NO VINTAGE CALIFORNIA PRUNO FOR NEW YEAR'S?

LANCASTER, Calif., Dec. 31 - There is a tradition among inmates serving
long stretches in the nation's houses of correction. The new year is rung
in with a little Dick Clark and a little jailhouse juice.

The homebrew is lovingly known as hooch in Sing Sing and called pruno in
San Quentin, but the process by which it is made is the same. It is a
fortified wine concocted from a hodgepodge of ingredients including
raisins, prunes (as in pruno), milk or anything containing sugar that can
be purloined from the mess hall and fermented into alcohol.

But the New Year's tradition was broken this evening at the California
State Prison Los Angeles County located high in the Mojave Desert about a
90-minute drive from Los Angeles. The warden decided two months ago that
fresh fruit should be banned from all lunch boxes that are delivered daily
to the cells of its 4,000 inmates. Without fruit, the thinking goes, there
can be no wine. It is the first prison in the California state prison to
ban fruit from the cellblocks.

"A good deal of the violence that goes on in these walls is alcohol
related," said Lt. Ron Nipper, a spokesman for the prison. "So this is law
enforcement 101. Cut your hair, behave yourself, keep your cell clean and
no pruno."

Prison officials acknowledge that it is difficult to curtail pruno
production entirely. Sugar and water are all that is needed. Sugar is
broken down into ethyl alcohol in the presence of yeast, which floats about
naturally in the air.

"We do the best we can," Lieutenant Nipper said. "But you can't trust these
guys. Inmates working in the kitchen hide loose yeast in their shoes.
Everything has a price in here."

Humane and law-abiding citizens need not worry about an outbreak of scurvy
among the incarcerated in Los Angeles County. State guidelines require that
prisoners receive 15 servings of fresh fruit each week. Prisoners receive
their fruit allotment at breakfast and dinner, which are served in the mess
hall. Box lunch is served in the cellblocks.

"There is pruno in every prison," admits Margot Bach, a spokeswoman for the
California Department of Correction. "We see an upswing around the holidays
like Christmas and New Year's. Inmates are human beings after all. They
want to ring in the new year like everybody else. It's a pretty busy day
for us."

Indeed. This morning, a half-dozen correction officers swept through the
beds of Cell Block A, ostensibly in search of pruno. Though the blend is
sealed in plastic bags, it is so rancid it can be detected with a simple
sniff of the nostrils.

"It's a never ending battle of contraband," said Sgt. J. Ortiz.

It is estimated by prison officials that more than two million cocktails
are confiscated each year in California's 33 maximum security penal
facilities, which house 160,000 people.

According to correction officers, amateur alcohol is more prevalent in
California prisons than any other form of contraband. Possession of alcohol
is considered a misdemeanor behind bars, while possession of hard
substances such as methamphetamines, opiates and marijuana are felonies.
This is a deterrent to the man with two strikes, who if caught with a
marijuana cigarette, could find himself serving a life term.

Amenities that have been banned in California prisons over the past decade
include weights, indoor smoking, conjugal visits for those serving life
sentences and now pruno. Keep this up, inmates say, and people will stop
wanting to come.

"Everybody wants to celebrate the New Year," said Paul Magnen, a
soft-spoken and heavily tattooed man currently serving 50 years to life for
the possession of narcotics, his third strike. His previous two felonies,
he said, were in connection with an armed robbery committed in 1980.

"God knows I could use a drink," he said glumly as he sat at a card table
in Cell Block A. "I did what I did, but it doesn't justify 50 years.
There's not much to celebrate in here really. One day is just like the
next. Nothing changes inside. Except the day they take me out in a box."

The most famous recipe for jailhouse pruno comes from Jarvis Masters, a
death row inmate at San Quentin who won a PEN award for his 1992 poem
"Recipe for Pruno." Take orange peels, fruit cocktail and water and heat it
for 15 minutes in your sink with hot water. Keep mixture warm with towels
for fermentation. Leave hidden and undisturbed for two days. Add sugar
cubes and six teaspoons of ketchup. Heat for 30 minutes. Wrap and leave
undisturbed for three more days. Reheat daily for 15 minutes for three more
days. Skim and serve.

The poem ends, "May God have mercy on your soul."