A Caldron of Fear and Violence

Hell might be this: A place where all of the racial hatreds, gang wars and law enforcement problems of an entire metropolis are squeezed down into a single bastardized society so hard and twisted it defies reason.

Los Angeles funnels thousands of its worst, from hundreds of gangland neighborhoods, into the sprawling Pitchess Detention Center in the rugged foothills of Castaic. There are killers and crack dealers, carjackers and small-time thieves, and untold numbers of innocent men--all prisoners in a madhouse, struggling for power and survival in loud, overcrowded jail dormitories never meant to house dangerous felons.

Tensions smolder day and night, erupting time and again in bloody clashes: fistfights, “rat pack” beatings of 10 or 12 on one, full-blown race riots.

Sometimes hundreds of prisoners fight at once, malice surging like high voltage, inmate to inmate, dorm to dorm. Guards scramble to impose order with pellet guns and sting-ball grenades--a harsh style of discipline that often dances on the line between what is necessary and what is not.

Pitchess was the scene of 57 violent disturbances last year, 123 the year before that. It is an extraordinary place in a system that is in deep trouble on all fronts.

The Los Angeles County jails are an institution, like the courts and City Hall, that form part of the immense regulating machinery of society: pumps and filters to cleanse the streets of lawbreakers, to deter crime. In some areas, the whine of the motors is no more than a faint hum, but in many communities--especially in impoverished minority neighborhoods--the jails are a roaring presence, touching nearly everyone, dividing families, drawing up thousands of teenagers into the penal system.

“No one wants to go to jail, but a lot of the youth here in the inner city feel that it’s inevitable,” said DeWayne Holmes, 28, a former inmate from South-Central who has helped crusade for a gang truce. “The typical youth . . . if he’s never been in [jail] or never been shot or never been involved in drugs, he’ll say, ‘I was lucky.’ ”

Eight major facilities make up the nation’s largest county jail system, one that handles 250,000 inmates a year. At any given time, its cells, holding tanks and dormitories house 18,000 to 20,000 prisoners--men and women locked up to await trial, or serving sentences, or in transit to and from the courts and state prisons.

The machinery is overloaded, running hot. The Sheriff’s Department, which operates the system, has closed several older jails in recent years--reducing capacity by 5,000 inmates--and has run short of money to open Twin Towers, a new, 4,100-bed jail that cost $373 million to build.

Jail space could be doubled and still not accommodate all the criminals that should be in custody, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Thousands are arrested and convicted each year, only to be released for lack of room. Not a single neighborhood is unstained by the leakage.

“The problem is enormous,” said Chief Mark Squiers, head of the Sheriff’s Custody Division, who said the department has pleaded in vain for financial help. “We holler . . . and nobody gives a damn. It doesn’t work.”

Inside, the jails are old, rat-infested, understaffed, overcrowded. The clientele is rougher than ever--more felons, more repeat offenders bound for state prisons.

Center of Maelstrom

Perhaps nowhere is the system more bent and cracking than at Pitchess, where life is dominated by mayhem, or the prospects of mayhem. In between meals and sleep and the regimented routines of the jailhouse, prisoners spend much of their time girding for trouble: forming alliances, crafting weapons that they secrete in their mattress pads or candy bars and claiming strategic bunks with a wall at their backs.

Every prisoner and every guard plays some role in tilting the balance between order and chaos. Whichever prevails at the moment is the result of forces swirling at many levels: racism, gang politics, the often hostile relationship between angry, mostly minority inmates and the predominantly white, inexperienced deputies who serve as jail guards.

“It’s hard to describe the fear,” said Lycurgus Helton, 31, a black inmate who was stomped but not seriously hurt during the worst upheaval at Pitchess so far: five days of race riots in January, when 5,300 of the 8,500 prisoners went to battle. Six guards and 123 inmates were injured after the Mexican Mafia ordered an attack on blacks, for reasons that authorities have never been able to learn.

“It was insanity,” said Helton, who is doing time for robbery. “Blood everywhere. It was like something coming to an end--like the book of Revelation, like the Holocaust, whatever you want to say.”

