California's Soledad Prison: A ‘Pressure Cooker’ for Rage Among Inmates (Published 1971) (2024)

SOLEDAD, Calif., Feb. 6— Movies have been made about San Quentin and songs have been written about Folsom. Picket signs are now being printed about Soledad.

The Soledad Correctional Training Facility is, like the two other institutions, a Cali fornia state prison. It is sit uated in the lush Salinas Val ley, about 125 miles south of San Francisco, but the pastoral serenity is deceiving. In the last year, eight men have been killed within its mustard colored walls—two guards and six inmates.

“There's such a reign of ter ror now that everything is out of control,” said Fay Stender, a Berkeley lawyer. “It's worse than a jungle. Animals don't act that way.”

Soledad is an extreme exam ple, but it embodies many of the forces that are surging through American prisons, forces that have produced a rash of strikes, riots and murders.

Reflecting the Repression

Prisons, as one official here said, are a “compressed micro cosm” of the outside world. The 2,800 inmates here and their lawyers contend that the violence at Soledad reflects the repression of dissenters and radicals across the country. Prison officials say that the inmates have been infected by the increasing acceptance of violence in some circles “on the street.”

It is agreed that many pris oners are rebelling against reg imentation, that they want more “self‐determination” and control over their own lives.

The cycle of violence at Soledad (pronounced SOUL‐a dad) began last January, when a fight broke out in a prison yard. In trying to quell the disturbance, a white guard shot and killed three inmates, all black.

Two days later, the Monterey County grand jury ruled that the deaths were “justifiable homicide.” Within hours after that news reached the prison, a white guard was murdered. Three black prisoners were charged with the crime. They became known as the “Soledad Brothers.”

In July another white guard was killed, and this time seven black inmates, who were called the “Soledad 7,” were accused of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. However, last Tuesday the District Attorney of Monterey County dropped murder charges against four of the defendants and conspiracy charges against all of them. He said that there was not suffi cient evidence to prosecute the cast.

In August, Jonathan Jackson, the brother of one of the Soledad defendants, invaded a courtroom in Marin County and took several hostages, includ ing a judge, and demanded the release of the prisoners. A shoot‐out ensued, leaving four men — including the judge — dead. Angela Davis, the former philosophy instructor and an outspoken revolutionary, was later charged with buying the guns used by young Jackson.

Since then, three inmates— two whites and a Mexican— have been stabbed to death and five guards have been assault ed, two of them this week.

What is Soledad like? What does life here do to men, the jailers as well as the jailed?

Soledad is a medium‐security prison. Armed guards watch the manicured grounds and steel fences from a series of towers. But most inmates on the “Main Line” are fairly free during the day and carry keys to their own cells.

The most frequent criticisms have centered on O Wing, a section where prisoners are placed In isolation for violat ing prison rules or because they cannot get along with other inmates.

The men in this wing are confined in cells measuring 10 feet by 6 feet with heavy mesh covering the doors. Each door has a slot through which food is passed. Inside, the cells con tain a steel sleeping platform, a toilet and a sink.

The prisoners are allowed out of their cells to exercise about an hour a day. Their reading matter is limited to re ligious or legal material. In mates are not supposed to spend more than a month in isolation, but many have been there six months or more, be cause the prison staff does not feel they should mix with the other prisoners.

If a prisoner in isolation gets into further trouble, he can be thrown into a “strip cell,” or “The Hole,” which is even smaller and more uncomfor table than the rest of O Wing.

As a visitor walked past the tier of cells, the prisoners mut tered and yelled animal sounds, half spoken and half growled. The mesh is so thick that one can hardly see inside the cells, but an occasional limp hand pokes through the food slot. Then one voice breaks through clearly: “Tell him about the tear gas you used last week.”

In interviews at the prison and in letters, inmates have charged that some guards are “racists” who “set up” black prisoners to be beaten or stabbed by whites during the exercise period. They com plained that urine was put in their coffee and that favored inmates were allowed to throw feces at others.

Medical treatment is hap hazard, they charged, but doc tors try to get prisoners hooked on tranquilizers to keep them quiet. All mail, except to at torneys, is censored by the, prison staff; visiting privileges are subject to arbitrary restric tions, the inmates asserted.

A Strong Indictment

Last summer, a group of black lawmakers in the State Legislature investigated O Wing and later reported that, “if even a small fraction of the reports received are accurate, the inmates charges amount to a strong indictment of the prison's employes as cruel, vin dictive, dangerous men who should not be permitted to con trol the lives of the 2,800 men in Soledad.”

Prison officials by and large deny such charges and reply that many of them result from the capacity for exaggeration that infects all prisons. “A headache on the street,” said one official, “is a migraine in side.”

They concede that some guards may be rough in han dling prisoners but they feel that the entire prison staff is being attacked for the actions of a few. Moreover, they say, jails hold men with e long history of violence, who are adept at the encouragement of the guards to start trouble.

As for putting urine in the coffee, one official said: “I can't swear it never happened, but if it happened more than once or twice, I'd be very surprised.”

A physical description of O Wing does not fully convey the experience of living there. The Soledad 7 had been incar cerated in the section since August, although the four who were cleared were immediately transferred to other prisons. One of the remaining defend ants, Jesse Phillips, described how he felt:

“You sit off in that cell and you know you can't get out. You try to read but you get to thinking about what hap pened on the street. The main thing is hearing from some body; you don't get any mai and it really gets to you. I get bad bad headaches in here and the doctor says it's nerves. You sit in that cell all day and it drives you crazy.”

