CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 12, 2023, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“PRISON GUARDS GET A WARNING”
Few labor
groups have more clout in California government than the prison guards union,
whose members draw an average annual salary of almost $55,000, not counting
their often-copious overtime.
But the
California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. has now been put on formal notice
that its members can’t get away with simply doing whatever they want, whenever
they want to inmates in the state prison system.
Lawyers
for convicts have long claimed that’s been the actual situation in prisons from
Pelican Bay in Del Norte County on the Oregon border to Chuckwalla in eastern
Riverside County, and everything in between.
Now,
though,the prison guards have learned their storied and frequent political
contributions may buy them a lot of influence in Sacramento, but not so much in
federal courts around the state.
That’s
one lesson of a ruling from Senior U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, a Bill
Clinton appointee based in San Francisco, in a case mostly affirmed the other
day by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that included
one judge each named by ex-Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
As a
result of the new ruling, guards in at least one prison now must wear body
cameras when dealing with inmates because of documented excess use of force.
Some actions described included tipping over the wheelchairs of disabled
prisoners, punching a hard-of-hearing inmate in the face when he asked for
written communication from the guard because he couldn’t hear what the guard
had said and using pepper spray on mentally ill convicts.
The
prison most affected by the ruling is the Richard J. Donovan Correctional
Facility in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego, about 1.5 miles north of the
Mexican border. Wilken had made her order apply also to five other prisons, but
the appeals court panel found alleged abuses at those facilities were not as
firmly documented as those at Donovan.
The
Donovan facility was designed in part to prepare inmates who are undocumented
immigrants for eventual release to U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services for deportation
to their home countries. It teaches skills they can use after they are returned
home. Donovan also specializes in prisoners with mental illness or high risk
medical issues. Inmates there have recently included high profile criminals
like Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, Manson Family member Chares (Tex)
Watson, the parent-killing Menendez brothers and onetime record executive Suge
Knight.
Donovan
features a shoe factory making footwear for state prisoners around California
and a bakery that supplies bread and cakes to several other prisons daily.
State and
union officials fought the order imposing surveillance and body cameras, new
training and a new complaint process, and kept those changes away from prisons
aside from Donovan. They said the claimed mistreatment of prisoner/patients was
not well documented, but San Francisco attorney Gay Grunfeld and the San
Quentin-based Prison Law Office collected 179 declarations from prisoners detailing
alleged abuses by prison guards.
The
appeals court panel also said the charges upheld at Donovan were closely
related to previous claims the state has mistreated disabled inmates in
violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Circuit
Judge Michelle Friedland, an Obama appointee, called the incident where the partially
deaf convict was hit in the face “a violent denial of accommodations” that
might deter other inmates from seeking help required by the ADA. She said both
the convicts and Judge Wilken had no need to “sit idly while (guards) violated
(prisoners’) rights.”
While
striking down parts of the initial court order that applied to other
facilities, the appeals court ruling put the
prison guards on notice that they, like police on their beats, are not
immune from punishment for violating people’s rights, even people they have
reason to dislike.
For one
thing, Friedland noted there is “plenty of evidence” of mistreatment of
prisoners at other facilities, but it was “not as thoroughly corroborated” as
what happened at Donovan.
So prison
guards around the state now know they can be observed and probably should at
least pull their punches if they want to avoid the kind of discipline underway
at Donovan.
It also
lets union leaders know the clout they enjoy in the state Capitol has some
limits.
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Email Thomas Elias
at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.