Hector Bravo UNHINGED
Official Hector Bravo Podcast
Hector Bravo UNHINGED
Inside the Yard: Prison Guard Reveals What Really Happened to Hugo Pinell
We sit down with retired California CO Jimmy Johnston, who activated New Folsom, survived riots, mixed yards, and a preventable stabbing, and lays out how leadership, training, and ego shape what happens when the door pops. The talk blends history, fieldcraft, and blunt advice for young officers who want to endure and lead.
• Sacramento upbringing and hard labor foundation
• Hiring wave and activation of New Folsom in the 80s
• Academy lessons on fair, firm, consistent enforcement
• Chow hall schemes, early mistakes, learning tier craft
• SHU yard mechanics, Mini-14 to HK transition
• Working without vests or spray, relying on judgment
• Phones, fraud, and exposing dirty staff pipelines
• Weapon-making, riot pieces versus killing pieces
• 1989 B Yard riot context and gang dynamics
• Cortez stabbing as a failure of supervision and process
• Trauma readiness gaps and need for blowout kits
• Step-down era, Hugo Pinell, and yard stability tradeoffs
• Leadership versus ego, manufactured risk, and accountability
• Career advice: promote, listen, influence training and policy
Love you, keep pushing forward
Hector Bravo on in chaos is now in section. Welcome back to our channels, Warriors. We are still growing today. A huge banger for you guys, man. I felt and found an old gem, an old relic, a retired correctional officer from California. He started his career in 1987. Want you guys to think about that. We have none other than Jimmy Johnston with the T, who started a new Folsom CSP sack. What up, dude? Why do you guys say old so many times? Old, old, old, bro. You look good as fuck, man. No homo. I'm a straight, straight man, bro, but 1987. Yeah, that's a while ago. That's why I say old, bro. You're not old. You didn't look old, but right, but 87.
SPEAKER_02:My sister was born in 87. A lot of people weren't born in 87 yet, so.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, this is good, bro. Well, what we're gonna do in this episode here is capture history, right? And you're not an old man by any means. Let me just clarify that. Because you're more in shape than 98% of these youngsters, and we'll get to that. I'm not, yeah. I mean, I'm I'm I'm all right. Where did you grow up? In Sacramento. At that point in time, I'm assuming Sacramento was not as as expanded as it is now. Yeah, it was uh it was a fairly small city back then.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. What was there? The downtown and the surrounding areas? Downtown, yeah. I lived uh we grew up in uh land park area. It's pretty nice, pretty nice neighborhood. I mean, there's a lot of um open land around the city. Me and my buddies would go pheasant hunting and stuff like that. Pheasant hunting with what, a BB gun?
SPEAKER_01:25?
SPEAKER_02:Shotguns. You know, like when we got to like high school age.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, pheasants, do they fly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm a fucking idiot from uh brawley. I thought sometimes I think pheasants, I think like little ferrets on the ground. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02:No, no, no, no. It's a bird that it flies. This is something we did, man. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Hey, high school diploma and G D right here, bro. Pheasant is the motherfuckers that fly. Yeah, you go hunting. It's kind of like a chicken with a long tail. I get it, bro. So at that point in time, was it well well, Folsom Prison existed. Yeah, yeah, correct. Did you have any knowledge of Folsom Prison?
SPEAKER_02:You know, not really, to be honest. We had some family friends that lived in Folsom. Folsom was a super small town. Um we'd go visit once in a while. I never once thought about the prison or wasn't, you know, I mean, you see it in the news once in a while, I guess, but as a kid, it was never on my radar. Was Folsom considered a rich city?
SPEAKER_01:No, it was like a country suburb almost back then. Interesting. Because I right now, present time, I would consider it a rich city just because of location and yeah, it's super nice, yeah. And you graduated high school? No, I got out early. I took the GD and got out. I only asked that way because I uh we've been talking for three years, man, and I'm able to gauge your personality. You seem to be a lot like my like me, you're rebellious, but stubborn, but no nonsense type of guy.
SPEAKER_02:My dad made a big mistake. I got in trouble when I was 14 that summer. So the next summer he put me to work and he worked construction on the on the Delta, on the Sacramento River. Um, the work was like on the levees, you're in the mud, in the water, throwing rocks into piles, whatever. And he thought he was gonna kind of like break me, I guess. But I started liking it and I saved a bunch of money up. So when I went back to school, I was kind of like, fuck school, you know. Like, what am I sitting in here in these classes? I go make$335 an hour throwing rocks and drinking beer and all that shit. So yeah. What did your duties consist of? Getting rocks and throwing them? So on the on the river, there's these river banks called the levees. And then, you know, like when the water's high, the water washes the dirt away, and then the levee can break and it flood, right? So their job was they bring these barges full of like rocks that big, it's called riprap, and they throw it up on the bank with like a big scoop, a dredge. So our job as the laborers, man, this like the rocks are in piles, bro. It's like to take the rocks from the high piles and throw them in the low spots. And I I was out there with this dude, this this older uh black gentleman, this guy Sam I worked with. This guy had to be in his 60s, but he was a machine, right? And he didn't talk much, man. I just got dropped off there the first day. And uh he's like, Yeah, get these rocks, put them, put them in low spots, right? I'm like, all right, and I'm trying to keep up. And he's just he ain't paying me no mind. So my hands are just blistered. He takes me to this store and he buys me these gloves, these rubber grips, he goes, You're gonna need these if you're gonna be out here this summer. So that's why I did that summer. Did he have gloves? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was all set up, man. He did that every day, dude. Every day.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. By by definition, would that be considered hard labor? I mean, I guess so, yeah. Well, the rocks were brother.
SPEAKER_02:He was in the laborers union.
SPEAKER_01:He was probably, I mean, shh, this was like and I'm getting somewhere with this, bro, because uh, and again, I'm learning about you, and I'm I'm trying to piece, I'm trying to see why how America went wild and went wrong, right? Back then, and and your generation of COs, you guys were worked your fucking ass off. Hard labor. Like my father worked in the fields, right? And then to get a good paying job working in a prison, and we'll we'll get to that, but I want people to know, like, hey, dude, you worked your ass off.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I had various jobs, you know. I was never I was never afraid of like, man, my job history. So I did that for a while. Then um, I wanted to go to college and get a you know, get a degree in something, and I started gravitating towards maybe I want to be a police officer. So I went to Sack City College. I signed up for the administration of justice courses. Um, I got a job as a as like a security guard for a grocery store chain catching shoplifters in in Sacramento, man. And that was like that kind of helped mold me to where I am now, too. I was a you know, a young, skinny, white kid. Did you encounter shoplifters? Oh man, we had riots in the parking lot, man. We had a store, it was Jumbo Markets. We had a store on 24th and Florin in South Sack, which I guess, you know, I don't know what's there now, but that there was a safe way across Florin Road. And I don't know if you know South Sac, but that's like a bad area, right? So the safeway got ran out of business because people just came in and stole it. This is like in the 80s, early 80s. People just come in there to the neighborhood, just got what they wanted out of that store, right? So um they hired us, and we were like a bunch of dumb shit kids, you know, and we'd get we'd get caught up in these predicaments. And we sat like in the back of the store and we had like these windows, but you know, it's like a mirror, and you you can see out, they can't see in. So, you know, there's what was it like a lot of standoffs at times? Or uh no, man. I mean, there was like the use of force. Dude, like somebody started running, we tackle them, man. Like I remember, and I'm not no tough guy, I ain't no big fight or whatever, but I knocked this guy's teeth out one time, kind of on accident, man, because my partner is a big buff dude, and he picked the guy up, and we were going through the door. The dude kicked off the door and he hit the ground on his feet, and he kind of took a step and it looked like he's reaching his waistband. And I had a can of this um like pepper spray back in the day, pepper spray is like what do they call it? Mace, right? A good sized can. And I just punched the guy like instinctively in the mouth and just folded his teeth back and knocked him out, right? First time I ever knocked anybody out. And and like I didn't get in any kind of trouble, you know. Like, right, if you do that now as a security guard, oh dude, you're gonna get charged. I didn't get fired, nothing. They're like, oh, what happened? I told him, like, oh, okay, cool.
SPEAKER_01:At that point in time, do you think you didn't get in trouble because maybe liability wouldn't come to what it is now? Everybody sues for everything. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong.
SPEAKER_02:We we got sued by people, but it never went anywhere. You know, like I mean, you just get sued by people, you never, oh, this guy suing you guys for what? Oh well, all right, you never hear about it. I just don't think um the people were like as concerned about it. They're just kind of like, yeah, whatever. True.
SPEAKER_01:How um at when did you catch wind of the California Department of Corrections?
SPEAKER_02:Man, that's a whole story in itself. So I'm going to Sack City, I'm taking these classes. There's an introduction to corrections class, right? And as part of the curriculum to get your AA in criminal justice, administration of justice. So I never thought about working in a prison, but you have to take the class, right? And so the instructor was this dude. He's an old school dude from uh he was a sergeant at Vacaville, yeah, from back in the day. Roosevelt Clopton, older, bald-headed black man, like one of the funniest dudes I ever had a class from in college, right? So I'm taking this class, whatever. And uh he gave us this book, Death in a Southwest Prison. Have you ever read that? What's it called? Death in a Southwest Prison. Never heard of it. It's about the Santa Fe, New Mexico riot in 1980, right? Okay. Then we had to watch this movie. Bro, like the shit, those guards, oh man, they got fucked up. Right. Like, I mean, they they like got gang raped and all this crazy shit. They're hostages. The um inmates broke into the PC section.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, they burned people on top.
SPEAKER_02:They got a yeah, they got access to like a torch and they're like cutting the bars and burning like crazy, crazy shit. And then in the video we're watching, or the movie is like back in the old days, like, yo, go get the projector kind of movie, right? And they're wheeling some of the guards out at the end, and they're like on their stomachs, landing on their stomachs on the on the stretcher because they got you know fucked up so bad. And I'm like, bro, you know, I'm thinking to myself, man, I'll never work in a prison. That's crazy. Like that shit kind of scared me, you know. Interesting, dude. I was like, no, I just want to be a police officer, right? So I'm like, nah, fuck the prison stuff. I don't really want to do that.