Latinos account for half of the inmates, and blacks another third. Those two groups have been at war for years--as have Latinos and Asians, who are outnumbered by their antagonists 50 to 1.

Race riots and gang fights often are orchestrated by the same men who set down the dorms’ unwritten rules of conduct: tattooed gang leaders known as “shot-callers,” links in a vast criminal network that extends far beyond this remote compound, 40 miles north of downtown.

The network fairly crackles with schemes and gang gossip, tying Pitchess to the streets and to leaders of the Mexican Mafia, a powerful gang in the state prison system. Word of a drive-by shooting in Venice or a drug rip-off in East L.A. reaches the shot-callers over any of hundreds of inmate telephones in the Pitchess dorms.

Shot-callers take advantage of the captive dorm populations to retaliate, ordering a “green light” for attacks on members of rival gangs or racial groups who happen to be in custody.

Assaults continue until the score is settled, a form of retribution and extortion whose effects ripple back to the streets.

While some combatants are gang leaders, far more are foot soldiers, bound to loyalty to warring factions by lifelong biases, coercion and peer pressures.

“Even if a Mexican grew up next to me, we really can’t be friends in here,” said black inmate Steven Troup, 26, of South-Central, who gravitated to street gangs at age 9. He has been in and out of Pitchess and the prison system for eight years, this time after police accused him of hiding 28 rocks of cocaine in a plastic bag in his mouth.

His tattoos, like those of hundreds of inmates, suggest his long commitment to the gang world: On his left fist and muscular right forearm are the initials “U.G.,” signifying the Under Ground Crips. His are modest examples of a vast lexicon of jailhouse tattoos: gang monikers, slogans and territories woven into fleshy tableaux of snakes, skulls and unclad women--a living Rosetta stone of urban culture.

Racial pride is intense, creating the deepest divisions in the jailhouse. Inmates segregate themselves as much as possible within each dormitory, dividing up bunks, tables and telephones. At the maximum-security East facility--one of four separate jails in the Pitchess compound--only Latinos and blacks live in six cavernous rooms upstairs: the “thunder dorms,” inmates call them, for the booming noises of the riots there.

Each concrete room contains 130 men and nine telephones that stand in a row like ebony tombstones. By agreement of the shot-callers, five phones belong to Latinos, four to blacks. That leaves none for the likes of Roberto Sanchez, who is both--a black-skinned Cuban, 35, arrested in December on a grand-theft charge.

Sanchez insists he should not even be here: He ran off with a man’s gun, he said, to prevent the man from shooting someone. In the dorms he became everyone’s victim. For trying to use one of the Latino phones, he was led to the back of the dorm by two blacks, who slapped him and berated him for showing allegiance to the enemy.

“ ‘Over here, we don’t talk to Spanish people,’ ” Sanchez recalls them saying. “I told them, ‘I’m Spanish--I’m Cuban.’ They told me it don’t make no difference--my skin is black.”

He was forced to “roll up,” bundle his bedsheet and pillow and plead with the guards to transfer him elsewhere. Sanchez ended up in six different dorms before being moved into a less hostile “old man’s” dorm, normally reserved for inmates over 40. At one stop, about 25 Latinos beat him until he dropped to the floor, a bloody assault that one inmate described as a “mob scene, a lot of noise . . . screaming” that went on for 10 minutes.

No one tried to help him.

Staking Out Territory

At downtown’s Men’s Central Jail, where many of the county’s most hardened inmates are held, guards usually are able to isolate incompatible elements in separate cells and cellblocks. But that is far more difficult at Pitchess, a sprawl of pale buildings and chain-link fences that occupies 3,800 acres of ranch land near Magic Mountain.

Developed over several decades as the Wayside Honor Rancho--a work farm mainly for drunks, traffic violators and other nonviolent offenders--the compound is considered inadequate for today’s demands. Its defining characteristic is its large dormitories, varying in size and shape and crowded with double and triple bunks.

The dorms house 70 to 140 inmates at a time, often in space designed for half that many. Minor offenders share tables and open toilets with alleged killers, armed robbers and rapists awaiting their day in court.

