Corcoran Ruling May Escalate Crime Wave By Enforcers

Right in the middle of a historic national eight-year decrease in crime, those entrusted to enforce the law are experiencing a crime wave of their own. Last week's acquittal of eight California prison guards of federal charges of violating prisoners' civil rights may accelerate the trend. PNS associate editor Joe Loya is working on a memoir about his years in federal prison.

If you are a sadist, now is a good time to become a California State prison guard.

Eight guards were acquitted last week of federal charges of violating prisoners' civil rights. The Corcoran prison guards were accused of staging gladiator-like fights between inmates, then shooting and killing some of them in the name of prison security.

I believe they did it and got away with it.

Don't get me wrong: I'm an ex-prisoner, but not the kind who believes all inmates are political prisoners and all cops/guards are sadistic racists. In fact, I recently disagreed with an ex-con who sees prison guards as the only problem in prisons.

In my experience, prisons are full of petty, insecure men, I told him. I was one of them. If I wanted to sabotage my life, I didn't need encouragement. So I'm not a rabid anti-law enforcement kind of guy. But I'm no cop-hugger either, because some of the petty, insecure men behind bars were sadists posing as guards. And sometimes they killed prisoners.

Last year, two L.A. County jailers handcuffed a man behind his back and choked him to death, apparently because he was yelling too much. More recently, two county jailers in New Jersey confessed to choking to death a prisoner who was serving a 90-day sentence for traffic violations. And all he did was yell for his methadone.

Frankly, it's time to recognize that the good guys are more often turning into Bad Lieutenants. Right in the middle of a historic national eight-year decrease in crime, the number of law enforcement personnel sent to federal prisons multiplied five times in four years from 1994-98. A veritable crime wave.

Law enforcement scandals have been such big news lately that I've considered producing a TV show called "America's Most Wanted Cops."

My TV show wouldn't distinguish between cops and prison guards, mostly because cops and prison guards don't. Every summer, cops and correction officers compete in the California's Police Summer Games. And in some areas they commit crimes together: 44 police and corrections officers in the Cleveland area pleaded guilty to drug trafficking.

And cop brutality, like prison guard brutality, occurs while someone is confined or in custody -- like in one's living room; or hunched over a toilet in a police station's bathroom.

Of course the prison guards in the Corcoran trial call the case against them a witch hunt. One guard, after he was acquitted, laughed and bragged that "The [government] started out with nothing and we took them on an E-ticket ride to Disneyland."

Trying to convict correction officers was tough work in the conservative farm belt of California where six prisons employ nearly 10,000 people. The prosecution was not helped by the presence of Dorene Delt, a Madera County Jail correctional officer, on the jury; Charlene Hefner, the wife of a retired correction officer; and a man whose application for a job in corrections was delayed until after the trial.

We all know that it is a virtue in law enforcement to protect a fellow officer. How else to explain why the jury ignored what a State legislative hearing in 1998 confirmed to be a pattern of brutality at Corcoran? And another panel confirmed that nearly 80% of the shootings of inmates by prison guards were unjustified.

It really shouldn't be so difficult for the public to imagine how vicious guards with guns can intentionally kill men in prison. College kids periodically die during rough hazing rituals, and those are mere pranks goes awry.

But more than a place where guards kill inmates, the country's lock-up systems are full of unethical guards impersonating honest law-abiding citizens -- Little League coaches. That's because there's no better place to get jiggy with one's vigilante fantasies than in a prison.

A New Orleans state judge removed six boys from a state juvenile facility because they were kept in solitary confinement without shoes, blankets and medical attention. In California's largest youth prison, investigators found some wards had been handcuffed and slammed into walls, shot at close range with potentially lethal riot guns and forcibly injected with anti-psychotic drugs. Juvenal posed the famous question, "and who will guard the guardians?"

Obviously, not the jury, whose acquittal last week proved the invisible potency of sadism. The Central Valley jury has, for a time, made prison guard brutality invincible as well.

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