SPEAKER_01:But so what so how well? I mean, this sergeant, he must have been like OG fucking Vietnam area.
SPEAKER_02:He would, yeah, he would tell us all the stories about all, I mean, just all the crazy shit that you know, his experiences, he probably did 20, 25 years you're thinking. He was retired. So he probably started in like the 60s. 60s.
SPEAKER_01:You know, yeah. So and the way he's what how would he speak of it? Like it was a great career, fun. Why?
SPEAKER_02:No, he'd just talk about all the crazy specific shit. Like, and he worked at Vacaville, man. So he'd tell you a lot of funny stuff that like I don't really want to repeat, you know. Yeah, but uh, yeah, he was like, he was raw and uncut, man. He told you the shit the way it was. Like it wasn't very appealing in that class to me to want to be a CEO, man. Like, all right, that's check that one off my list, you know. So then how what changed from from what changed? So I had a kid, and so I had no benefits working as a security guard. So that was that's a huge, you know, I have to have benefits for my family, all this stuff. So I'm like, well, let me, and right about that time they were hiring for what's called a community service officer in the Sacramento Police Department. And it's basically like I think you go through the academy, then you come out and you're not a full officer until you get your 60 units, something like that. A couple of my friends had done it, so I went to take the oral, right? I took the oral for that, and a guy I worked with that's doing security, he took the or he had just um applied for corrections and took the oral, whatever. So I said, you know, I'm gonna do the same thing. We're both 20. We weren't even 21 yet. I I like man, I I bombed that oral with Sach PD. Like they're looking at me like halfway through the oral, like these dudes want to cry. Like they felt sorry for me, dude. I remember the end it's like the sergeant or whatever puts his hand on my shoulder, goes, hey man, it's okay. You know, you just need to like work on it, just study and like, you know, maybe come back in a year or two, right? So I'm like, what did you what did you fucking suck at, bro? I don't even know. Like I didn't I didn't study, I didn't, you know, like these police department orals, you know, they're very convoluted. You gotta have somebody kind of like coach you beforehand, like, hey, they asked you this, and you gotta tell them that, right? And I didn't know any of that shit. I mean, he's talking about hostage situations, and you pull up on a car and there's a this, you know, like I don't know. I'm like 20 years old, dude. I don't know any of that stuff. So yeah, I sucked at that. So I'm like, well, let me go through with this corrections thing. I got a 91 on their oral. They were hiring, bro. In 1986, they hired anybody because they're opening all the new pens.
SPEAKER_01:What did their advertisement look like at that time? I don't remember. Newspaper article?
SPEAKER_02:Dude, I don't even remember how I remember, yeah, it's like word of mouth. I mean, I'm sure they did some advertising, but it's not like today where you know you see the dudes all up in their class A stand. Like it was kind of word of mouth. I got the application, I went to like the EDD or whatever, got the application, filled it out. They started sending me letters in the mail. Um and you said they were hiring everybody at the hiring a lot of people, man, because uh New Folsom was activating. Um I think they're getting ready to open up Mule Creek, maybe. They had a whole bunch of and you know, the turnover rate and CDCR, but New Folsom had just opened up and they're opening three different facilities. So as they're activating them, they're hiring people like you know they they wanted to have people already lined up to go there. What year did New Folsom open? 86.
SPEAKER_01:It opened up in 86. Yeah, they opened C facility first. Now, when you say they opened C facility, I know this is a stupid fucking question. The whole prison was already built, right?
SPEAKER_02:No, no, so they they it's weird, man, because when I got there, they just opened B facility. But when we were in the academy, uh we came to range there a couple weeks before we graduated, and B facility, like some of the walls weren't even up yet. Oh, like, dude, when when they open it, they're sticking inmates in B1 and two, and like the yard was they're still working on the big side on five through eight. They were still working. That you couldn't like they the first two blocks that they could actually house inmates in, they put inmates in them almost immediately. Then three and four block, then uh the big side once they finished it. It was like a construction site out there, bro.
SPEAKER_01:I didn't even know that you activated new folsom.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, uh BR. Yeah, B. You activated new folsom.
SPEAKER_01:I didn't even know that, dude. Yeah. Holy shit, bro. Well, it's not whatever, bro, because like this is history, and like there's people that have activated like Sentinella, Calapat, and we would hear OG stories, be like, yeah, we would have to find like the screws in the dirt. Did you guys have to do that? Welding rods, pieces of metal, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the construction guys are always out there looking. But then I think as I remember, it was a long time ago, man, and I was on first watch in the beginning, so like I don't want to speak on shit that I don't really like. I didn't do or whatever, but I know they're out there with metal detectors every day looking for stuff on the yard. I mean, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Oh shit, man. We kind of skipped over your academy, uh, but it was six weeks. Yeah. Paramilitary?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. It's it's paramilitary. I mean, you get busted down. Like, if you did something wrong, you'd be doing push-ups and stuff like I mean, it was kind of pretty weak.
SPEAKER_01:Do you remember what they were trying to embed in you guys at that time?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, back then they were trying to teach you their basic core principles were you know, being fair, you know, but strong, being able to say no, you know what I mean? But like, don't be an asshole, but you know, fair and firm and consistent was what they would teach us. What a concept, huh? I mean, what a fucking concept, bro. First fair, firm, consistent, learn how to say no. Most of the instructors were from Quentin and Vacaville, it seemed like some from SolidAd. Um, and you know, they're there people been around and they, you know, a lot of them had like worked in the adjustment center, death row, all those kind of units and stuff.
SPEAKER_01:So pretty experienced. And I asked that question because when I went in in 2006, the whole code of silence was being pushed upon us. Right. Do not fall for the code of silence.
SPEAKER_02:I watched the trajectory of people's careers that ended up at the academy too, probably like when you were in your era. And uh, yeah, man, it's just a whole different dynamic how people and I'm not trying to like that's 20 years. Yeah, you're not gonna tag on nobody, but like a different dynamic on how they got in there for the most part. Right. I mean Yeah, we're not blind. We saw what happened. Yeah, there's some people that like got stuck up in the academy for because they knew people, whatever. That was kind of a career path. Um whether or not that you know they're suitable instructors.
SPEAKER_01:I mean correct, correct. And you're also a veteran of the Navy, so you totally have a good concept of what is a suitable instructor and what is not.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I feel like I do. I was in the reserves, but I did a few deployments after 9-11. Um, I did a lot of instructor, you know, missions and jobs, um, a lot of leadership type stuff. So I mean, yeah, different perspectives.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we'll get to your Navy career um after we talk about activating a Bravo Yard, CSP sec, new fulsom. You were on first watch. What was the duration of this first watch? Hey Warriors, if you haven't already signed up for our all new website, HectorBravoshow.com, make sure you sign up at the link below, HectorBravoshow.com to watch explicit, uncensored, never before seen prison footage. With that, love you, keep pushing forward.
SPEAKER_02:I was on first watch for like three months. Like back then when you'd come in. So they there was probably 80 of us that came to Folsom, right? That from our academy class. And the first day at IST, they broke us up and it they just it had to do with your uh your oral score. If you were like uh 91 or above, you went to New Folsom. If you're below that, you were a PIE at Old Folsom for six weeks. Yeah. But if we went to New, you were you were uh full-time. So I was lucky, I was fortunate, they made me uh permit full-time, new folsom. Um, the OJT was like mostly touring old Folsom, uh like this the sergeants and and stuff that would come. So we had we did have the OJT, the classroom at New Folsom. They just kind of finished the admin building. But dude, some of these supervisors and these guys teach, they're like Vietnam vets. 100%. Yeah, they were like like hardcore dudes, man. They're trying to scare shit out of us. And like it was a little bit, man, I'm not gonna lie, you know, it was a little bit intimidating. Um, this one sergeant, I don't remember his name, you know. And he he he was a Vietnam vet, and he was telling us that basically working in in Folsom prison is just like being in Vietnam, but the civilian version talk about all the shootings, the stabbings, and the riots and stuff. And you know, I'm like I'm 21, man. I'm kind of like a smart ass one or anything. And I'm just oh, yeah, okay. This guy's full of shit, you know. Like, but cumulatively, first of all, they didn't have the control over um movement that they do in the newer prisons. That's why the prisons, the new prisons were developed that way, of course. But um, if you look at it cumulatively over time, it there's a yeah, you there's a lot of violence that goes on. Like, and you don't I don't know if I really thought about that so much while I was working, but I think after I retired, maybe looking back, saw, you know, and it probably nothing compared to what those guys experienced. They had they had just come off like a couple year long, you know, war between the the Mexicans and blacks. Oh yeah. All kind of different shit.
SPEAKER_01:When you got off of first watch and you ended up working in the during the day around convicts, yeah, what were those dudes' demeanors like and who were they? Dudes that were like gangsters in the in the fifties and 60s or I mean 70s and 80s?
