Union Knows All About Crime, but Nothing About Punishment

There’s this one outfit operating in California’s prisons that you don’t want to mess with.

They’ve got money, and they’ve got muscle. You squeal on them, you better watch out. You run afoul of them, you better start looking for another line of work.

I speak not of the state’s 161,000 convicts -- that’s a different order of dangerous -- but of the union representing the men and women who guard them.

The prison guards’ union has managed to make old-line union bosses of the Hoffa mold look wimpy and ham-fisted. This union goes by the unwieldy acronym of CCPOA, California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., and over two decades, the union’s budget has been bumped up a dozen-fold. Its freewheeling sick time and overtime policies have turned time cards into ATM gold cards. Veteran guards get a “fitness pay” bonus of $130 a month, but because they found actual fitness tests demeaning, they now get the 130 bucks just on a doctor’s say-so that they’re fit.

Where do I join?

Its membership is only a tenth of the size of the California Teachers’ Assn., which does business by rapping knuckles with rulers, compared to the CCPOA’s way of doing business.

Politicians who support the union get rewarded, like Gray Davis, the notorious beneficiary of millions in campaign money. He returned the favor by hefting union salaries by a half-billion bucks over five years, something only one state legislator voted against. Before him it was Pete Wilson, who also got handsome campaign checks with the union logo on them, and whose idea of a lovely parting gift when he left office in 1998 was an 11% pay hike for prison guards.

Politicians who dare to ask why it is the state keeps building prisons, why guards take so much overtime and sick time, why Californians pay so many millions in inmate-abuse lawsuits -- well, ask an ugly question, get an ugly answer. The union is willing to spend millions to reward its friends, and to punish those who cross them. It’s not quite leaving a horse’s head on the pillow, but it makes the point, especially if it’s the politician’s own head that could be left lying there.

And that’s nothing compared to what they evidently do when their own guys in green turn on them and point out guards who step out of line. Being called “rat” and “snitch” is the least of it. One associate warden who’s come down hard on his own operation has asked for protection from the CHP.

So, there’s nothing in it for Republicans to crack the whip on the union. They’re the law-and-order party, and who’s more law and order than a prison guard? And why tick off the one union that actually likes them?

And there’s nothing in it for Democrats to crack the whip, either; they have to prove they’re not soft on crime, and how can they be otherwise if they’re too hard on the fellows who patrol the prisons?

The public? Grilling the guards doesn’t do much for voters who made Three Strikes the 11th Commandment, who figure if a guard gets out of line to keep some thug in line, more power to him.

So who’s in charge here?

That’s what a lot of pols would like to know, and a lot fewer have the nerve to ask.

*

If you sped past the televised state Senate hearings as you went trolling for Janet Jackson’s breast or “reality” show results or any of the clap and trap that pass for news, then you missed the real thing -- crime and punishment, life and death.

You missed a hearing conducted with more security than a Mexican Mafia trial. You didn’t hear tearful officials testifying to reprisals and a code of silence. You missed learning about the guard who was ordered to get rid of incriminating audiotaped remarks, and was demoted when he refused. You missed the widow of a captain who was hounded after he questioned his superior’s judgment about a possible prison riot, and who committed suicide leaving a note reading, “My job killed me.”

Two Democratic state senators ran those hearings -- Jackie Speier and Gloria Romero. Today they will announce more hearings for Feb. 26, to find out how rich deals have put some guards into top tax-brackets, and whether union contracts obstruct investigations into wrongdoing.

In language that sounds like something from one of those Cagney-Bogart prison movies where the inmates call the guards “screws” and talk about being “in stir,” someone, says Speier, has put the word to her third-hand that she’s “crossed the line.”

For anyone considering running for state office in 2006, which is the common wisdom on Speier, this could be bad, or it might be good. I’d think it’d be hard for her to take such a threat seriously after what she’s been through. Speier was an aide to a congressman when she was shot and seriously wounded, and he was killed, in the Jim Jones Jonestown massacre of 1978. Her scars give her a kind of talismanic authority on law and order issues. In a vote on assault weapons, a fellow legislator asked whether she’d ever fired such a weapon. No, she said -- have you ever been shot by one?

The federal report on the deplorable state of California’s prisons was “the most damning public document I think I’ve ever read,” Speier says, and the state’s hearings have only confirmed her suspicions of an operation accountable to no agency but itself -- “a prescription for disaster,” for the union, for the prisoners, and for the state that has to pay for it all.

*

Six years ago, when Democrat Bill Lockyer was running against Republican David Stirling for the attorney general’s job, the state prisons were a mess.

My Times colleagues were writing story after story about guards using prisoners to discipline other prisoners, guards staging “gladiator” fights for their own amusement, or punishing one inmate by locking him in a cell with a prisoner they knew would rape him. California was the only state where guards could use lethal weapons to stop nonlethal fistfights.

My question back then, at a candidates’ debate, was, who will police the police?

Six years later, I’m still asking.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected]. Her earlier columns can be read at latimes.com/morrison