessary to separate inmate gangs that formed along racial lines, such as the Mexican Mafia and white supremacists.

But the state had little choice except to abandon the practice after losing a decision in the U.S. Supreme Court in February. The justices, in a case brought by a black prisoner from Los Angeles a decade ago, ruled 5 to 3 that the state could segregate prisoners by race only in rare instances.

"We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal … 50 years ago in Brown vs. Board of Education, and we refuse to resurrect it," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote at the time.

The justices sent the case back to lower courts for further proceedings, and since then lawyers for the state and the black prisoner, Garrison Johnson, have been negotiating a settlement.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will phase out race-based segregation policies over the next two years. The change is expected to gradually bring more racial mixing to the cellblocks and yards of the nation's largest penal system.

"We will start to create an environment where it will be less dangerous in prison for everyone because racism will start to dissipate," said Bert Deixler, an attorney for Johnson.

By integrating prisons, "the power of racial classification and racism will start to die," Deixler said.

"People will come into contact in a more reasonable way with people of a different race and will not feel so threatened or so angry with those people."

In the past, some high-level corrections officials had predicted dangerous results if the segregation policies were discarded. But corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said Monday that California prisons have already been moving away from simple race-based segregation in favor of policies designed to look more closely at factors that contribute to inmate violence.

Age, physical characteristics and reasons for incarceration are among the factors that prison officials will be considering as they place inmates, according to a corrections department statement. The settlement, Thornton said, also includes a provision to track violent racial incidents to improve understanding of the conditions that lead to them.

Among the 167,000 inmates in California's 33 state prisons, about 29% are white, 28% black, and 37% Latino, Thornton said. Currently, once they leave the initial reception centers, many prisoners live in integrated cells or mix in prison yards, she said, and the prison system uses a number of criteria, including race, to assign placements.

Although the lawsuit dealt with reception center segregation, the settlement will be applied throughout the state's prison system, and eventually all state prison facilities for male and female inmates will follow the new policy that prohibits using race as "the sole determining factor for offender housing assignments," Thornton said.

Under the terms of the agreement, the state will phase out racial segregation in three steps:

In March, after distributing the new policy to prisons and retraining prison staff, current race segregation policies will end in state prison reception centers.

Next year, the ban will extend to so-called sensitive needs yards and minimum support facilities — dorms that house minimum-custody inmates.

In 2008, plans will be rolled out to bring the new integration policy to the prisons, Deixler said.

Prison officials say that there will be no wholesale movement of prisoners to bring about desegregation. Instead, the mixing of prisoners by race will occur as new inmates enter the system and current ones are transferred, gradually blurring the racial lines within prisons.

Thornton said prison officials are not seeking to meet any particular integration goal. "Prison gangs are aligned along racial lines, and many confrontations among inmates are race-based," she said. But prison officials believe the new policy will bring more careful evaluation of the various factors that lead to prison violence.

In fact, Johnson's lawsuit was a direct challenge to the idea that prisoners were safer if housed with those of their own race, Deixler said.

Prison segregation policies are flawed because a great deal of underworld violence occurs between people of the same race, Deixler argued. Rivalries between the predominantly black Crips and Bloods, for example, claim numerous lives on the street, he said.

Deixler's client was a black man jailed for murder in 1987 who was not a member of any gang, court papers said. Being housed with other black men, most of whom belonged to gangs, left Johnson feeling defenseless — unable to form alliances with prisoners who, like himself, were unaffiliated with gangs.

"He was a lone wolf who did not have a prospect for having protection," Deixler said. He sought an integrated prison setting because he wanted peers who would back him against the black gang members he found so menacing, he added.

Deixler, an attorney with the law firm Proskauer Rose who handled the case without pay, praised corrections Secretary Roderick Q. Hickman for helping to engineer the settlement.

The corrections department leadership was "engaged and thoughtful," in designing a plan for desegregating prison facilities without compromising safety, he said.

Johnson remains housed with an African American cellmate, Deixler said.

But Deixler added that Johnson has been promised a cellmate of a different race upon his next transfer.



http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... -headlines

[AcmeWhiteBread]

All thats gonna happen is when the walk a white boy up to a cell and introduce him to his new black cellie is the white boy is gonna have to fight the guard. Its not the CO's who administer the policy its the inmates and it will never change. And anyone who thinks it can has never been to the joint.

[Christina Marie]

All thats gonna happen is when the walk a white boy up to a cell and introduce him to his new black cellie is the white boy is gonna have to fight the guard. Its not the CO's who administer the policy its the inmates and it will never change. And anyone who thinks it can has never been to the joint.

And how much time did you do? Where did you do you're bid(s)?