SPEAKER_02:So I end up on on uh first watch. I end up going to C facility for a couple months, came back to B. Uh, one of the sergeants there who was uh a really uh developmental supervisor for me. I had really good supervisors on third watch, and he he just kind of called me out of the blue and he's like, hey, um, you're up for rotation. You want to come over here to B Yard and be um a dining room relief officer, right? I'm like, okay, cool. So it was like a PM dining room. So back then they fed in the chow hall, man. And uh the food was even different, man. Like when the dude, I'm a new cop, I don't know shit, man. The truck pulls up, I don't know what to do. These dudes are like walking out. The I had a 50-pound bag of sugar, CH, 50-pound bag. That's what they delivered for my sugar, right? And uh, you know, they're just putting it on the table and stuff, and I'm trying to like, you know, count everything, all the pans, you know, you know how we do it. I look in uh the tear tender from the block, man. The cop up there popped the dining door for some reason, and dude's got my 50-pound bag of sugar walking back in the block with it, right? He's just gonna rip me off for the whole thing. So I'm like, I'm like, hey, you know, like I run over there and I'm like, hey, man, get you know, give me a fucking sugar back, right? You know, and he's like, huh? Oh man, I was just trying to help you. Uh I'm like, dude, just put it back on the table, right? And I told the guy upstairs they shut the door, you know. And so that's how I learned. I I got, you know, I got ripped off, all kind of, I mean, it's just it's covered with territory, yeah, 100%. Well, and and so we fed in the chow hall, and like, dude, we used to give them like we'd have steak. Like, there'd be these big bins, man, and there'd be like on the count steaks. And they're like a sirloin about that big, and they're like, dude, there's like blood on top. You gotta like pull them out and count them and shit. It'd always be just count, man. And it these motherfuckers would figure out how to steal it. Like, I would watch it like a hawk, man, and they'd figure out how to steal it, man. And I'd always get there'd be like two dudes left in line, and we out of steaks. And I'm like, fuck. And these dudes would be mad, I mean, rightfully mad at me, but they want to fight me. And I'm like giving them eight, like, hey man, I got peanut butter packs and lunch me. You know, like oh shit. So that responsibility would fall on you when they were short count? Yeah, it'd be short count, and I'd have to call a kitchen. And these dudes would, oh man. Was there a central kitchen you can Yeah, there's a there's a main kitchen and see, but you know, it kind of taught me how to deal with inmates because these dudes, I was a young, skinny babyface. I was not, I was a non-threatening individual, bro. So like they're looking at me like, hey, you know, they think I'm a pussy, and they're gonna, you know, try to pressure me on this shit. You know, 100%. Yeah. So I just learned how to stand my ground without starting shit and get my ass whipped. But like, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Now I know some of these newer cops might question themselves, well, yeah, things were different back then. You know, your supervisors wouldn't burn you back then in the event that you got into a conflict over a big giant bag of sugar. Is that the case? Yeah, pretty much.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So what, not that it did happen. In theory, what would it look like from a supervisor's perspective if you got into a tussle over a big bag of sugar that turned into a physical confrontation? Honestly, so what's a fighting with a Zenmate over it?
SPEAKER_02:Correct. I mean, you know, anything can be. Anything can transpire. So when the door opens up, whoever comes in, they're gonna beat the shit out of the guy, man. They're not gonna ask. They're not gonna be like, Josh, what happened? This is gonna be bing, bang, boom, you know, right. Drag his ass down, put him in the cage. What happened? I'm gonna tell him what happened. Um, did he hit you first? No, man. Like, you know, whatever. So, you know, I'm not gonna lie on the guy and get him a shoe term or whatever, just like, hey, you know, yeah, we're just you know, whatever. Um, I'm not gonna get in trouble, but sometimes you, you know, depending on the inmate and the circumstances. Dude, I mean, I I've gone down to the cage and talked to inmates in the cage and said, you know, like, okay, everything's cool. Whatever happened, happened. I hear what you're saying. Yeah. I it's being fair. Yeah, like, but if the dude put hands, like, say he assaulted a staff member.
SPEAKER_01:Correct, correct. No, no, I totally hear what you're saying. No, no, there's a difference. The difference is a grown man shit, but it's a fair one, right? Like, yeah, and I was young.
SPEAKER_02:I had some sergeants, like, I did some things, man. I'm not gonna go into details. I almost got fired once for fighting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I promised you I wouldn't put you on the spot or incriminate you, bro.
SPEAKER_02:I almost got fired once for fighting with another CO at work. That's a whole nother story. But I think you told me that story off topic. I did some dumb shit, and like I got called on it, you know, whatever. And the sergeants would hit me up, and I would just, I'd go, yeah, I did it. And they they just like, hey, don't do it again. You know, it's stupid. Don't do that. All right, you know.
SPEAKER_01:We won't talk about that story, but is that the one did you put handcuffs on the dude?
unknown:Yeah. All right.
SPEAKER_02:Man, it got carried away. Let's put it that way. It just got it was heated. But even then, man, I was like, it was ridiculous on everybody's part. I'm not gonna get into what happened or whatever, but I mean, and we're all young dudes. We're all like, I was 22, and I believe everybody else was like early 20s. And uh we just got split, we got cast to the four winds, man. I got I ended up in a different dining room relief because at that time I was working in the blocks and A, and I didn't really like it there anyway. So I got sent back to B on a different dining room relief. And my buddy that I was working with on the floor went old Folsom, they they almost fired the dude that came down out of the booth and started. Oh, you're saying, like, yeah, yeah, you did say that. Yeah, yeah. But like I got a letter of repper, man. You got an L O R, right? But I got it. I mean, they had to do something, dude.
unknown:Like you know.
SPEAKER_01:So you actually you actually prepared some notes, which I'm grateful for, bro, beforehand, and I told you, bro, I'm not gonna lead you astray. Yeah, I lead myself astray, so stop me if I do. Right here, you jotted down uh Bravo shoe, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so um just kind of going back to like the different programs they had. They had the shoe. So back then, um I believe the only shoes that they were like putting these high, high-level guys in was Tehachapi had a shoe. Then we had the shoe. It was originally on CR, then they moved it to B. Um, and they had like your top-level Aryan Brotherhood guys, Mexican Mafia, uh BGF, um Bloods and Crips, you know, some of them. There was there's certain like to validate Crips, they had to belong to uh there was two different organizations of Crips, stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01:Um East Coast Crip, maybe uh no, it was it was called the CCO Consolidated Crip Organization.
SPEAKER_02:It was like I didn't fully understand that stuff at the time, and it kind of went away. But um they basically so in the shoe, man, they they had these guys, you know, they're on a tier, just like you know, a black cell, white cell, uh you know, northern cell, uh Southsider, whatever. And they would all go out to yard together on the hard yard. What did the building look like? 180 GM? Yeah, it's just a 180, man. It's just it's like basically B2 um was a shoe, probably for like because they moved them all in '89. They moved them out when Pelican Bay shoe opened. Holy shit. So it was probably a shoe for like a year and a half, a year. Um, a lot of a lot of stuff happened in that shoe during that time period, though. A lot of stuff. I was a dining room relief officer for a while in there too, and my workers were shoe inmates. I mean, like, that's how but it kind of made sense, man. Because they couldn't, they couldn't smuggle shit in. So, like, yeah, like eventually, you know, a couple years before I retired, they put shoe back in Bravo 3, and those dudes were getting hooked up because we had regular GP guys in the kitchen. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yes. So I had to go get my inmates out of the out of B3. So B3, um, I know A section, I don't know if the whole block was, but it was PC shoe guys, right? And so my crew was like four, you know, Sirenio dropouts. Unrestrained? Yeah, and I'd have to go out and search, strip, search them, you know, restrain them, then I'd take them to the chow hall and cut them loose, and they'd work. And then you would restrain them. Yeah, I'd read them, strip them out, and then just take them back up there, man. Then uh interesting. They worked, they work both shifts every day. So interesting. Like they'd want to get out early. Like, say, I think my shift last it was 12 to 8. So we'd get out of there like 5:30 or 6. Hey, Johnston, man, we're getting out early so we can play handball. So I'd put them on the shoe yard and I'd have to be the gunner because the regular cops are like, hey, if you're gonna give these guys yard, you gotta be the gunner, right? What? Like, whatever. So that's it kind of worked out though, man, because like they would bust ass, get everything done, everything clean, everything squared away. They worked morning shifts, so they didn't really steal, you know. It actually ran pretty smooth, man. And then yeah, at the end of the night, man, I just kick it up there and you would have to make your way to a gun post. Yeah, I just go up into the B3 control and uh because those guys were busy running the block, so I would just sit in the window watching.
SPEAKER_01:Describe to me, I never worked there, dude. Describe to me the process of taking a dude out of the cell. How do they get to the yard? What do the yard look like? And what how many doors do they go down a set of stairs? You're talking about the shoe yard.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. It's attached to the block. So, like, say you're coming out of A-section, you're gonna come down the stairs, turn your right, there's a door, just like the you know, all the rest of the big doors. The guy, um, the the gunner opens the door, he goes in, we have a chain-link fence, and then there's a chain-link sally port with razor wire all on it. And so there's a bar, like you have access to the side of the sally port, so you can pull this bar to let them out to the yard. They just have to shut the door behind them so you can lock it again, right? Who has to shut the door? The inmate. So basically, that door shut, the you know, the one enter to the yard, you put them inside that one, lock the door, uncuff them, open that bar, they go in, shut the door behind them.
SPEAKER_01:I'm tracking. Yeah. W was there almost like like uh like a middle part? Is that segregates them? No, they just it's one door that segregates them.
SPEAKER_02:So the way they had it built, um, and B is they had pull-up bars and dip bars, a toilet, um, some concrete steps up to the toilet, and the rest of it was just open concrete to play handball. Oh man. Probably 40 by 100, let's say that. I mean, it's decent. They played like decent handball.
SPEAKER_01:And this is ASU shoe big yards, big yards before the dog kennels came on.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah, yeah. We didn't have like man, nobody was going to New Folsom, nobody was going to yard in a friggin' dog kennel back then.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So during this time, I'm assuming we were almost fast-forwarding to well, late 80s, early 90s, Corcoran was going allegedly the gladiator shoe wars or the gladiator wars, right? Was CSP Sach New Folsom being instructed to mix?
SPEAKER_02:So that was just how it was. I mean, like there was no instruction otherwise. Like there was inmates that obviously, you know, were on they they started doing some um walk-alone yards and stuff for like the highly violent inmates and stuff like that. Once again, I wasn't really like a cop working in the shoe. I remember the chow hall, whatever, um, did a little overtime here and there. So I can't speak too deeply on it. But yeah, I mean they pretty much just ran the tear out, dude. Like they, you know, or half the tear would go out there and it would just be whoever, you know. Were there incidents out there? Oh, yeah, there's a lot of incidents. Yeah. Yeah. With weapons? Yeah. With uh mini 14 being fired? Yep. There was no block gun. There was just a mini up there, man. And then after I think 89, we got the HK with the nine millimeter glazer rounds.
SPEAKER_01:When they introduced the H and K to you guys, did they announce it first? Hey, were you guys about to get a new weapon system?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so what happened with the Mini 14 is pretty much um relative to those shoeyards, it's a small, enclosed, completely concrete area, man. And they're shooting and like dudes were getting cracked by ricochets. Two, two, three, dude. Dudes were getting uh the bolt going through them, hitting another guy. It you know, it was, I mean, there was a lot of uh friendly fire, you know. I mean, so you know.
