CORCORAN PRISON REVIEW

ATTORNEY GENERAL Bill Lockyer's promise to take yet another look at
conditions at California's notorious Corcoran State Prison is encouraging
after years of guard brutality and official coverups.

But there have been so many feckless investigations of guard-on-inmate
violence and coverups of official misconduct at Corcoran that we will hold
our applause until the new attorney general produces results.

Between 1989 and 1995, there were 50 shootings at the prison in Kings County
leaving seven inmates dead and 43 wounded. Convicts were shot during
``gladiator fights'' between inmates staged by guards, who fired on the
combatants when they failed to quit on command.

Department of Corrections internal investigations and reviews by former
Attorney General Dan Lungren and former Governor Wilson were narrowly
focused and found little. No criminal charges were filed.

Then, a year ago, the FBI indicted eight Corcoran guards on federal civil
rights violations charging they staged fights among inmates in which one
convict was shot to death by a guard. But that was only one shooting.

FBI agents openly criticized state authorities for hampering their
investigation.

With little public confidence in the Department of Corrections efforts to
find the truth at Corcoran, CDC Director Cal Terhune correctly established
an independent panel to review 31 of the shootings.

The panel returned a scalding report in November that 26 of the inmate
shootings -- five of which were fatal -- were not justified. Further, the
panel said, the state's entire system of investigating and prosecuting
prison shootings has broken down.

Last week the attorney general announced that top state prosecutors will
review those findings for possible criminal prosecution. This will be a real
test for Lockyer, if he is serious about rooting out abusive behavior by
guards that some lawmakers say contaminates the entire prison system.

Corcoran was the focus of publicity because of the barbaric gladiator
fights, but there is strong evidence that guard misbehavior may pervade many
of the state's other 32 prisons as well.