Trifling matters--a stolen tube of toothpaste, someone cutting in line for the showers--become issues of staggering importance in rooms where men brood endlessly over their legal woes and where some keep all their worldly possessions in a small box. A disagreement over “proper bathroom etiquette” blew up last year into a race riot involving 100 inmates, jail administrators said.

“This county is crazy,” said former inmate Mario Wellington, 34, who led nightly prayer groups at Pitchess before being sent to state prison for selling marijuana. He was in one of the huge East dorms when rioting broke out in January. He recalled the terror of objects flying, bunks overturning.

“Your life is on the line,” he said. “You draw a circle around yourself and defend [it]. . . . A guy came in my circle and . . . I don’t know if he was coming to hurt me or not. All I knew was, he came too close to me. I hit him twice and he fell, and when he fell I stomped on him twice and dragged him away from me. Then somebody else came at me, and I fought. I felt bad about it, because I’m a child of God. But God don’t have no punks--God has warriors. Ecclesiastes says there’s a time for war.”

Even when fights are not raging, the dorms operate under Byzantine rules imposed by the shot-callers. Issues that threaten to stir violence are often brought before them in “court,” where the shot-callers yank at the levers of emotion and reason to try to negotiate peace.

Sometimes they decide that the only alternative to an all-out brawl is to punish a thief or troublemaker. Each racial group is expected to handle its own. Thieves are usually escorted to the rear of the dorm, out of easy view of the guards, and beaten--a practice known as “regulating.”

For lesser offenses--say, disruptive yakking at night--blacks may force a brother to roll up, transfer out, in lieu of getting hurt. Latinos are more likely to regulate their own, no matter what the charge.

On occasions when the shot-callers cannot agree, disputes quickly escalate into far greater violence. That was the case in April at the maximum-security North County Correctional Facility, the largest and newest of the Pitchess jails, where an 18-year-old black inmate was accused of taking a metal shank--a makeshift knife--that belonged to a Latino.

When the shank turned up missing, the shot-callers discussed where it had been hidden and where the black inmate, Ronald Harrington, had been seen. Harrington staunchly denied the theft. Other blacks decided to stand by him, despite being badly outnumbered, said inmate Gregory Robinson, one of the allies.

“He swore on his mother and swore on his neighborhood that he didn’t take it,” Robinson said. “He almost broke down and cried.”

That night Latinos timed their assault to begin at the call for the wristband count--the announcement ordering inmates to their bunks, so guards can run a checklist to be sure no one has escaped. Twenty men were injured in the fierce surprise attack, Harrington worst of all. He had to be transported to nearby Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital and later Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, where he underwent five days of treatment for facial wounds and stab wounds in his leg.

“They were jumping off the top bunk down onto his face, his neck,” Robinson recalled. “Man, you should have seen it--kicking his face off the side of a steel bed. They kicked his head off the ground, stomped him unconscious.”

Survival Tactics

Whites, who account for 15% of the inmates, live in constant fear of attack, as do other outnumbered groups. The safest are those who are strong or in dorms with a favorable racial balance or who are willing to pay “rent” to the shot-callers in the form of snacks and other items from the inmate store.

Ken Wolf, a 37-year-old Caucasian who spent time at Pitchess this year on a drug charge, said he was housed in a mostly black dorm.

“The first thing I did,” he said, “was I found the biggest black guy there and paid him protection,” two $1 items a week--either prepackaged cups of soup, potato chips or instant coffee. And he went beyond that, volunteering to write letters. Wolf averaged four letters a day, to girlfriends, to women listed in the personal ads.

“I wrote a lot of letters for people who really didn’t know how to write,” he said. “People were coming to me, [saying], ‘Write me a letter to this one.’ I felt kind of important. I knew nobody was going to mess with me. Nobody would let it happen.”

Wolf was housed in medium-security North jail, a low, gray concrete building, which looks like a wing in an industrial park. Its dorms hold 100 prisoners apiece. Bunks are assigned, but prisoners claim their own beds once the lights go down. Latinos take over the row along one wall, blacks the other, leaving a middle row for whites and others of lesser importance.