SPEAKER_01:I wonder, now that we're having this conversation, if it was shoe uh deadly force incidents that prompted the HK, like you just stated.
SPEAKER_02:I'm pretty sure that is. That was the reasoning they gave us because we started using the HK. And if you're shooting inside the housing unit or in the shoe yard, you would use the HK. Um it was a good weapon, pretty accurate. Um, the the bullet was a pre-fragmented round. I don't know if you've ever seen a glazer. Frangible. Yeah, it's it's basically like uh the cup um jacket and it's filled with little pellets and it had a plastic tip. It would just fuck some shit up. I mean, it it wasn't a real consistent round. I seen a dude get shot like from me to that tripod with it, and it just blew like a big just gash on his back, man. So it didn't penetrate, it didn't penetrate far at all. It hit him like in the lower back where it was soft, you know. I just saw this like hole open up on the dude's back, man. And he was like, I don't remember stabbing some dude or punching him. He was whatever he's doing, he did it too long because the gunner like was like, all right, all right. And he, you know, fire warning shot, dude kept doing it, and we were gonna run him with batons, and the gunner's like, get the fuck out of the way, right? So he shot the dude and the dude just kind of rolled back, you know. But I don't think he died or anything. It was just like a really bad looking.
SPEAKER_01:And you had the uh PR PR24s, yeah. The PR 24s, side handled batons. Yep. And at that point in time, did you have the small mace or MK9s? Oh, we didn't have pepper spray back then, dude.
SPEAKER_02:We uh we didn't get pepper spray till like like CO's, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Man, until 97 maybe. So you guys were issued PR 24s and keys.
SPEAKER_02:We have vests, dude, on the on the main line. Yeah, you had keys, handcuffs, PR24, and the dude above you to keep you, you know, alive, I guess, which you know Okay.
SPEAKER_01:So, and I love I love the fact that you told me that you were fucking throwing big ass rocks doing manual labor back in the day, bro, because it gives me a huge perspective. Uh, here you are, a knuckle-dragging prison guard in the late 80s, early 90s with a PR-24, no vest, and a gunner up in the tower. How does that differ from 2025 corrections?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, man, a lot. I mean, especially for yard incidents. We didn't have the, you know, like the pre-planned responses and the codes, ones, twos, three, all that. We didn't have any of that, man. Like you just ran out there, man, and it's some whatever's happening is happening, and you're just kind of looking to see what's going on. I mean, you gotta take a second, you gotta see where the other staff are and go to where you think you're most needed. So you're using you're using fucking thought process, forethought. You're not just acting wild. But yeah, because at that time, man, the dudes up on the gun, they ain't fucking around, man. They're firing warning shots, and a lot of them would fire them against the concrete wall. And so when they hit the wall, the fragments of bullets and the concrete and all that shit. So, like, you're not just gonna run out there all like a dumb shit because you could get clapped.
SPEAKER_01:You performing your duties in the late 80s, early 90s, did that give you a sense of security knowing that you had a gunner up at the top? Uh, yes and no.
SPEAKER_02:It depends who you had up there that day. There's a lot of blind spots too, but man, you get, I mean, sometimes you get some old dude on overtime, bro, that's like he's he's first watched and he's sleeping up there and you're trying to run program. Um so yeah, not really. To be honest, I learned fairly early on um to just rely on myself, man. Don't expect anybody to help you, man. Don't get yourself into something that you can't hopefully get yourself out of. Um definitely don't talk your way into an ass whipping, you know, because it happened. It happened to people, you know.
SPEAKER_01:And I was just about to elaborate on that. Uh, would you say that verbal communication is huge? Oh, yeah. I mean, on many levels, many levels, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Even back then, would you agree? Oh, yeah, back then, yeah, even more. And that that was kind of one of the things you learn from the more experienced officers that came from like old Folsom or even CMF or SolidAd or something that transferred in. Um, those guys had to learn how to communicate with inmates. They're on a tier, like they might be the tier cop and they're throwing a tier, you know, they got, I don't know, 60, 70 inmates, however many inmates up there. And they're just they're they're busting the doors, and like, yeah, man, when they come out, like all that shit you was talking at the door, you know, right? So, and and it just makes things work better. Like, I saw people start issues over stuff that they just like it could have been resolved at such a low level, but their egos or their just inability to communicate, you know, would would mess it up.
SPEAKER_01:And that's what I like about you, bro. You're you're fucking you're a big guy, dude, and you're not a bitch by any means, but you have the forethought and the common sense and experience to verbally de-escalate a situation if you can. You're not a in other words, you're not a fucking like a Neanderthal, bro. No, and and I I worked around a few of those.
SPEAKER_02:And I don't know, man. Like they would start a lot of shit. A lot of them end up going out sideways too. Like it almost seemed like that personality had some other things, a lot of times, like even off duty, that you know, it was like kind of just a negative package, you know. Right. But I remember I I never gauged inmates on their size, man. I remember when I was I had to go to Old Folsom for a while. I was there when they made American Me, right? And I had this gun position in one dining room, and it was like it's like the worst gun in fucking CDC. You're in this catwalk way up above this dining room. It's it's all painted white. You can't see shit until this it has like uh a window on the top. There's like sunlight on you. We're running chow. It's hot as fuck. I'm just kind of looking around. And I look in, you can see the scullery kind of into the scullery. And bro, there's this, I could just see guy's legs sticking out, right? Like he's laying down down in the scullery under the table, right? And so the cops notice it, and they, you know, we put the dining room down, they go in there, and they bring this little ass dude out, right? And they they drag this. This guy was fucked up. And what he had just been picking on this little guy in the scullery, you know, their co-workers, right? Running his mouth, talking shit, whatever. And so that scullery table, you could remove the leg, man. It's like a hollow steel, like a aluminum baseball bat, man. And he just had enough of that dude and cracked his ass and and fucked him up. And it's like, you know, what race was this? They're black. But I mean, like, hey, you know, he was a little dude versus a bigger dude, laid his ass out. Took him out, man. Yeah. And it's like, you know, I kind of already knew that, but it just reinforced me, like, hey, look, like, you know, these smaller guys in prison ain't no punks, man. Like, they they have to be extra, you know, because they don't want anybody thinking that they can, you know, overpower them or whatever else. And um just treat everybody the same, man. You know, treat everybody the same.
SPEAKER_01:It's crazy, bro. You just told me two stories long where the dude got his back fucking big ass hole with a glazure round, and then the fucking dude getting hit with the and these are just some like common shit that you see in prison.
SPEAKER_02:It it's funny, man. I've been retired 10 years. I Don't really like even think about it that much, but then like I'll start talking about it to somebody or whatever, and I'm like, this shit comes up at like, oh yeah, man. I just start thinking about some fucking whatever random thing that happened. What year did you retire? 2015.
SPEAKER_01:I had no idea, bro. I thought you retired three years ago. Oh no, man. Shit, what do you think? I'm fucking 35 years in the department, bro. Dude, you got out, you got out just in time. Yeah. Did you realize that the department went to shit in the hell in a hand basket? Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It was going there, man. There's like there was a couple other officers with about the same amount of time in. And I'd say about the last two years we were there, we were kind of like, yeah, we're like dinosaurs, man. Like it's it's time for us to go on and you know, go to the fossil record, man. Let these we don't belong in this shit, you know.
SPEAKER_01:2015, my pops retired in 2015 after doing 22 years. How many years did you do? Uh 28 and a half. Almost 20. Yeah. So you served in the most perfect time frame, dude. In theory, if you can actually feel like it. I mean, yeah, I think I I think I left at a good time.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Realistically, no nonsense, no bullshit. Around what year did the department start to take a downward tank? Probably a year I started.
SPEAKER_02:No, you know what, man? Like, um, so it's weird, man. There was like always this thread of you could get in trouble for stuff, and there's people kind of gunning for staff, and you know, but it wasn't, it was just like individuals and stuff, or you could get caught up. You know, I was telling you earlier about the program administrators. Right, right, right. We have they have captains and facilities now, at least when I retired, but back then they had program administrators who a lot of times didn't come from custody, they came from different, you know, education, um, places like that, right? And so you can have somebody that's kind of running the facility that doesn't really understand your job. And a lot of times back then, inmates would complain about stuff sometimes, and they'd want to like start investigations on you over shit that like, you know, it just kind of right. I mean, when I was new, I had some like bullshit investigations on everybody did. Like there's that thread, but it's like it never really went anywhere, you know, unless you did something crazy. And even then, people got away with shit. True. Allegedly. Yeah, allegedly. But um, I'd say it got worse and worse. I'd say what really changed the dynamic at at CSP SAC is when they brought in the EOP and the PSU um programs. Because you bring in a lot of people from mental health and and stuff like that, and I'm not bagging on them. They have a they have a job to do, you know, it's all right it's all good. But like, but they're they're in the mix of what we're doing, and then these programs are bullshit programs as far as like the way they're manipulated by inmates. I I will say before that before they had those, man, like in the 90s, I'd just get some dude be crying and say you want to kill himself and stuff, and we'd take them to the infirmary. We'd always take, you know, I'd never like leave them in the cell or nothing. We make sure we'd take them to the infirmary and they'd put them in like a like an observation, and I don't know where they'd go.
SPEAKER_01:They just never come back, you know. So now, from your humble opinion, because I know you're not a psych doctor, but when that inmate was crying and saying he wanted to kill himself, did he really I'd say then?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the dude was probably going through some kind of a uh struggle or crisis because they didn't have some little cozy program for him to go to. He's gonna be butt naked, like in some fucking cell somewhere. Oh, so there was no fucking incentive to play the part. No, man, he's gonna be butt-naked in his cell, some officer in overtime, like, you know, trying not to fall asleep next to the door, getting the same chow everybody else got, except it's probably cold because they had to put it on a cart to bring it to him from wherever they got it. Where, you know, they have this mik boo and uh and all these other programs where uh like once again, man, I'm not trying to like judge it or whatever. I hear you. It's these guys are getting different food, they're getting ice cream, all this just personal attention and um masturbating the psych doctors and psych ticks. Yeah, all that, man. And I mean, there's dudes like purposely injuring themselves to go out to the hospital so they could have this dude would like mutilate his genitals and he would just so he'd go to the hospital and have nurses playing with his junk, you know, to fix it up or whatever. It's just like it got to like you know, where it was really hard to believe when these inmates would tell you they're suicidal. It's like, oh come on, man.
