Hella Nation - Evan Wright [84]
Within a few years of the prison’s opening, reports began to leak out suggesting that Pelican Bay’s neat façade served mainly to conceal its interior horrors from the outside world. In two early incidents, guards were caught using medical facilities to torture inmates—strapping one man to a gurney and beating him, submerging another in scalding water and flaying him with wire brushes. Eventually, several brutality cases filed on behalf of inmates were rolled into a class-action suit. After a two-year trial that ended in 1995, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson ruled that prisoners at Pelican Bay had been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. His lengthy opinion detailed “assaults, beatings and naked cagings in inclement weather,” and concluded that “the misuse of force at Pelican Bay is not merely aberrational but inevitable.” (Since the ruling, prison authorities say conditions have improved.)
In 1997, Schneider was taking a shower in Pelican Bay when, he claims, a guard popped open an electronic door and allowed a sworn enemy from a rival African-American gang called the Black Guerrilla Army to enter the shower area and ambush him. Schneider overpowered his assailant. The guard intervened with a weapon misleadingly named a “gas gun.” The firearm actually uses a gunpowder charge similar to a twelve-gauge shotgun to fire plastic projectiles the size of Ping-Pong balls. Schneider took multiple shots to the head and was taken to the infirmary with a concussion and lacerations. Afterward, Schneider, a jailhouse lawyer of some renown, sued the prison over the incident. His case, however, was thrown out of court.
Upon his release from the infirmary, he was sent into Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit. Schneider speaks of living in the extreme confinement of the SHU with a sort of twisted pride. “They put us in the SHU to keep us away from the rape-os and chesters,” he says, referring to rapists and child molesters. “I’m proud of that. I don’t want to be associated with them.”
The role of the Aryan Brotherhood, like other race-based gangs, is a complex one within the hostile prison universe. On the one hand, these gangs enforce segregation. But the gangs are also likely to do business with each other: smuggling drugs, manufacturing weapons, running numbers and brewing alcohol. The gangs also share (along with many guards) a more or less openly homicidal contempt for sex offenders. Under Schneider’s leadership, the Aryan Brotherhood is alleged to have recruited at least three guards in its efforts to identify and attack sex-offender inmates. In its case against Schneider, the federal government charges him with masterminding the murder or attempted murder of twenty-four people, including the killing of a cop.
In person, Schneider maintains an unnervingly pleasant, almost bland smile, whether he’s discussing killing rapists or reading one of his favorite authors, J. R. R. Tolkien. He says his entire mental and physical effort in the SHU “is structured around not going insane.” The last stop for those who lose this battle in the SHU is the prison psychiatric unit. Here, the most critical mental cases can be put on heavy doses of psychotropic drugs, then given “group therapy.” In these sessions, individual prisoners are locked in telephone-booth-size boxes with plexiglass-and-barred fronts that prisoners call “man cages,” and these are propped upright, arrayed in groups of four or six around a therapist.
“You definitely don’t want to lose your marbles in the SHU,” Schneider says. “But you can find things that cheer you up—getting a cup of instant coffee, news or a box of saltines. It’s important to keep your day full.” He stays in shape by banding together law books he keeps in his cell and using them as weights. Sometimes he lays his cell mate,