The shot-callers sleep in the bottom bunks at the rear of the room, where they can hang sheets from the upper bunks and afford themselves privacy from the guards. Many use the seclusion, Wolf said, to smoke homemade cigarettes made from coffee grounds and lettuce. The ersatz tobacco is wrapped in pages torn from the free Bibles the chaplains pass out. The cigarettes are lit by jamming pencil leads into a wall outlet, creating an electrical short that will ignite a wad of toilet paper.

Sex in the dorms is uncommon and rarely discussed, but Wolf said it happens. Two men were understood to be partners; one made the other’s bed, gave him extra food, brought him coffee in the morning. Another prisoner went from bed to bed at night, sleeping with several inmates, until he was badly beaten and transferred out. The rumor, Wolf said, was that one of his former sexual partners in another dorm had tested positive for HIV, and one of his new partners vented his rage by beating him.

“It looked like his eye was coming out,” Wolf said. “There was a lot of blood. You learn real quick not to look. You get checked: ‘Mind your own goddamn business.’ ”

Outside Influences

It is every prisoner’s business to be alert for signs of danger. In the name of preparedness, prisoners arm themselves and their allies with weapons they craft and hide: razors melted onto the ends of toothbrushes, steel slivers cut from air vents and socks filled with scraps of tile. In the heat of battle, others are improvised. At North, where the ceilings are low, prisoners can stand on the bunks and break off fluorescent lights. Although the phones are rarely vandalized, one inmate said he has seen a receiver snapped off, the metal cord used as a whip.

Though administrators and guards continually search for concealed weapons and move inmates around to keep racial balances from becoming volatile, trouble flares anyway, often for reasons rooted in the streets. In 1994, the year that Pitchess disturbances soared to 123, two deadly feuds were raging in the county: one between Latinos and blacks in Venice, another between Latinos and Asians in Long Beach.

An incident that May, when Asians shot and killed three Latino teenagers as they were leaving a birthday party, is still cited by shot-callers who keep a green light on Asians in the dorms. An attack in March occurred even after guards were tipped to it. Deputies transferred 28 inmates, but still Latinos singled out the weakest-looking Asian from a group housed in an East dorm and beat him badly enough to put him in the infirmary.

“Anything that happens on the streets these days, the prisoners in here have to pay for it,” said one Latino inmate, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This is the way it is handled.”

In contrast to other racial and ethnic groups, Latinos are highly organized. Their shot-callers compile lists of other gangs targeted with green lights. Often those targets are other Latino gangs that have run afoul of the Mexican Mafia by violating its ban on drive-by shootings or by failing to pay “taxes” on drug sales on the streets.

The lists are circulated from dorm to dorm, by phone or by means of smuggled jailhouse notes known as “kites,” a standard form of communication at Pitchess. Kites float through the halls in the shoes or waistbands of prisoners going to court or the infirmary, on meal carts pushed dorm to dorm by inmate workers, and in plastic bags that inmates carry anally.

Even when attacked, targeted Latino gangs are expected to side with their assailants when the time comes for war with blacks, a traditional enemy in the penal system dating back decades, to when blacks were the dominant group. Latinos and blacks alike are expected to support their brothers or risk further attack later, either at Pitchess or in the state prisons.

“You can’t go in there and say, ‘I’m an individual, I’m by myself,’ ” former inmate Holmes said. “There is no neutral corner.”

Inmates caught fighting are usually given 10 days in the “hole,” Pitchess’ cramped disciplinary cells. But many aggressors go unpunished--in part because snitches are savagely regulated and because surveillance by nearly 700 guards often is inadequate.

A single deputy in the newest Pitchess jail must watch 250 to 300 men. At East, the oldest jail, a guard supervises 130 men by peering through thick wire mesh into a room crowded with square pillars, long rows of bunks and hanging sheets.