SPEAKER_01:Like okay. Help me piece the pieces together if you can. What changed? Was society changing that caused the inside to change?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I believe so. And they had those um, you know, what those those they had the feds in there, man. They had those those lawsuits for the federal lawsuits about the medical care, about the psych care, and um CDCR being CDCR, man. Of course their ducks weren't in a row, man. So, like when these people came in, that's when like they start doing all these crazy audits all the time. Audits, audits, audits. Like these dudes come in and do the audit, you don't, you know, like no offense, but like they don't know shit either, man. Like somebody told them, like, go get this or whatever. They start giving us different forms to fill out. Right. Like just just trying to, you know, to placate whoever this, you know, they they would get, I forget what the person's called. They basically get somebody appointed to that case that they would have to, you know, feed all this information, fulfill all these requirements and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01:And it's almost like a receivership, but I hear what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think that maybe what it was called. I don't know. I mean, I I never really worked in mental health, man. I avoided that like the plague, man. I just don't want to deal with that shit. But um, yeah, I mean, that that had to be a big factor. I mean, that you know, the feds come in, yeah. Their medical care too.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, so was there contraband surveillance watch potty watch back in the day? Oh yeah. There was? Yeah. What would happen? I mean, let me I'm I've heard, I mean, I heard like if an Amy was like gonna swallow something, maybe they got Yeah, that happened.
SPEAKER_02:But like, say, I remember the first time I saw a dude on Potty Watch. I was new, I was coming back to working at Chow Hall and B Shu, and I think he didn't pass the the want the metal detector, right? They're doing cell searches or something. And they had this dude, um, they had him like in the Sally port, and there's like a little uh holding cell area, and he was he had handcuffed to one of the doors, and he was just wearing his boxers, and they had him sitting on a like a plastic garbage can, right? Trying to shit in it, right? And you know, they had the plastic garbage can with a liner. A lot more sophisticated these days, but yeah, he was trying to shit in it, and he wanted to shit because he I don't think he had anything, and he's just like you know, and like I'm going through, you know, you just kind of look for a minute. Oh, okay, I get it. I get what's going on, you know, whatever. I just kept walking. But that that was that was the first time I saw potty watch. They they started doing it differently, of course, like chaining them up, taping their jumpsuit, you know. But you know, these dudes would like some of these dudes would hold out, like if they had dope up there, they would hold out for days, days, and days. He's hey, these Nortenos, like, gotta give them credit, man. Those dudes would hold, I don't how could you hold that in for two weeks or whatever? That's wild. But what they would do it for a reason, they would wait until there was some new cop or somebody fell asleep at night. You know, they're supposed to be watching them, and they I mean they're taped up and all that shit, but they would shit it out and try to get it out, you know. Someone would try to get out and swallow it back 100%, you know, like yeah, or if they could get rid of it. I mean, we had guys that would uh they'd go to use a toilet and then you just start fighting the cops, shit it out, try to get in the toilet and flush it, whatever. But yeah, man, I avoided that job too.
SPEAKER_01:That's an OT job. I'm cool. You I like that we're diving back into like the old school things. Uh back then, late 80s, early 90s. What was the what was the motive? What was the goal? Cat and mouse game, gangs were gangs and dope a big priority. Uh for like staff working in the units? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Or on the yard in general. Yeah. Um, you had individuals that were focused on that. And then you a lot of us were just there trying to. I mean, honestly, it took me a while just to make sense of what was going on, figure out who's who, what kind of shit they're doing, how they do things, um on more of a macro level where some of these guys had a dial down. They would just be like on the yard and they'd see some dude coming back from visiting, and they'd like give them like a couple minutes to shit it out, and they'd like they had it all set up with a control cop, turn off the water, leave the pocket doors open for the tear tenders, but kick the tear tenders out like to one section, whatever. They'd slide down the tier. These dudes would be low crawling on the tier. No way. There's one dude, hey, he would low crawl on the tier. He was good though, man. And he had a water bag, right? So yeah, they'd pop the door and he'd throw the water bag in the toilet. And the the guys, you know, he got a couple fights, but I mean, he'd catch dudes just have the shit laid out on the bed. They're getting ready to distribute it, you know, to the tier tenders or whatever. So, I mean, yeah, there was some of that, but I mean that's like a drop in the bucket of the shit that comes in.
SPEAKER_01:Right, but that part of the job is kind of fun. I mean, if people want to join like law enforcement or just do some how like a high, you know, adrenaline, that that's a fun part of the job.
SPEAKER_02:So, my last two years in the department, I was a floor officer in B2. And uh, it was a GP unit. Had um, we had a very small GP at that time. It would, they would close and open different it was basically B1 and B2 had had GP. Um, and I made it made it my focus because when I first started in the block, um there was a nurse, there was an RN man, and this dude, I knew he was dirty because there was just phones. The block was flooded with phones, right? And he would wait till we were doing chow to come in to do his morning meds, right? Because he was supposed to have an escort, but he would wait till we were busy, and then he'd slide in there, oh I got it, man, and we'll, you know, at the doors, and and I told my partner, yeah, that fucker's dirty, you know, like but we just could never catch him, right? He eventually got caught. I think he got ratted on by an inmate, but um course he did. He was coming in dirty, you know. He came in dirty and got pulled over and whatever. And I I think he got a slap on the wrist, man. And he made, from our estimates, he made$50,000 to$60,000 bringing in phones. You know, he was making some money and he had a drug problem and stuff, whatever. But um after that, I was like, you know what, man? This is gonna be my thing this last couple of years I'm working here because my thing with the phones is I want to catch these phones because I want to get the dirty staff. Like, hopefully, over time, you know, I keep you know sending these phones up for evidence. Somebody will leave some kind of information on there or whatever, and we can get these dirty staff. That was my number one focus. Number two, these dudes were doing uh credit card scams. Bro, these guys are making money off those phones, man. I because I'd go in, I'd find the phones, then I'd find pages and pages of people's PII, you know, with everything, their socials, names, addresses, all that stuff, right? So they had people on the streets, I don't know if, or if they're on a different, like they had some kind of program they're on on the phone, but man, an internet capable phone inside of a prison is dangerous on so many levels, man. And I would try to explain it to supervisors, like, look, man, I'm not tripping on the dude's having a phone up there so he can send dick pics to his old lady at left at 11 at night or whatever. Like, right, that don't bug me. But like the potential for all the things that this phone could do. I mean, imagine this. One of my things that I thought about, and I explained this to a captain that we both know, and uh he laughed it off. I was like, what if these guys, what if these guys go into the Muslim chapel, these dudes, and they bring have a phone in there, right? And they set off an alarm, and the first cop, first two cops go in, get disarmed and held hostage. There's no gun coverage in there, right? Okay, eventually, you know, they put knives or necks, whatever, right? We're gonna have to back out at some point, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe that's their plan. Maybe it works, maybe it don't. But can you imagine you have hostages and you're live streaming? Maybe you're gonna like oh, dude. And that was like during the time of like Al-Qaeda cutting off heads and shit like that. So I always thought, like, man, like these dudes could do some really powerful shit with this that could really, really fuck us up, man. I mean, just the potential for it, you know. But you're out there scamming people. It was it was crazy, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Dude, I I didn't even think about that, bro. Uh I was thinking more, and I don't even want to say it because I don't want to give them the idea, but like utilizing a phone and having something happen on the outside, you know what I mean, where cops get killed.
SPEAKER_02:And well, there and so phones were coming up with that kind of information. There's guys that were um having people murdered on the streets, right? And those phones, you know, were getting caught and you know, processed, and FBI got involved with some of that. That wasn't on B, that was on Charlie Yard. Um, but you don't know what's in there, man. And so I started setting up like it kind of became cat and mouse for me. I was always like in my block, like everybody was pretty respectful, man. I had problems once in a while with some dipshit, whatever, and I'd get it handled by the other inmates. I'm just like, hey, talk to your boy, man. We don't, you know, we're not gonna run this block like that. Always get taken care of. But um respectful, you know, I'd go through in the morning. I'd say good morning to everybody when I gave them their tray, whatever, you know, like this not in there to cause nobody no problems, but they knew I was there to take care of business. So we started kind of doing like um stings on them a little bit with the phones, or what I would do is I would just kind of lay back and and be lazy for a while, but I watched. Oh, okay. I watch and I'd be like, okay, but I I um I made a fake Facebook profile, fat white girl, whatever. Right. So that's their kryptonite broke. Bro, so I I started getting I started making Facebook friends, and I started busting, you know, then I'm looking at their friends because it was like kind of new shit, you know, like, yeah, dude. I mean, so like they weren't smart, you know. Like I would look and I'd see like six other inmates I knew as their friends, right? Yeah, so I'd start following these dudes, and then I'd just watch when they posted, right? There's one dude in my block, he would post at the same time every morning, right? He'd take a picture or whatever, and I'm like, what time is that? Oh, it's 8 45, right? That's when we do outline. That's when we do like outline for school or something. Is that time? So I'm like, I'm gonna go get this fucker's phone. So what I did is I I put all the tear tenders in the A section and I said, Oh, we're gonna start in C, run the outline. This dude lived in B, and I just fucking slid up in B, and he was on the phone one, like you know, same turn off the water, crack the door. He's on the phone, he just gived it to me, man.
SPEAKER_01:You said turn off the water that way they can't flush shit. But who has control to turn off the water? The control booth has the option to turn off the water in every cell? Yeah. Holy shit, dude.
