It’s a Tuesday morning. The sun shines on the tree-studded hills of the North Coast. Danny Forkner stares out at a green field with basketball courts, soccer goals, chin-up bars and other exercise equipment sectioned off by chain-link. He could see for miles save for the cement buildings obstructing his view.
Forkner is one of the 824 people tasked with guarding California’s so-called “worst of the worst” as correctional officers at Pelican Bay State Prison north of Crescent City.
They oversee the murderers, rapists, robbers and gang members that no other prison wants. Outcasts banished to a remote location hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from their families.
Most are likely to serve the rest of their days surrounded by cement in a cell big enough to fit two metal bunks, a small metal toilet, a desk and two stacked dressers.
This is where many residents of Del Norte and Curry counties — neighbors, friends, coaches — go to work every day.
Lockdown changes life
Forkner deals mainly with the privileged inmates. They get to leave their cells for the openness of “A yard” and mingle with other prisoners.
On a typical day, rain or shine, the African-Americans tend to be on the basketball courts, the Hispanics on the soccer field, and the whites at a workout station near a now-defunct baseball diamond.
“The weather doesn’t stop these guys,” says Forkner.
But a lockdown does. On this day, besides a couple of inmates in a chain-link corral awaiting medical attention, “A yard” is empty.
All the inmates are in their cells until cleared to leave by administrative staff. Eleven days earlier, a riot broke out involving 45 inmates and lasting about five minutes. Correctional officers fired one warning shot and used pepper spray, pepper spray grenades and their batons.
The “A yard” is expected to be back to normal next week. Correctional officers have slowly been allowing inmates back into the yard in small groups. “If there’s a riot, usually it happens on the yard,” says Forkner.
He has been on yard duty for five years and with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for 15, joining after serving in the military. He spent time in housing units before being placed on the yard. “I like this job better,” says Forkner.
He usually monitors inmates on the yard after he and other officers pat every one of them down to make sure they have no hidden weapons. That’s always a risky endeavor — inmates may react violently if a weapon is found.
Today, instead, Forkner searches cells to aid investigations into the cause of the riot and to check for possible contraband fashioned from metal cut from furniture in cells. He also interviews inmates, including ones not involved in the riot. “It’s a slow process,” says Forkner.
Officer Billy Jackson at the medical care facility.He and a group of four other officers head toward Block 5 across the yard. At the entrance, they yell up to an officer armed with an M14 rifle in a control room.
The door opens, and then another leading into the block. An orange hue from fluorescent lights fills the room amid the strong smell of fragranced deodorant, soap and cleaning supplies. The air is stale. It’s quiet in the block and most of the prisoners, some wearing only boxers, stand at their metal doors peering through the windows of their cells.
The officers walk up a stairway and call for the man in the control room to open a cell on the top tier. Two Asian inmates are brought out, frisked and commanded to sit at one of the picnic tables in an open area below.
During a cell search, officers comb through an inmate’s belongings, including all of the pages in the books and papers they possess, to seek out signs of gang involvement or communication with other gang members. They also check the integrity of the beds, toilets, TV sets, desks, drawers, floors, ceilings, walls and doors to make sure everything is intact.
If they find a chunk missing from any of the furniture, they spray paint it for the sake of future searches. They also look for the missing piece, likely being formed into an inmate-grade weapon. “They’re improvising, too,” says Forkner.
Weapons have been found in walls and desks after a hole was bored out and camouflaged, Forkner says. Sometimes inmates hide them in their bunks or toilets.
The cell has stacks of books, anime cartoons, ramen noodles, other snacks and a small, flat-screen TV that is transparent so correctional officers can ensure nothing is hidden inside it.
The inmates have fashioned a wire from personal speakers that plugs into an outlet, which they use to heat water for coffee or ramen noodles. A sheet divides the cell, so an inmate can use the restroom in semi-privacy. Such items can be confiscated, but more can be made and likely there the next day, Forkner says.
“A lot of it is based on respect,” says Forkner. “They know they are going to get searched.”
He will place a prisoner’s belongings on the bunks in neat piles after it is rifled through. “You want to take some respect for their property,” says Forkner. “We deal with them every day.”
Alertness becomes the norm
Officers also inspect the yards to make sure fences, tables and equipment are intact. They took metal detectors to the yard earlier this year, finding 10 buried weapons and about 350 nails that had been deposited into the ground when crews were building the prison in the 1980s.
An officer’s eyes are always moving, scanning and reading social interactions with the inmates to decipher whether something is awry.
The politics of gang prisons and threats of abrupt attacks force officers to stay aware at all times.
“Every day you are walking into the unknown,” says Correctional Sgt. Dell Higgerson.
The alertness is so ingrained that it doesn’t switch off when it’s quitting time, says Higgerson.
“You don’t turn off your awareness with that job,” he says, adding that in public settings he often automatically positions himself so that he can observe his surroundings.
Communication with inmates is also crucial, Higgerson says. Familiarity with their mannerisms makes it easier to identify odd behavior, possibly anxiety about a crime that is about to take place, he says.
Officer Christina Alanis oversees visitationsOfficers are paired up in the yard and whenever chaperoning inmates, and other officers armed with rifles and positioned at higher lookout points provide more assurance, Higgerson says.
“The gunners in the booth give us that, knowing we can go out on the yard,” says Higgerson.
All that inter-dependence builds a fraternal sense among correctional officers.
The relationships extend past the prison’s walls into friendships and shared time in adult league sports and volunteering as coaches. “A lot of people out here are all about the youth in this community,” says Forkner.
They also volunteer as firefighters and reserve deputies who help the Crescent City Police Department run the annual Police Explorer Academy.
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