OVERCROWDING, VIOLENCE PLAGUE PRISON SYSTEM

The violence at Pelican Bay State Prison on Wednesday once again puts
the spotlight on California's troubled prison system as it struggles
with problems of overcrowding and allegations of prisoner abuse.

``It's a horrific situation in the prisons,'' said Richard Becker, San
Francisco coordinator of the National People's Campaign, a
non-profit advocacy group calling for prison reform.

California's prison system is the largest in the country, housing
161,000 inmates in 33 prisons, 38 fire and conservation camps, 14
community correctional facilities and two county jails. And over the
past decade, the state has paid millions of dollars to settle cases of
alleged excessive force, wrongful death and constitutional violations
throughout this system.

State officials are especially wary about violent incidents in the
prisons following allegations that correctional officers at Corcoran
State Prison in the Central Valley staged gladiator-style battles
between rival inmates for their own entertainment in February and
April of 1994. Preston Tate, a rapist, was shot to death by a guard
during an exercise yard brawl in the April incident.

As part of that probe, federal officials looked into whether the
state's Corrections Department and Attorney General's Office impeded
an investigation into those guards. A federal civil rights lawsuit
brought by Tate's family was scheduled to go to trial next month, but
has been postponed.

Other notorious incidents include a case where four Corcoran guards
were accused of setting up inmate Eddie Dillard to be raped in March
1993 by his cellmate as punishment for kicking a female guard at
another prison. After years of investigations by state, federal and
local authorities, the guards were eventually tried -- and all four
were acquitted in November.

As a result of those and other allegations, efforts have been made to
tighten use-of-force regulations, with the most recent retooling
coming last year, said Jeff Thompson, lobbyist for the California
Correctional Peace Officers Association, the guards' union.

Thompson said four bills were passed to improve training, clarify when
use of lethal force is necessary and help guards use better judgment.

But advocates for inmates and correction guards say conditions in the
nation's largest correctional system need to be improved.

As prisoners double up in cell bunks and stand in long lines for
toilets and dinner, tempers flare. As prison guards wrestle with more
and more inmates, nerves tense.

And when these two problems converge, as they may have in the yard of
Pelican Bay's highest-security wing of the maximum-security facility,
violence erupts.

``The sheer number of prisoners in the system makes effective
management all but impossible,'' said Steve Fama, a staff attorney at
the Prison Law Office in San Rafael, a non-profit group that provides
free legal services to state prisoners.

Matthew Pavone, a former assistant U.S. attorney general in San
Francisco, and lawyer representing a correctional officer involved in
a lawsuit in Fresno, said the stress of monitoring the state's most
vicious convicts takes a heavy toll. And working extra shifts because
of staff shortages -- common in the prisons -- only exacerbates the
strain.

Becker, with the National People's Campaign, said Wednesday's riot
was, in part, a symptom of the harsh conditions prisoners endure, like
solitary confinement.

``At places like Pelican Bay there's no effort for rehabilitation,
it's strictly punishment,'' Becker said. ``And that creates a very
explosive situation.''

In 1998 in California, three prisoners were shot to death by guards
breaking up fights, and a dozen other inmates died in altercations
between prisoners, according to the state Corrections Department's
report.

California's prison system is also the deadliest in the nation,
according to another study by the Criminal Justice institute, a
Middletown, Conn., independent research group. California had 16
violent inmate deaths in 1997, compared with nine violent deaths in
Texas prisons and 10 violent deaths in federal prisons.