SPEAKER_02:That's news to me, too. Yeah, they could do that. They we could turn off the water. Um, a lot of these dudes were keeping their phones in their toilets, man. They would wrap them up in several gloves. They had like, you know, we you know, we kind of figured that game out. So we we built tools. We had this thing. We called it the dragon claw, you know. We made like this little look like a grappling hook, man, and we'd throw it down, we'd flush it down and grab it. And I mean, I lost a couple phones that way where like they break off and flush away, and I'm like, oh well, you know, whatever. But it just kind of became like I had a reason for doing it, and I found a lot of weapons that way too. Like I was always in there with a wand going through stuff, found a lot of weapons. Which race makes the best weapons? I mean, I'd say the most impressive weapons, the whites, yeah, the whites. There's like kind of um some of the older school black dudes know how to make a good bladed piece, like they bladed as a slashing instrument? No, like a blade, like a like a like a knife. A knife. You know, yeah. A few of them, and there's dudes in there from all races that know how to make weapons, believe me. But um, there's some lazy ass weapon makers too. You see this shit, you're like you ever see a knife, you're like, oh, this is fucking crap. I I caught this dude coming in from yard one time with a knife like that, and I like it, I pull it out. I'm like, fuck, he's serious, man. And you're trying to take a back in the block, you know. Like, what are you doing? Like, I it must have been a like a PC move or something. Because even his homies kind of look back, I'm like, you know, put the yard down, you know. He's like, huh? But yeah, like, dude, what but yeah, no, man. The the so the guys in B2, I I had a lot of uh white dudes. They're all Aryan Brotherhood associates at the time. And um they made a piece. There was a guy in the yard that they were supposed to hit, another, another white guy. Um, and this is on orders. They made this piece on the they cut out from the bunk a strip about I think it was 11 inches. Damn. And it was like a the star like tapered to like a point, then probably got about that thick. Put a handle on it and just sharpen the shit out of it all night. I heard about it the next day. You know, I I have my people in the block that tell me stuff, they're like, Yeah, we could hear them in the vent. They sharpen that piece all night long. You could hear them breaking it off the bunk, you know what I mean? That's you know that that bunk metal's thick. Oh man, it's it's that's the good shit right there, man. And so it was, you know, so he was this dude was from San Diego, right? And they told one of his homeboys to hit him. And so he has his piece, and it's coincidentally, I just walked past on the yard and I was talking to about 15 white dudes there, and they're all posted up on their spot, right? And I walk up because this inmate that they're supposed to hit, he's kind of like an influential dude. He's supposed to be like their main guy or whatever, and he likes to talk, man. He wouldn't shut up, right? He was always talking about stuff. Justin, come here, right? So I pull up, I'm talking to him for a minute, and I look. Everybody's looking at my white tier tier, like the dudes I know pretty well, they're looking at me like, get the fuck out of here, right? They're just looking at like kind of like get out of here, man. It's like five minutes, four yard recall. So I'm like, oh, yeah, I'll talk you back in the block. So I just bro, I just spun down the track. There's no other staff around. I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't I don't know what's going on up there, but I'm I I think it's a good idea to get the fuck out of there. You gotta be smart, right? So I get down to the watch office, and the watch office clerk is this white dude, and he's standing at the bars looking out there. So I turn around and I go, you motherfuckers, and they just called yard recall. So Central Tower puts the yard down. So dude goes to stab this guy with that piece that they made in the cell, and um, it was made in a different cell, by the way, and came out with the trash in the morning. Yard crew pulled it out, whatever. He drops it at the guy's feet. He's just like, Yeah, I don't want to hit him. Fuck it. Drop it at the guy's feet. And so that dude, the the target picked it up, and this other guy ran up to hit him. And I'm running up the track at that time, and that guy stabbed him in the neck and get him good. This dude stabs this this just all the white dudes rush him, and this one white guy runs up and he stabs him like from the side, like like a like a bullfighter almost, man. It's just like this weird, I hits him underneath his arm from the side, like perfectly targeted blow, right? Hits a dude, the dude is kind of does that, runs back and sits against the wall, right? And and we didn't do code three or nothing. Is me and another, you know, yard copper out there. We probably shouldn't have ran in. Um, whatever. I ran up there with my baton. I got the dude to drop the piece. Um, he threw a grenade because like All the whites trying to get involved. But that dude he had hit all the way into his heart and it bounced in there and put two holes in his heart all the way through his lung. And the dude like flatlined in a couple minutes and they brought him back to life. Did he die? Nah, he he like flatlined, but then they cracked his chest and massaged his heart. He like woke up and yeah, but he turned the tables on him.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, he turned the tables. Yeah. So the supposed victim. Why do you what the what was wrong with that dude? Not just dropping the knife and not wanting to hit the dude. He thought it was he thought it was a wrong move.
SPEAKER_02:Oh. There was a lot of politics behind the stuff that would happen with some of these dudes. So, like, not to get into detail. Right, right, right, right.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you know, how he felt about it. Going back to your notes, you said uh the Bee Yard riot, 1989?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, just I mean, historically, B facility had some major riots. So when uh it was May 25th of 1989, I was working one of those dining room jobs. I wasn't at work yet. Um, there was a simultaneous riot with at the Ali County Jail and on Bee Yard. I remember that. I don't remember all the details why. I think it may have been a disrespect thing. That's a thing I heard, but it could be anything. Different races? It was Mexicans versus the blacks, Southsiders versus blacks. And uh, I mean, there's at that time too, we used to run big yards, probably two, three hundred inmates out there. Um, and they died. Several inmates got shot, a bunch got stabbed. I mean, we would have major riots like that, and the mini 14 is what would stop it. But we didn't have um, like I remember one of the officers, there was another riot in '96, and one of the officers I knew really well, he worked on second watch, and he ran out there. We still we didn't have the, you know, everybody just ran out and did what they thought. No alarm response training. He ran out there, and some Mexican dudes turn around and told him, hey, get the fuck back in the block so you don't get hurt. Like, because they like the dude. You know, like we have report, these guys like were he was actually well, you know, he was a cool officer. Staff liked him, inmates liked him, good dude. They turn around and told him, Hey, go back in the fucking block so you don't get hurt. And I mean, that's that's a level of what it was. And like the smart officers back would back off, like, hey man, let the fucking gunner handle it. You know, that's kind of how the shit's done.
SPEAKER_01:Around the 90s, 91, 92, 93 was a gangbanging era in Los Angeles and the three strike laws. Did you notice an increase in inmates?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, obviously, there's always just a fluctuation. You know, they built more prisons. That's probably when they started building all those prisons in the valley.
SPEAKER_01:But did you notice the capacity levels filling up at Captain?
SPEAKER_02:It was always full. It was all like on the GP, we always had like very, very few empty beds. But there was a turnover because dudes would get rolled up or they transfer. So Charlie Yard and Bravo Yard were general population. Yeah, so C Yard was like a PC yard. C yard. Yeah, Charlie Yard, the big side was a PC yard. Then they had the shoe, then they moved the shoe to B. And those guys went to the big side, and then I think C turned into eight blocks of PC or something. They had to do some kind of thing and see to take there's too many PCs there or something, and they sent a bunch of old Folsom, I guess, and like two guys got fucking whacked the first week or whatever. There's a lot of pedos over there, and uh I mean gang dropouts, it was a mix, a lot of victims, you know. Um, but yeah, so they weren't interchangeable at that time. Were but would they flip occasionally from SY to GP or GP and S and Y? Uh not really, man. But uh like the actual yard or inmates.
SPEAKER_01:The program on that yard facility. It was the designation.
SPEAKER_02:That one changed a lot, man. Yeah, because it became a regular yard sometime in the 90s where they had the same kind of inmates basically. Um 90s, yeah. You had the third strikes guys coming in. Um there was different groups that were more staff assaultive, different groups that were stronger and weaker on the yards. Which groups were most staff staff assaultive? During the 90s, man, the Crips really came out as like being the guys that were after staff, you know. Um, they had that pretty soon after I opened uh Calapatria. Right. I think it was in like '95, '96, they rushed out watch office, they stabbed them up. Um did you guys hear about that at new at New Folsom? Yeah, of course. Of course. We might have even locked down for a day or two over it or something. I don't know. I mean, and that was just it was a different kind of dynamic, you know, and um yeah, I mean, that was that was the group. When I first started, it was the whites actually were uh going after staff, trying to kill staff at at SAC and uh um to Hachapee, I guess. And that kind of, you know, though all those guys were pretty much locked up, locked away and stuff. But um the white inmates at that time in the 90s were very weak on these GP yards, in my opinion, from what I saw, like a B yard. I can't speak on other facilities, but most of their leadership was locked up. And the guys, like they're being watched. If you were if you became an associate or like, you know, whatever, even if they didn't really have a good case on you, you'd just be under investigation in the hole, like indefinitely, you know. Um like an associate? Yeah, for associates, like a validation. Yeah, yeah. Like these guys just they'd fucking disappear them. They'd go somewhere else, you know. So it wasn't like the GP now where it's all influenced by you know the A B. It was, you know, maybe on paper, but like there's dudes, a lot of old like white convicts out there just doing their thing, running up drug debts with other races, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Which it reminds me, did you did the USAS ever try to establish themselves there?
SPEAKER_02:No, they were on Charlie Art from what I understand. I don't know much about those guys, but they couldn't be, they couldn't be there. No.
SPEAKER_01:Any major riots that you were involved in early on in your career? Because I know you were in the uh Pennell.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, not really early, like a bunch of melees type, you know, melee type stuff, but like real riots. Where like they lost control of the yard type shit.
