The Chino Riot 2: Stupid Reporter Tricks & Possible Solutions

FIRST THE STUPID REPORTER TRICKS—THIS TIME NY TIMES STYLE

In case you’ve been living in a bunker, starting at around 8:30 p.m Saturday night there was an 11 hour, 1300-person riot at the California Institute for Men at Chino—otherwise known as “Chino.” 250 people were injured. 55 of them went to the hospital. Nobody died. No guards were injured.

Unfortunately, in reporting the event, the press—myself included— unwittingly drew a straight line where none existed between the 2005 Supreme Court decision regarding integrating California’s prisons—and the race-based riot at Chino. (See my earlier post for back story).

In this instance it seems that it was the NY Times that began the viral spread of faulty news that the rest of us happily repeated.

Here’s the triggering set of sentences from the NYT article on the riot:

The Chino prison is trying to put into effect a 2005 Supreme Court decision that prohibits 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 could now opt out of segregation and that a growing number of black, Latino and white prisoners shared 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…..

Sounds true and well sourced, right? One would think so. But one would be wrong.

CDCR Adult Operations Public Information Officer, Terry Thornton. has been tearing her hair out on this matter. “I’ve spent more time talking about that Supreme Court thing than everything else,” she said on one of the occasions when we talked yesterday.

According to Thornton, the facts are as follows:

Chino has not in any way been involved in any post- Supreme’s decision integration. Not at all. Not even a teensy-weensy bit.

The only two institutions that have been affected in the least are Mule Creek State Prison and Sierra Conservation Center. The former is a regular prison housing inmates at multiple security levels. The later is a minimum and medium level custody place that trains inmates in firefighting.

Again, nothing at all has happened of this nature at Chino. Furthermore, the riots took place in housing units that are made up entirely of 200 person dorms that have always been integrated said Thornton. (The Supreme’s decision, FYI, has to do with the integration of cells.)

So then how did the NY Times get it so wrong? And what about that Lieutenant Hargrove and what he said? (Hargrove is the press guy for Chino)

“The NY Times took a bunch of facts, smashed them together and came to the wrong conclusion,” said Thornton impatiently. (Terry Thornton is a very nice woman, but I don’t think she ever got lunch yesterday.)

It seems that, among the many, many questions that inmates are asked at the Reception Center at Chinobefore they’re shipped off to the prison where they will spend the bulk of their time, is if they are okay to have another race in their cells, or not. And if so, what race or races? The question is pro-forma, and has nothing to do with the court decision. Nor does it have anything to do with how they are housed at Chino. NOR does it increase racial troubles. It’s just a couple of boxes to be checked on a form.

And it certainly had nothing to do with this riot.

(And, yes, I know that’s wa-a-aay more than you needed or wanted to know.)

Anyway….

As with the now endlessly cited, but entirely false notion that the governor was proposing the “early release” of 27,000 prisoners, once the mistake is repeated enough times, it is hard to call back.

Mea culpa for my part in the Supreme Court/Chino mistake.

***********************************************************************************************************
WHAT LESSONS SHOULD WE TAKE FROM THIS?

No, we don’t know the exact cause of the thing yet, other than the fact that it was Black on Brown and vice versa. But the specific cause of this specific riot is merely anecdotal and, for the most part, irrelevant. It is the systemic causes we must contemplate.

With this in mind, I spoke with one of the team of CDCR prison ombudsmen, Matthew Thomas, sighed when I asked him.

“We need to put money into programs that will train people for jobs, and that sort of thing,” he said, “and into helping people when they get out. But until you start looking at sentencing reform….” he said. You’re not going to get the money for all those good programs, if you don’t turn down the spigot that’s sending all these people to prison.”

“We also gotta do something to give alternatives to all those kids from those inner city neighborhoods who are feeding our prisons,” Thomas said. “But you know all that.”

Yep. Most of us know all that. Still it doesn’t hurt to say it again.

Yet in Tuesday’s editorial, the New York Times got to the deeper levels.

Here is part of it:

…..Officials are still investigating, but a major cause is already clear: 5,900 men were being held in a facility designed for 3,000. The violence should serve as a warning to officials across the country not to try to balance state budgets by holding inmates in inhumane conditions.

California has already ignored too many warnings. In 2007, a state oversight agency declared that “California’s correctional system is in a tailspin.” That same year, a prison expert warned that the California Institution for Men in Chino, the site of the recent riot, was “a serious disturbance waiting to happen.”



Last week, just days before the riot, a three-judge federal panel ordered the state to reduce its prison population of more than 150,000 by about 40,000 within the next two years. That was the only way, the panel ruled, to bring the prison health care system up to constitutional standards.

The 184-page order painted a grim and alarming picture — with some state prison facilities at nearly 300 percent of intended capacity and some prisoners forced to sleep in triple-bunk beds in gymnasiums. “In these overcrowded conditions,” the court said, “inmate-on-inmate violence is almost impossible to prevent.”

California’s problem — like much of the nation’s — is a mismatch between its harsh sentencing policies and its willingness to pay to keep so many people locked up for so long. A few years ago, it went to the Supreme Court to defend its right, under the state’s three-strikes law, to sentence a shoplifter to 25 years to life.

Given the serious budget problems that California is facing, there is not a lot of extra money available. The state could, however, divert offenders into drug-treatment programs and other nonprison environments, which are less expensive than incarceration and better at rehabilitation. It could also do more to give prisoners job skills and help them re-enter society — so they don’t end up back behind bars.

The riot in Chino and the federal court ruling contain the same message for state officials everywhere: they must come up with smart ways of reducing prison populations and they must do it quickly.

This is what every single governor-appointed commission and blue ribbon committee and high-priced state study has said—including (as I mentioned in Sunday’s Op Ed) the commission headed by former Governor George Deukmejian, arguably one of the godfathers of modern hard-liner law-and-order policy in the state.

Yet spineless legislators and rigid, one-note lock-em-up martinetshave repeatedly resisted reality and things keep getting worse not better.

However, later this month, when the California State Legislature reconvenes, we have a fiscally-necessitated chance at some real change. Let us please, please, please take it.

NOTE: The LA Times also has a good report in Tuesday’s paper.