That Saturday Night Riot at Chino’s California Institute for Men

There are now reports that the 11 hour race-based riot that broke out at around 8:30 Saturday night at the California Institute for Men—more commonly known as Chino—was not spontaneous, but pre-planned.

Prison spokesman Lt. Mark Hargrove told the Riverside Press-Enterprise that on Thursday Chino staff caught wind of plans to start a riot, so the prison was put on a modified lockdown, which included feeding inmates in their cells and not allowing any unnecessary movement of an inmate outside his cell.

That lockdown was lifted on Saturday—at which point the riot began.

By the time it was finished, 1300 of the prison’s 5,911 inmates had been involved, 250 inmates were injured, 55 of those were hospitalized, one dorm was burned to the ground and five more were rendered uninhabitable.

Yet despite the riot’s size, there were no deaths and no injury to staff. There was one serious head injury and multiple stabbings, yet by last night, 38 of those 55 who were hospitalized had been released.

The correctional officers deserve much credit for their skillful handling of the event. According to the CDCR, to eventually control the riots, officers primarily used batons, pepper spray, and “less lethal force”—projectiles and the like.

After the riot began, the nine other So Cal prisons were also put in lock down—just to be on the safe side— to prevent the riot from spreading.

As to how preplanned the riot was, my friend former CDCR warden David Winett told me that a look at the weapons gathered post-riot will tell a lot. In other words, weapons that were mostly the tools of the moment, glass shards and the like, will convey one message, a high number of pre-made items, another.

Chino was one of the California correctional institutions in which the policy of segregating prisoners by race was being gradually reversed in response to the 2005 Supreme Court decision, even though few state prison experts thought this a terribly safe idea, given the stranglehold the race-based prison gangs have on the corrections system. The desegregation of cells and dorms began slowly to roll out, institution by institution at the end of last summer.

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The California Institution for Men—or Chino, as it is more commonly known—is a dilapidated, 68-year-old complex that sprawls in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains on twenty-five hundred acres of ranch land, forty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It was built in 1941, the third state facility for men authorized in California, eighty-one years after San Quentin’s construction in 1850, a half century after Folsom in 1881.

Alcatraz was built well before Chino, in 1861, but the near mythical island penitentiary that once housed Al Capone and Robert Stroud, the Birdman, was part of the federal system, first a military prison, then in 1934, re-outfitted as the country’s first maximum security super-prison.

Chino, by contrast, was originally intended as a minimum-security facility, also the first in the nation. It was designed to house low level offenders and short-term inmates about to be paroled. Then when determinate sentencing and a rash of stringent drug laws caused California’s prison population to inflate with extraordinary rapidity in the early 1980s, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation needed another place to stash short time but higher-risk prisoners and, unwittingly, allowed the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood to cluster at Chino. Instead of controlling the mix in those early stages, the CDC’s over-bureaucratized system kept transferring inmates apparently without cognizance of their gang associations. Soon all the prison gangs were represented and the state’s so-called safe facility became among its most violent.

Chino became notorious for three incidents. The first was the 1983 escape of inmate Kevin Cooper within 24 hours of his arrival at the prisons. Cooper killed four people within a few days of his escape

Then in 2005, Corrections Officer Manuel Gonzalez was stabbed to death at Chino—the first such incident in 20 years. Subsequent investigations found that staff had chronically ignored basic prison security protocols.

Finally, in 2006, Correctional Officer Shayne Allyn Ziska was charged with conspiring to help members of the prison gang, the Nazi Lowriders assault and kill other inmates at Chino. (He was sentenced to 17-years, which strikes me as a bit short. But whatever.)

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Parts of Chino function as what is called a Reception Center—meaning that it is the entry point into the system for parolees returning to custody and newly sentenced male felons from several Southern California counties. At Reception inmates receive diagnostic tests, medical and mental health screening, and other kinds of assessments in order to determine “inmates’ appropriate institutional placement.”

It is also the last stop at which many of those same inmates go to be processed out of prison and back into the non-locked up world.

It was in one of the reception centers–specifically the Reception Center West facilities—that the riot took place.

it is precisely because of the transient nature of their population,that reception centers, like jails, tend to be less socially stable (in terms of the prison gang-run hierarchical social structure that dominates all California prisons) and thus more danger prone.

It doesn’t help that Chino is so run down and in need of repair that in at least one dorm, the hot water was off for more than a year, meaning no hot showers. And a number of inmates have told me that the there are broken windows in many of the cells allowing flies, mosquitoes and other bugs to enter at will.

It also doesn’t help that the prison was designed to hold 3160 inmates, but now has more than 5,900.

Upcoming budget cuts, if not carefully chosen, could matters worse in places like Chino.

Chino and the 9 other So Cal prisons remain on lockdown until further notice.

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Photo capture from KTTV video.