This is exactly what I was just talking about yesterday...
LOS ANGELES — Rioting inmates smashed and burned one of the nation’s largest prison facilities on Saturday night and Sunday morning, injuring 250 prisoners and hospitalizing 55.
The 11-hour riot, at the California Institution for Men in Chino, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, broke down along racial lines, with African-American prison gangs fighting Latino gangs in hand-to-hand combat, the authorities said.
No prison employees were injured, no deaths were reported, and no inmates escaped, state officials said. But the entire 33-prison system was placed on lockdown to prevent unrest from spreading.
With more than 150,000 inmates, the California prison system is one of the most crowded in the nation, with many of its facilities holding more than double the number of inmates they were designed for. A federal three-judge court ruled last week that crowding and poor health care were to blame for one avoidable inmate death each week and that the system was “impossible to manage.”
Lt. Mark Hargrove, a spokesman for the Chino facility, said damage to the 1,300-inmate prison was “significant and extensive” with prisoners having smashed windows, torn down gates and used whatever they could to battle one another.
“Inmates broke out glass and used shards as knives,” Lieutenant Hargrove said. “They used pieces of metal, wood, whatever they could break off the walls, pipes.”
The Chino facility is trying to put into effect a 2005 Supreme Court decision that prohibited automatic and systematic racial segregation of prison inmates after more than three decades of racial separation in the corrections system.
Lieutenant Hargrove said that inmates may now opt out of segregation on an individual basis and that a growing number of black, Latino and white prisoners share cells, increasing racial tensions in the prison.
“All races had injuries,” Lieutenant Hargrove said of the weekend riot. “But there are a greater number of injuries among Hispanic and black inmates. And we did have another incident that occurred in May, a riot between blacks and Hispanics, and this may be associated with that incident.”
Prison officials said they were still questioning inmates to understand what set off the uprising. They said no demands or complaints were directed at the guards.
Inmates in one of seven 200-man housing units began brawling at about 8:20 p.m. Saturday, officials said. Overwhelmed guards set off an alarm and quickly retreated as unrest spread through the low-slung prison.
Thirty minutes later, a crisis response team of about 80 guards arrived at the institution, but were prevented from entering by the chaos inside. Guards watched as prisoners reinforced positions with barricades of broken bunk beds, desks and other furniture and clashed in the prison yards and rooftops.
One housing unit was virtually destroyed by fire, Lieutenant Hargrove said. The other housing areas were so badly damaged that they were uninhabitableon Sunday, he said, so some inmates were being temporarily housed in tents while others were sent to alternate facilities.
As prisoners tired on Sunday and fighting died down, prison guards re-entered the facility, staving off sporadic attacks from prisoners throwing scrap metal and glass at them, and reasserted control.
Lieutenant Hargrove said that the entire prison was being treated as a crime scene and that new charges would probably be filed against prisoners who participated in the violence, which was mainly between inmates.
In its order last week, the court directed the state to come up with a plan to reduce its prison population by 40,000 inmates within two years. Jerry Brown, the state attorney general and a possible candidate for governor next year, said he would probably appeal the ruling.
Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, said the riot illustrated the many problems plaguing the state prison system, including growing cost overruns. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently approved $1.2 billion in cuts to corrections without specifying how he would achieve those savings.
“There are proposals to eliminate all programs including reducing visiting days for inmates participating in programs,” Mr. Krisberg said. “But if you isolate these men from their families and cut down even the most basic educational and counseling programs you’re going to create more idleness, and this is what happens.”
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