SPEAKER_01:Nah. All right, we're about to turn it up right now. This is gonna be good, man. When I was a correctional officer, I mean you probably remember the year. I'm talking about the Cortez stabbing slashing. Yeah, it was in 2013. Yep, I was a correctional officer. We had that CDCR website where it says attempted murder on a cop on a peace officer, and they said uh Cortez. Inmate Cortez, he's a fucking Mexican inmate, Southsider, right? Yeah, at the time we had ERMS. We got uh Psalms 2012. So I looked them up. The tripped out thing is you were involved in that incident. Yeah, I mean it it happened in the block next to me. Can you tell us a story of when inmate Cortez, because he was a youngster, I believe he had a fucking tattoo on his face, if I can remember correctly.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I can I'd like to do some background on that story. So the way we ran inmates out for releases in the blocks at that time, I had had a problem with it for over a year and mentioned it to many supervisors to the point of argument. Um, they wanted the we were usually three, four of us, um, supposed to be a sergeant out there. The one officer with a wand would stand right at the the cell block door. So you can't, there's a door and concrete. You can't see what's coming out of that door. Um, and so the inmate steps in front of you, you bend down, you wand them in the back, wand them in the front. Well, like you're you're bent over in front of that open door, not you can't even see in there because it's it's you know I mean it's lit, but it's dark because you're outside. You know what I mean? The contrast, and uh you're you're you're ridiculously exposed and vulnerable right there. Then you'd have a couple officers standing on the walkway to the yard to pat down, and half these guys I worked with, man, they'd be bullshitting out there, not even paying attention, they're telling jokes, backs to the inmates. Like I I had a lot of discussions and and you know, shared my feelings a bunch of times with staff, sergeants. Um, the sergeants were supposed to be there. Sometimes they wouldn't show up. I'd be like, you know, call them on the radio and they'd oh, just run it, just run it. Um, sometimes, so in one and two, B1 and two, that actually happened in front of B1. One of our officers would get redirected to be the yard gun in B7 for EOP yard, which was originally my post before I came to B2, but they eliminated it. So then they started redirecting a floor officer up there. Like that's the kind of shit that just like and you know what I mean. I had different supervisors, and then you know, one time the supervisor didn't show up and we're short. There's just like two of us. Damn. You gotta get the yard out, man. And uh, so you know, he's just I'll go run some newer guy, right? So we ran. I'm mad. Like sometimes I I don't have a good like filter or like sometimes I'm a crash out. Let's put that so that's my kids call me.
SPEAKER_01:I wouldn't say it's a crash out, bro, because these are valid concerns which fucking proved you right.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's not even like it's just there's a way to do it, man, and let's be safe. And uh, I would bring it up, and they just kind of like, oh you know, these guys would be very complacent, man. And and some of these dudes make sergeant, and they've never really seen some shit go fucking horribly wrong, you know. So I remember that one day I go in the office, man, and you walk in the watch office on and beef facility, and to the left, there's a picture room. It's kind of a room, and the sergeants have their desks there with their computers, and it used to have the inmate pictures. I don't, I think they've moved him somewhere else, and you have the lieutenant, captain, whatever, the main office with the SE. So I go over there and look, and it's some new guy, man. I I knew who the sergeant was. I didn't really like him anyway. He's kind of punks, but he's sitting in there on the computer joking with the other sergeant. And so I went in there like, the fuck are you doing, right? This is the day of that no, this is the the day that they ran us short, and the sergeant didn't show up. And I, you know, I called him on, I said, Man, this fucking bullshit. And he started defending himself. We started arguing. I might have called him some different names or whatever. Lieutenant came and kicked me out of the office, right? But like I let them know, like, hey, like that that shit's not okay. And it's on paper. That's your job, that's what you're supposed to do. You expect us to do our jobs, do your job too. It's for everybody's safety, right? So the day that incident happened, we were still doing it the dumb way, you know, and there was no supervisor there. There may or may not have been supervisors that somehow got medals of valor out of this. Oh, no. No way, dude. There was no supervisors there, bang, because it what we we know were posting up a couple inmates out. They let a couple inmates out, and I heard their uh their control officer start yelling, get down, get down. And I turned and the officer was being assaulted. Where were you? In front of B2, so probably like 70 feet away. And you heard, get down. Yeah, I heard something like he's got a knife, get down, or something like that. Yeah, I heard something about a weapon. So I turned and looked, and the officer, I could see the inmate with a weapon in his hand. When you looked, are you able to see the direct incident? Oh, yeah, I can see right over there. It's just like, yeah, there's just like this little patch of grass where they unload the truck to the dining room there. It's all open. And I see his partner jumping in. Um, me and my partner ran over there, you know. We did what we had to do, um, you know, got it under control and whatnot. But uh yeah, I mean, it's a bad incident, man. But I mean, to to look back on it, I mean, another thing, not to really get off too much into the weeds with this, but like the medical staff, bro, this guy got stabbed in the neck and it nicked his jugular. I'm walking through the the Sally port to medical later. You got brown paper towels covered with blood. That's what they're trying to stop the bleeding with.
SPEAKER_01:Like wow, brown paper towels.
SPEAKER_02:You can't even like they don't even absorb water, man. Like you put them on, you put them on your desk, like absorb some water, like your little ring from your coffee or whatever. And yeah, it soaks right through. But I just and and for a while I've been, you know, from my military training and I'm trying to like whatever, but like, dude, we're in a we're in an environment where you could have mass casualties, you have somebody bleeding out, you could have some multiple people gunshot wounds, um, all these different things, right? How come you don't train the COs how to deal with this? You know, they're all put on the medical staff, bro. The medical staff is not trained for that there. The RN, sometimes you might have a good one that maybe it was in the military or something.
SPEAKER_01:Right, you got some experience or common sense at least.
SPEAKER_02:But the other ones are pill pushers, man. And a lot of them, it's just it it does it, it doesn't happen. And it's like, why not have like a like a bag, like a bag in the block where, like, hey man, this trauma somebody's bleeding out. Yeah, trauma kit, man, like a blowout kit, at least tourniquet, whatever. Teach you how to use it to save somebody's life. And even especially on third watch, I'd work overtime on third, they're like their RN. It was like one RN for the whole joint, and you had L V and in there, and she just pushes pills. I I don't, you know, half of them don't even like know what the fuck they're doing. So, like that was always my trip, you know.
SPEAKER_01:So the weapon that Cortez used was made out of his television, made out of glass. Glass? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:What had happened is um the week before, they had like that block had different programs, and I think they had Fish Row downstairs in one. And the dude, the dude nutted up and then broke his TV, right? And so I think the cops tried to get all the glass up.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know, but somehow this piece of glass about like that just because I seen the weapon in arms, and then I seen the the hole, the it was like stitches, dude. It was bad, it was fucking bad, bro. I don't know if it hit him in the face or in the neck, but it was in the neck, yeah. I mean, it was really bad. Um now let's talk about the reality of prison, dude. Uh is the possibility of dying is that a reality? Getting killed in prison working. Staff member?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, staff member. I mean, it's it's a reality. It doesn't happen very often. It's something to, you know, I think keep in the back of your mind like where you're going. I don't know if you want to think about dying, going in there, but like you have to go in there. But should should a should a staff member go in there complacent? No. I mean, and and the problem, I mean, you were in the army, right? You know, you were in Iraq, right? So say you went down, say you did a year there, and every day you guys did a route clearance or or a convoy on the same road, right? And say you went down for six fucking months and nothing happened, which I'm sure wasn't the case, but nothing ever happened. Then everybody's just jawjacking, fucking off, sleeping, whatever. Then you go through and there's a fucking ambush, IED, you know, fuck a complex ambush, right? You're gonna fucking die. You know, everybody's gonna die. Nobody's know what to do. Like, you know, everybody's it's the truth. That's how CDC is on a daily basis. It's just like, you know, I went a couple years when I was new, and that place had a lot of shit going on, and I I didn't really get caught up in that, you know, little staff assault bullshit type stuff, but like no like soup, you know, really major like stabbings or or riots or whatever. And um, you know, people, but I always knew like, man, it could happen, and I was always like, fuck this. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna get taken out, man. I'm not gonna uh you know, let this shit fucking happen to me, what I've you know, seen happen to other people. But um I was telling you, man, I'd see these dudes coming, like they come in with their little mocha frappuccino, or whatever the fuck they call it in their Starbucks cup, 10 minutes late, you know, doo-dee-doo, like in the in the B2 block where I worked, which full of killers, full of fucking killers. And oh, hey, Johnston, you know, like I just want to slap that cup out of their fucking hand, you know, because they just come in there with the wrong attitude, man. And, you know, why are you mad? You know, this type of shit like, bro, you're late. I already did the I was up on the tier doing my shit. It's got to be done, you know, by so we can get all this stuff done. And they just like don't give a fuck.
SPEAKER_01:You just mentioned a building full of killers. I know what a killer is. You know what a killer is, they know what a killer is. Is being a correctional officer job for just anybody that wants to be a CO? Uh yeah, I don't believe so, man.
SPEAKER_02:And you know, over the years, it's almost like it's been um marketed as such. Like some of the people I hear talking about being COs or the ones I see, and I'm just like you know, and you gotta look at it this way, too. Anybody in that situation that's locked up that has life has the potential to be a killer, even if he's you know a regular guy, but stick you in there for for life, right? You maybe you're just gonna have a bad fucking day one day. It's the environment. The environment breeds out, yeah, or or whatever. I mean, it's you have to kind of look at the big picture, man. And I think people come in and they just kind of like uh trying to get through the day, try to minimize it, don't want to think about it. Um, I would see some people almost bring in these things or like a lifeline to the life outside, so they've like almost like a feeling of normalcy in there, which a crutch, man. We call that a crutch. Yeah, just like you want to be like feel like everything's safe and normal, and yeah, you know, you're thinking about going home and shit. And it's like, man, come in here and get through the day, man. Like yeah, all that other shit be waiting for you out there. And yeah, it's all a mindset thing. You don't have to be. I mean, I've seen women that came in that were like 45-year-old moms, man, but they had the right mindset. Right. Yeah, they were fucking down for the cause, man, and they're good partners, you know.
SPEAKER_01:And it's mindset, bro. It's not the mindset of, oh, I'm a badass CEO. I'm gonna push my authority around. It's like, no, realistically, I understand what can happen here. I've seen a bunch of those guys get fucked up. Yeah, you know, it just it's let's just let me just put it on record because not that we're saying it has happened, but is dumping inmates and handcuffs make you a tough guy? No, we have that discussion many a time now.
