Mayhem in the Cellblocks

By DAN GOODGAME

Immortalized on jukeboxes in a thousand honky-tonks, California's Folsom Prison is one of the U.S.'s best-known penitentiaries, and one of its worst. Hewn from local granite at the base of the Sierra foothills northeast of Sacramento, Folsom dates back to the 1880s and for decades has been a squalid, antiquated mess. But its problems have become acute in the past ten years, as its population has swelled to 70% more than capacity and the rate of violent acts nearly tripled. This year three inmates have been killed and 130 others stabbed in unmanageable violence that has locked the prison into what Criminologist Craig Haney calls "a slow-motion riot."

Folsom, for all its notoriety, is depressingly typical and illustrates the turmoil faced by penitentiaries and local jails across the U.S. In April a Justice Department study reported prison overcrowding was worse than ever, with 463,866 men and women jammed into facilities that are filled to twice their capacity. Prisons in a record 37 states have been found unfit by the federal courts. Meanwhile, the bloodshed born of such stock-pen conditions is spreading beyond the wire-topped walls of prisons, clogging the entire criminal-justice system, forcing the early release of dangerous convicts and cycling their pent-up rage back into the streets.

Designed for a population of 1,782, Folsom today struggles to contain 3,036 maximum-security convicts, the meanest of the mean in violent crime. On the main blocks, two inmates are jammed into each of the 6-ft. by 8 1/2 -ft. cells. Less than half work or attend classes. The others mainly watch daytime television and frequently turn their idle nothing-to-lose ferocity against one another. Homosexual rape has long been commonplace, and stabbings are now epidemic, averaging 19 a month, in contrast to about nine a month in 1984. Assailants wield sharpened combs and toothbrushes, melted-down margarine containers and other makeshift daggers. The usual motive is simple racial hatred among blacks, Hispanics and Anglos.

Seeking protection and status, many inmates join gang syndicates such as the Bloods, the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood, whose inflexible ethic of vengeance ensures that no knife attack can ever be the last. "The guards can't solve all this fighting," laments one convicted murderer, Kenneth Foutenette. "The only solution is the inmates." Says William Charles, a lanky con in his 20s serving an eight-year sentence: "It's fighting for race. They stab someone, and we get 'em back." Above Charles' sink, like a battle flag, hangs the distinctive red kerchief of the Bloods, a major gang syndicate that runs a lucrative retail cocaine trade not only on the streets of south-central Los Angeles but also inside the walls of the prison. Police detectives report that imprisoned gang leaders are able to direct their criminal enterprises from behind bars, where they also recruit new members.

Folsom's attempts to isolate gang leaders have failed, so when violence flares, authorities have been forced increasingly to use the single blunt tool at their disposal: confinement of all prisoners to their cells. During such "lock-downs," inmates are released only for a ten-minute shower every other day, spending the rest of the time seething in their cells. After each of Folsom's recent lock-downs, inmates have emerged ornery as ever. "All the lock-downs do is buy time," says Prison Chaplain James McGee.

Today's prison crisis represents the late-arriving bill for the law-and-order crackdown of the past decade. Public anger at crime has resulted in the wholesale warehousing of unprecedented numbers of criminals, often at great cost: about $40,000 to build a cell and $16,000 a year to keep it occupied. Despite ambitious construction programs under way in some states ($1.2 billion for 19,000 prison berths in California alone), the crush shows little sign of easing. The inmate nation swells by 73 new members a day. At this rate, a new Folsom is needed every three weeks. Says Gerald Kaufman, an attorney for Philadelphia's National Jail and Prison Overcrowding Project: "You can't build your way out of it."

The problems in the prisons affect not only the inmates, but the whole criminal-justice system. Local jails designed to hold convicts until they are sentenced often find that when the time comes to transfer them, the prisons are full. In Michigan, 10,000 criminals have gained early release under a state law that caps the prison population. In every state, more and deadlier inmates are joining America's more than 1.5 million probationers, many of whom receive only cursory supervision.

Unless alternative programs for dangerous criminals are created, some experts say, incarceration will serve only to escalate the viciousness of American crime. "It animalizes people," says Criminologist Richard Korn of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "They sit in there building fury." Says Charles, the young Bloods gang member: "This place is a pigsty. People come off the lock-downs anxious to kill." Self-serving as that comment may be, a harsh fact remains: more and more cons, both inside the prisons and reunited with fellow gang members on the outside, do just that. --By Dan Goodgame. Reported by Richard Woodbury/Sacramento

With reporting by Reported by Richard Woodbury/Sacramento