George Jackson, one of the Soledad Brothers, recently pub lished a collection of his let ters. In one to Fay Stender, his lawyer, he wrote this about O Wing:

“It destroys the logical proc esses of the mind, a man's thoughts become completely disorganized. The noise, mad ness streaming from every throat, frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls, the steel trays, the iron beds bolted to the wall, the hollow sounds from a cast iron sink or toilet.

`Ruined for Life’

“The smells, the human waste thrown at us, unwashed bod ies, the rotten food. When a white con leaves here he's ruined for life. No black leaves Max Row [the maximum se curity section] walking. Either he leaves on the meat wagon or he leaves crawling, licking at the pig's feet. In two weeks that little average man who may have ended up on Max Row for suspicion or attempt. ed escape is so brutalized, so completely without holds, that he will never heal again. It's worse than Vietnam.”

F. L. Rundle, the chief psy chiatrist at Soledad, agrees with many of the criticisms.

“O Wing is like a pressure cooker for human emotions,” he said. “They put the fire up on high and there isn't any safety valve.

“There has to be a change in the philosophy of the people who run these places. They believe that the way to get a man's behavior to change is to impose very strict controls and take away everything he values and make him work to get it back. But that doesn't make him change. It just gen erates more and more rage and hostility.”

According to Dr. Rundle, throwing feces is a last act of desperation. “A man has been stripped of every other weapon,” he explained. “It's the only thing left to do. It's humiliating to him, but it's the ultimate humiliation to a guard. He's just trying to say, ‘I'm alive, I'm a human being, even if I don't act like one.’ “

Beyond the rage of the pris oners here lies a powerful and pervasive hopelessness. Walter Jo Watson, another of the Soldad 7, has already served almost five years for armed robbery. Like many of his fel low defendants, he doubts if he will ever be free again.

“It's senseless for me to go into that court and look for justice,” he said recently. “I've been isolated for so long now, who can you have confidence in? Who can you trust? It's hard for me, man. No one real ly knows me. If it weren't for my case, I'd have nothing to look forward to. It hurts, man, when a dude don't have no power. You just do the years in the pen and suffer.”

Patrick S. Hallinan, a lawyer for the Soledad 7, believes his clients were the victims of a frame‐up. He has received let ters from five potential prose cution witnesses who said that they were threatened into giv ing false testimony at the pre liminary hearing. Prison offi cials call the charges “out right lies.”

This week, Mr. Hallinan said that the decision to clear four of the defendants reinforced his belief that the prosecution had no case.

“The whole thing stinks to high heaven,” said the law yer. “For six months they had no case but they held these men in the maximum security section all that time. Now they take another look at the case and realize they have nothing and let them go.”

But even if all seven defend ants are ultimately cleared, they can still face an almost indefinite stay in jail. All seven and thousands of others are imprisoned under California's “indeterminate sentence” law, which means that a prisoner's time in custody is decided by the Adult Authority, a special review board.

“No matter what the courts say, if the Adult Authority thinks you're guilty, they can keep you in jail as long as they want,” said Mr. Hallinan. George Jackson, for example, has already served more than 10 years for robbing $70.

No Rights or Protection

This law, Mr. Hallinan be lieves, is as responsible for the ugly mood in California prisons as anything. It makes prisoners completely vulnerable to guards who can put a “beef” in their files and thus prevent their release. “It's a nightmare,” the lawyer said. “In prison you have no rights, no protection.”

Prison officials feel that Soledad has been unfairly ma ligned, and that the root of the trouble here lies outside the walls.

“We live at a time when there has been more violence in the streets,” said Jerry En omoto, the deputy superintend ent. “And we get people from the streets in here who have problems with violence. The joint is full of them.

“They react to the times around them and they tend to protest against things they think are wrong. We can't iso late ourselves. The trouble has a lot to do with the frame of reference in which prisons ex ist.”

The officials believe that the unrest within the prison has been aggravated by a group of outsiders, including some lawyers.

“These people come in here and tell the inmates, ‘I am your friend and the staff is your enemy,’ “ said Robert H. Donnelly, another deputy su perintendent. “They say, ‘Give us every suspicion or incident you can think of and we'll use it to attack the establishment of the institution.’ “

Called a Necessity

The officials contend that O Wing is necessary for the good of the institution and the ma jority of inmates.

“You can't let a man assault other people or tear down the institution, you can't do that,” said C. B. McEndree, program director of the “Adjustment Center,” which includes O Wing. “Until we find a differ ent way of containing people, we're stuck with what we've got. You know why these peo ple are in prison? For killing people, for assault with a dead ly weapon. Society has said, ‘We can't handle these people. Lock them up.”

The staff acknowledged, how ever, that many of the charges against O Wing were valid. “Any prison,” said Mr. Eno mato, “has a demeaning, de humanizing impact.”

As they talked, it appeared that many of the officials felt as trapped as the inmates. The present system is destructive, they conceded, but they have neither the resources nor the authority to change it.

“The people down the line are like the prisoners, they're almost as helpless,” Dr. Run dle, the psychiatrist, said. “These places don't change be cause the citizens don't want them any different.”