Many prisoners express bitterness about the guards. They say the guards foment trouble to keep inmates divided--and therefore less able to challenge authority--and that they allow riots to occur so they can earn overtime. The county spent $5.5 million last year on overtime at Pitchess, beyond normal payroll expenses of $51 million. It paid an additional $600,000 in overtime just to handle the January riots.

Although administrators scoffed at the notion that guards might angle for extra income, they acknowledged that a small number of deputies fail to treat inmates or their belongings with proper respect. Inmates say the guards curse them, rough them up and treat them as anything but men who are, in many cases, not yet convicted by the courts and who are presumed innocent in the eyes of the law.

Adding to the Tension

Seventy-six complaints of excessive force were filed against Pitchess guards last year; 12 were sustained. Guards sometimes create conflict among inmates by singling out culprits when an entire dorm is disciplined, prisoners said.

“[A guard] will say, ‘You can blame so-and-so for having the TV turned off,’ ” inmate Phillip M. Diaz said. “He may name a black, or he may name a Mexican. They start yelling at each other, and then starts the physical part.”

During dorm inspections, guards are supposed to place the prisoners’ personal possessions--deodorant, shampoo, stamps, photographs and the like--atop their bunks, so they do not get lost. Instead, candy bars are often crushed underfoot to look for razors and shanks. Other belongings, according to inmates, are often tossed to the floor and mixed together, sometimes even thrown away.

Missing items lead to accusations of theft, inflaming the tensions.

“They keep the war going,” inmate Ansar Muhammad, 34, said of the guards. “They’re trying to keep the racial war [between] the Mexicans and blacks, but pretty soon it’s going to be against them. They can’t see it. They’re not aware of what they’re creating.”

That bitterness is heaped on top of anguish at being separated from loved ones.

Carlos Bandino, 42, a soft-spoken man with a gray-flecked mustache and the tattoo of a nude woman on his forearm, is one of about 500 inmates facing “third-strike” charges that could send them away for life. He was accused of armed robbery and brandishing a firearm after police officers confiscated stolen property from his home.

“If this ‘three-strikes’ law is not abolished, [the inmates] are going to go up against the [guards],” he said. “That’s what I hear through the grapevine . . . coming down from the state [prison] system: a green light on everything.

“If law enforcement’s going out of their way to crack somebody and put them away for life, that’s pretty much what it’s coming to--the convicts versus enforcement.”

Being jailed has disrupted his attempt to go straight and to make something of his life, Bandino said. It has cost him his job as a warehouse watchman and caused problems for his wife and children: They had to give up their rental home in Covina and move to Adalanto, near Victorville. His wife, Debbie, gets by on welfare, raising her three children from a previous marriage, plus a baby daughter she and Bandino had two years ago.

One son, 14, has begun having trouble in school--fighting, failing classes, she said. Her other son, 10, was caught throwing rocks and breaking windows.

“He’s got a lot of anger in him,” Debbie said. “I’m having a hard time getting control of them ever since [my husband’s] been gone.”

Bandino frets over their well-being. He grew up without a father, and he fears that his baby daughter will do the same.

Jail reaches across generations that way.

Inmate Daniel Zepeda, accused of carrying a concealed gun, has survived dubious odds to reach the cusp of adulthood.

At 21, he stood shirtless in one of Pitchess’ aging disciplinary cells, his chest emblazoned with the signature of his neighborhood: “Puente.” His younger brother was here before him, on the way to prison, Zepeda said, and his father was here before that.

“My dad used to tell me, just in case I’d go to prison, how to handle myself,” he said. “I’m on that road. It looks like I’m going to be there.”

It is not a road he likes, but it is the only route he knows: the gangs, the violence, inside the system and out. It is his past, and it is all he can really see for his future.

“Jail was all I knew, basically--that and the streets,” Zepeda said. “It ain’t no place to grow up.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About This Series

The Times today begins a three-part series exploring conditions at Los Angeles County’s jails:

* Today: Racial warfare explodes inside L.A.’s most volatile jail complex.

* Monday: Convicts are back on the streets in no time--often to commit more crime.

* Tuesday: Years on the inside breed frustration and cynicism among jailers.