[AcmeWhiteBread]

If you were not so new on here you would know

[Christina Marie]

If you were not so new on here you would know

Instead of playing games...why don't you just answer the question?

[AcmeWhiteBread]

Because we do things on my terms, not yours

[Christina Marie]

Because we do things on my terms, not yours

LMAO!!!! Like you really think I care all that much. Peace...I am done with you.

[AcmeWhiteBread]

Your the one who asked. And that tells me right there you dont nothin about being locked up.....

[Christina Marie]

Your the one who asked. And that tells me right there you dont nothin about being locked up.....

Whatever you choose to believe.

[Christina Marie]

This is the CDC(R?)'s way of cutting down the inmate population. Plain and simple. And, sadly it is going to be quite effective. I am so grateful/lucky my guy is out of there before March.

[Maniac]

Are there any prisons in Cali where the blacks and whites atuall get along and same with the mexicans.

[se11]

it is still going to be all about race. because they want to mix up a few inmates doesn't mean the mexicans, blacks, and whites, are all going to get along.

[Christina Marie]

Imagine this....."Here Mr. AB....meet you're new celly..Mr. Crip"

[Christina Marie]

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will phase out race-based segregation policies over the next two years. The change is expected to gradually bring more racial mixing to the cellblocks and yards of the nation's largest penal system.

"We will start to create an environment where it will be less dangerous in prison for everyone because racism will start to dissipate," said Bert Deixler, an attorney for Johnson.

By integrating prisons, "the power of racial classification and racism will start to die," Deixler said.

"People will come into contact in a more reasonable way with people of a different race and will not feel so threatened or so angry with those people."

This man is delusional

[Invincible]

if he is, you arent?

[Christina Marie]

if he is, you arent?

Gee Invincible.....how do you think think this little plan of theirs is all going to work out?? Do you think its a good idea??? Do you think the inmates are going to just become best buddies all of a sudden because the CDCR has decided to do this?? Or maybe you just don't actually have any reason to give a f*ck because you don't have any friends, family or loved ones that are going to be subject to this little experiment and are running you're mouth about something for no particular reason???

[Invincible]

so do you really think it can happen in society if integration cant happen in prison? whats the diff between prison and society? in society u dont know whose the cirminal and whose not thats the only diff.

[Christina Marie]

so do you really think it can happen in society if integration cant happen in prison? whats the diff between prison and society? in society u dont know whose the cirminal and whose not thats the only diff.

So are you saying that society is filled with people who are as f*cked up in the head as inmates who are institutionalized?? You cannot compare the free world with the world inside prisons Invincible. Two completely different worlds.

[AcmeWhiteBread]

Sounds like their trying to create new C/O positions to me. At a certain point it will be all colors against the C/O's if they push it too far. Seperation is completely natural. Its how the world was , for the most part, prior to say the invention of air travel. What the BIG BROTHER SUPER STATE doesnt realize is that there is no evil with like kind being comfortable with like kind. Just because we all have a nose two eyes and a mouth doesnt mean we are the same.... They just keep compacting the tension andany reasonable person can see, it will blow.

[Christina Marie]

Sounds like their trying to create new C/O positions to me.

Why would they go and create more C/O positions when they cannot fill the positions they have already. The CO's are constanly working doubles because they are so short. VERY SCARY a CO on a double... ! But then again, you may be right....not much the CDCR does makes any sense.

[AcmeWhiteBread]

There will be a need for more cause so many are gonna be in the hospital all the time I would think. Thats not like taking cigarettes from them....
Its much bigger..

[Christina Marie]

There will be a need for more cause so many are gonna be in the hospital all the time I would think. Thats not like taking cigarettes from them....
Its much bigger..

Ok...true.

[Invincible]

so do you really think it can happen in society if integration cant happen in prison? whats the diff between prison and society? in society u dont know whose the cirminal and whose not thats the only diff.

So are you saying that society is filled with people who are as f*cked up in the head as inmates who are institutionalized?? You cannot compare the free world with the world inside prisons Invincible. Two completely different worlds.

in a way it is. Look at all the recent riots, France, Australia, Katrina etc.

[Invincible]

Sounds like their trying to create new C/O positions to me.

Why would they go and create more C/O positions when they cannot fill the positions they have already. The CO's are constanly working doubles because they are so short. VERY SCARY a CO on a double... ! But then again, you may be right....not much the CDCR does makes any sense.

I heard COs make a shitload of money in California, because oI think Governor Davis or something promised them raises after the contributed to his campaign or something awhile abck.

[Christina Marie]

I heard COs make a shitload of money in California, because oI think Governor Davis or something promised them raises after the contributed to his campaign or something awhile abck.

Its all those doubles they are pulling,lol.