LATimes Saturday, April 21, 2001

Guards on Death Row Face Escalating Dangers

By JOHN M. GLIONNA, Times Staff Writer

SAN QUENTIN, Calif.--Each time the heavy gates clank shut behind him, prison guard Robert Trono enters a violent realm of bitter men with nothing left to lose.

The 39-year-old sergeant works in a cramped concrete cellblock that houses 85 killers awaiting execution. It is a place where riot gear, stab-proof vests, biohazard body suits and fear are standard issue.

Trono helps oversee inmates known as the Grade-B condemned, the most dangerous of San Quentin prison's 580 death row prisoners. Singled out for their unruly behavior and gang leadership roles, isolated in a three-story building called the Adjustment Center, they are waging an organized behind-bars war against San Quentin's guards and staff. Over the last 18 months, officials say, Grade-B inmates have committed 67 attacks, triple the rate of only a few years ago. They include one attempted stabbing, 15 kicks and five slashings with crude prison-made knives and razors.

One convict sliced an officer's wrists and hands when he reached into the inmate's cell to deliver a food tray. And in five other incidents, small arrows fired from makeshift slingshots have stuck in the arms, necks and faces of guards who were not wearing protective shields.

For their part, inmates say the attacks are a response to provocations by guards.

"Walking those cellblocks requires every bit of your attention, every moment of the day," said Trono, a cautious, compact man. "There's no room to breathe a sigh of relief until you're walking out those doors." 'Gassings' Are the Worst

What Trono and others dread most are "gassings," when prisoners hurl cups filled with feces and urine or even infected blood at the faces of guards. Prison officials say 41 gassing attacks have taken place at the Adjustment Center since 1999, requiring officers to be tested for HIV and hepatitis C.

"Being gassed turns you into a different person," said Tony Jones, president of San Quentin's 800-member correctional officers union. "It's the most disgusting thing you can ever imagine. The first time it happened to me, the stuff got into my eyes and ears. I took 15 showers that day and I still couldn't get clean."

Prison officials allowed several guards to be interviewed for this report, hoping to publicize a pending amendment to state law that would drop the 63-year-old requirement that male death row inmates be housed only at San Quentin. Troublesome convicts could then be moved to newer, more secure prisons.

Since the violence began, half a dozen San Quentin guards have retired rather than face the stress of returning to work--more than twice the normal rate of such retirements. An additional 14 have received permanent transfers from the prison's most secure cellblock, officials say.

The Adjustment Center has always been dangerous. But in recent months crowding and tensions between guards and several prison gangs have worsened markedly, resulting in the unprecedented number of assaults on officers. Officials say the attacks demonstrate how guards working in aging, obsolete San Quentin risk their lives--earning not a penny more than guards elsewhere in the system--by coming into daily contact with the state's most hardened criminals.

Such hazards are present at maximum-security prisons at Pelican Bay and Corcoran but not on the scale seen now at San Quentin's Adjustment Center, officials say.

As a result, the Adjustment Center has emerged as one of the nation's most perilous prison beats, because inmates know the system can do virtually nothing more to punish or control them.

"I've been on a lot of death rows and I've never heard of attacks like this," said Robert Johnson, a professor of justice and social psychology at American University in Washington, D.C., and the author of two books, "Condemned to Die: Life Under Sentence of Death" and "Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process."

"The general wisdom is that death row dwellers want to appear to be the kind of people you give life in prison rather than the gas chamber, so they're usually well-behaved. But this sounds like an extension of gang mentality. This sounds like chaos."

Since the attacks began, Trono and other guards have confiscated slashing devices fashioned from razor blades smuggled from the inmate shower area and melted into the end of a toothbrush with a cigarette lighter.

They have seen darts made from paper clips, heavy-duty staples pried from cardboard boxes or legal binders and even copper wire from a TV antenna--each filed to a lethal point on the concrete cell floor. The missiles are often fired from a makeshift blowgun--a tightly wound newspaper, hardened with dried oatmeal--or propelled with elastic bands salvaged from socks or underwear.

Inmates often spread word of any attacks to fellow prisoners by attaching notes to lengths of fishing line or dental floss, guards say. Convicts also start fires in their cells by lighting a wad of toilet paper twisted into a wick.

Trono has been gassed six times, but never hit in the face. He has also been spit on and speared in the shoulder by an inmate's arrow.

As a result, he and other guards now walk the cellblock in tactical teams of four, sliding a plexiglass shield the size of a picture window between them and inmates.

The father of four small children, Trono never discusses his job with his wife or family--only with fellow guards who can fathom the daily pressures of the cellblock that both guards and inmates call the AC.

"The rest of the prison just doesn't see the violence we have here in the AC," he says. "It's given me gray hairs."

