Pelican Bay Prison: A ...

Pelican Bay Prison: A Chamber of Horrors - SF Examiner

Friday, January 13, 1995

CALIFORNIA'S 29 state prisons never were meant to be country clubs, but neither were they supposed to be the kind of chamber of cruelty Pelican Bay Prison was described as being this week by U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson in San Francisco.

Ruling on a class-action suit by 3,594 inmates of the super-maximum-security prison, Henderson wrote that the institution near the Oregon border was administered in a way that inflicts unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment and subjects prisoners to "senseless suffering and sometimes wretched misery."

The judge's 344-page decision was a litany of horror stories of constitutional violations, including staff cruelty to inmates, torture, and inadequate medical and psychiatric care -- as well as a lack of due process in inmate disciplinary hearings.

While chastising the prison administration, the judge declined to shut down the infamous Security Housing Unit (SHU), known as a prison within a prison, where the most dangerous and incorrigible 1 percent of the state's 125,400 inmates are held.

Pelican Bay SHU

However, Henderson appointed a special master to oversee the Department of Corrections' efforts to eliminate the abuses and come up with a long-range plan to correct the prison's many problems.

In a brazenly disingenuous press release, Director of Corrections James H. Gomez ignored the crimes committed by the Pelican Bay staff and declared the judge's ruling "a significant victory" because Henderson did not order the SHU to be closed.

The judge ordered the Corrections Department to come up with a plan for eliminating the prison's problems within 120 days. If the problems aren't solved, Gomez should resign or be fired.