Officers blame the attacks on frustrated members of the Mexican Mafia who have demanded to be returned to the main death row population, where inmates have such advantages as more freedom of movement and contact visits in which they can embrace relatives.

Along with sympathetic gangs such as the Crips and Aryan Brotherhood--which have complained of reduced exercise and visitation rights--they often physically coerce other inmates to join the assaults. Of the Adjustment Center's 85 prisoners, 45 have attempted assaults on staff, guards say.

Inmate advocates say the vast majority of death row inmates--495 men housed elsewhere at San Quentin and the 12 women at the Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla--cause prison officials few problems.

And they say the Adjustment Center violence cuts both ways, pointing to the 1997 case of inmate Sammy Marshall--who died after being pepper-sprayed and dragged from his cell by officers.

Prison officials declined The Times' request to interview inmates, citing safety concerns. Nor would they identify officers who had retired so they might be asked about their experiences.

But Robert Navarro, an attorney who settled a lawsuit with the state on behalf of Marshall's family, agreed to convey questions from The Times to prisoners.

Inmate Alfred A. Sandoval, a quadruple murderer who has been housed in the Adjustment Center since 1987, confirmed that guards have been attacked. But he said the assaults were in response to taunts and provocation by officers. He said prison officials routinely ignore convict complaints of excessive force.

"Every time we step out of a cell, officers have their batons drawn, shoulder height, with a can of pepper spray in our face," Sandoval said. "The situation has never been this bad in the 14 years I've been here."

The inmate said prison administrators also condone racist behavior by Adjustment Center guards, who often tell racist jokes and refer to the cells for Latino prisoners as "jalapeno row." Pepper spray used on Latinos is referred to as "salsa."

Sandoval, who cooperated with lawyers investigating Marshall's death, later had a T-shirt returned from the prison laundry with a bull's-eye target drawn on it with the words "one-shot, one-kill pop. control," according to grievances that Sandoval lodged against guards with prison authorities.

Such stress has made the Adjustment Center so unpopular among San Quentin staff that many veteran officers use union seniority to avoid working there, forcing officials to scramble to fill vacancies.

In turn, the officer exodus leaves the penitentiary's most dangerous inmates overseen by many of its greenest guards--often those with only one or two years of experience, prison officials acknowledge.

But even veteran guards say the most successful psychological tools to keep order among convicts--such as the threat of a transfer to other prisons--have failed with Grade-B inmates.

Until state law is changed, even the worst disciplinary cases cannot be moved to Corcoran or Pelican Bay, where direct contact is restricted.

And because death row prisoners already face an execution date, corrections officers are left with few disciplinary remedies. The most common punishment is confiscating all of the inmate's personal property for 90 days.

'What More Can We Do to Them?'

"The inmates know the score--you can only kill them once--and it gives them incredible leverage," said union chapter President Jones. "No matter what crazy, violent things they do, the only thing an officer can do is write up a report."

Prosecutors in Marin County, where San Quentin is located, say they would like to seek further punishment for condemned inmates who commit crimes behind bars. But though officials last year prosecuted a quarter of 125 assault cases involving the prison's general population, they acknowledge that none of the charges involved death row inmates.

"When a prisoner gets away with attacking my men, that absolutely destroys morale," said guard supervisor Trono. "Officers question whether their lives are valued by people outside these walls."

Marin County Dist. Atty. Paula Kamena blamed the lack of cases on the cost and security concerns of transporting the condemned to and from court. Her office is still considering charges in a 1997 murder at San Quentin's Adjustment Center--believed to be a contract killing among prisoners. "These people already have the ultimate sanction; what more can we do to them?" she said. "What should we do, execute them twice?"

Sandoval contends that guards have provoked inmate attacks to gain public support for the inmate relocation bill, AB 1460, proposed by Assemblyman Joe Nation (D-San Rafael) which this week was unanimously approved by the Assembly's Public Safety Committee and could receive a vote by the full Legislature within a month.

Officials flatly deny the charge.

"These officers aren't paid to take potential AIDS home to their families because they've been spit on," said Kamena. "They're not paid to have someone throw feces in their faces and put themselves and their families at risk."

Prison officials, meanwhile, have begun new security measures--including the use of full riot gear. Yet most guards still feel that "swarm of black butterflies" unsettling their stomachs each time they enter the Adjustment Center's doors.

"Just walking in there, you know your chances of being attacked has risen 10 times over compared to the rest of the prison," Jones said. "You can feel the eyes of some very dangerous people with nothing else to do but patiently wait for their chance to hurt you.

"And you know that if you work there long enough, something bad is going to happen."

-- Anonymous, April 21, 2001