SPEAKER_02:Correct. I mean, it I get it, man. Like these so they would take the new the last couple of years I worked there, man, being a new CO at SAC was fucked. Because they would stick you right in PSU, man. Oh god, and so you're getting shit thrown on you, and you're getting these dudes that are just playing these games, and there's guys that want you to dump them because they want you to get in trouble. Yep. I mean, it it's I'm really I mean, some of those guys I knew, you know, from like before their COs and stuff, I felt for them, man, because it's like I as a new officer, I don't know how I would have handled that. It wasn't that wasn't they're in a bad position. I wasn't put into that situation at all, man. So I I don't know, man. I mean, I probably would have stuck with it or whatever, but it would have it would have been very stressful. So I get it, but like guys that like brag about dumping an inmate, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't impress me. I mean, honestly, really not much that goes on in there impresses me. Just yeah, you did your job, right? Like that's what you're supposed to fucking do, you know.
SPEAKER_01:The uh Hugo Pinnell. Well, fuck, it was a murder. It was a murder. So we've talked about the early 80s or the late 80s, early 90s, into the 2000s. When you started to hear about the lawsuit, ask your settlement. What did you think in your mind, bro? That they were gonna let these dudes out? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:They've gone on for a long time. But what did you think? Um here's the thing, man. We when we started getting these actual members onto the GP, man, most of them were torn back, dude. Older. Older, man. Um, they had, you know, they're they had health issues because they've been locked up. You know, I mean, they're not getting sunshine, all that kind of shit. I'm not saying that, like, and most of them had drug addictions and stuff like that going on too. I shouldn't say most, but some did. Um, I didn't think it was necessarily gonna be a bad thing, to be honest. I mean, I kind of felt like those dudes kind of got hosed in a way. They did, bro. They did. And and I also felt like, hey, maybe if these guys are on the GP, they can keep like instead of there's probably a lot of miscommunication that went on that caused a lot of fucking people to get hurt. At least these guys are on the GP, maybe they can just like set up whose territory is whose you gotta be straight up with it and not have like the you know, the the violence that that you know kind of went along with the thing. So I didn't think it was a bad thing at all, to be honest.
SPEAKER_01:See, prior, I did think it was a bad thing. Prior, because you just you don't uneducated, right? Or uh inexperienced. But then after you're like, nah, you're right, they did get kind of get hosed 30 years in the shoe for no fucking reason.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and it's like CDCR had their reasons for it, man. And it was, I mean, it's whatever, but yeah, dude. I mean, the whole thing was kind of it was meant to fail eventually.
SPEAKER_01:So Hugo Pinnell was a member of the BGF, correct. And he touched down at CSP SAC New Folsom.
SPEAKER_02:So what happened is they started moving a lot of these guys to, we had a shoe block in B yard. It was on B3, I was in B1 and two. And I know that him, along with some A B members, some Mexico Mafia members, um, some different associates, it eventually kind of filtered in there. It was kind of like a shoe for guys going to court in Sacramento. Um, medical issues sometimes, because like the bay, they didn't really have the medical. But I kind of think maybe they're moving them down to like, okay, we're gonna eventually release these guys to these facilities. Kind of like a step down. Yeah, and they had a program actually called the step down where they would yeah, give them increasingly more freedom and stuff like that. But that was not the step down. That was just a portion of the street. No, there were there was a step down in there, I guess. Yeah, I never really worked overtime over there a few times, man, and I didn't really I can't speak on it. I I you know I basically know like how it worked, but I can't tell you.
SPEAKER_01:Basically, for the public, it's uh these Mexican Mafia members, Arian Brotherhood, BGAF, were in the shoe for 30 years and they incrementally let them out onto the main lines.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, a lot of those dudes had no points. Like, because they were locked up, like you know what I mean. They're like zero points because they're locked up that whole time just getting good time credit and like they weren't doing shit, you know. So I mean, it's kind of hard to justify keeping them up in there, you know. I mean, there's some guys that were still violent up there, but it's kind of unless you're killing your celly or you know, figuring out a way to get the cops, it really, you know, for the most part, they kick back.
SPEAKER_01:So, this is what you're talking about. You had Pennell in one of those buildings with other with A B members and Mexican Mafia members and some heavy hit hit associates.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, then yeah, guys that were just doing a shoe term, whatever. They were gonna release back to B facility or maybe Charlie facility.
SPEAKER_01:Now, as you guys, as experienced cops, knowing who's who in the zoo, were you guys like, hey, so-and-so just touched down, so-and-so's in the building, so-and-so's here.
SPEAKER_02:Let's put it this way I would know who was in the shoe, who was getting kicked out to B yard from both staff and inmates. Um, I would pretty much know like the whole landscape of how it's going down um ahead of time, which I I made sure I was very aware of what was going on in that because it was two blocks. It was pretty easy to do. And I mean, like, you know what I mean? I uh it's like I I had my own little private zoo there, you know. I mean, it's like I I know what everybody's doing.
SPEAKER_01:Um, and without saying any names of any managers or administrators, right, you had a clear understanding of who was who and where they were ideally the best place to put them. What did you begin to encounter?
SPEAKER_02:I would say that a lot of people there were aware of that. A lot of people. And there were some excuses made about why things were going to be done a certain way, and it was all pointed to downtown Sacramento, you know, um decisions are out of my hands, kind of things. Um I don't know. I I kind of feel like if I'm a leader, and this way I was in the Navy, I got in a lot of trouble sometimes for like people shitting on the people below me. Like my unit, I might be a team leader, I might be the LPO of the unit or whatever. If somebody above me wants to shit on my people, they're gonna fight me. 100%. We know this. They might win, but like I'm gonna do and that's why I never made chief in the Navy.
SPEAKER_01:Because they're your fucking troops.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I couldn't make chief in the Navy because of it, but whatever. That's a whole nother story. But uh well, that's leadership. But that's ownership too and leadership, and it's like I've been in their shoes, so I know, like, you know, we all got fucked over when we were like an E1, E2, E3, whatever. And um I felt the same way about that job. Like, they make these dudes I CDCR man in the prisons, not everybody, but a lot of these dudes aren't leaders, and they're put in very high positions of authority. They're managers, they're administrators, they're managers, they're bean counters or whatever you want to call them. Correct. And um, you know, a lot of them get places being pleasant and knowing the right people, which is all cool, you know. But no, no, no. It's cool until it's not. Yeah, exactly. Until you get into a position where people's lives and well-beings are at stake underneath you, then you're letting some other entity above you just tell you, hey, this is the way we're gonna fucking do this, and it doesn't make sense. And you just, okay, go along with it, and just you know, fucking tell the people below you, hey, this is just I'm sure you dealt with that in the army, bro.
SPEAKER_01:Like, you know, I had amazing leadership in the army. I experienced that in CDCR a lot, though.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, like we're it comes down from the top, and you're like, really? Like, we all know this is a bad fucking idea. That was kind of the consensus. Like, this is a bad fucking idea.
SPEAKER_01:So tell us what was tell us what was the plan. What was the plan? I mean, like, I don't want to go into too many specifics. Don't go into too many specifics because you know that could come around and bite us in the ass. But ultimately a decision were made was was that individual wasn't gonna be.
SPEAKER_02:Let's put it this way there was moving parts to this dude coming out that they you know, there were certain moving parts that had to occur for this guy to come out here. Um there was immediately uh issues with the inmates on the yard. That was that was my thing. Like, I'm on the ground level, there's immediate issues. Um what facility are we talking? What yard? Bravo, Bravo Yard. Bravo too. And I'd had this before with supervisors where you would have guys get locked up for like an incident on the yard, right? So, you know, they make you the the staff investigator, whatever. You're supposed to get these findings for him for when he goes to committee, whatever, whatever. So and I'd be confidential. Yeah, I'd go talk to these inmates and I'd I'd figure out what was up. And I but my thing was, man, if an inmate told me something, I'd never tell the anybody who told me. I just don't throw people under the bus like that. I mean, it's just like I'm not I'm not on the squad working informants, man. Right, right, right. You know, I'm just like in the know, and I man, and that's how I kept things respectful with me and the other inmates, and that's how I knew things.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's why they were so willing to divulge information to you because you knew they weren't you weren't gonna budget.
SPEAKER_02:I mean it ain't going nowhere. I'd use it as advice, but I wouldn't say who told me, well, Johnson, you got to write who told you. I'm like, hey, look, don't bring this fucking guy back. You know, whatever. This guy did something foul, he got locked up. These other dudes are waiting for him, man. They go fuck him up. Oh, Johnson, we can't go off that. They let him out first fucking 10 minutes on the yard. Yard down, get out, get out. Somebody talked stabbing the guy, right? Whatever. So that was kind of like that. I mean, that was a buildup to all this shit anyway. So I already knew that these fuckers ain't gonna listen. But I'm just like, I gotta get this off my chest with you guys.
SPEAKER_01:Like, I like that though. Let's elaborate on that. You felt that you had to do the right thing. Yeah. That was a lot about you, dude, as a man. Honestly, too, like we had inmates.
SPEAKER_02:So it's kind of when these dudes with three strikes were finding out, hey man, I might get action on one of my cases and get a date, get out, right? So I had a lot of inmates that you know that lived in my block, um, that that worked for me and you know, as porters and whatever. And they won't they were trying to like get these programs in there, like uh we had anger management, they had the Toastmasters, they had all this stuff. And like, look, man, I know a lot of staff like, oh, you know, that's but but really to be honest, man, these guys were trying to program. They were trying to program. And you had for white GP guys, you had a heavy white GP line, Southsiders, you know, Crips, Vakumi, Bloods. Everybody was like, they were they're all soldiers, man. It wasn't like some like soft get-along yard, bro. Like, you know, but these dudes were getting along, they had their own little business they took care of, whatever. But um, and I worked there. And I felt my part was to keep this program running. You're telling me this, you're telling inmates that I heard them telling inmates at a committee, all this stuff, right? You know, but then you then you just throw this fucking problem out there. And these guys were not, they didn't know what to do about it, man. Like you, and and you know, the inmates didn't really know what to do about it. And I could see that I could see what was going on. I heard things, I saw things, and I'm like, I'm like, hey, man, I come to supervisors and told them, hey, like, this isn't a good fucking idea.
SPEAKER_01:So the inmates were were programming.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and administration uh through some we hadn't had any racial shit on that yard for like a minute.
SPEAKER_01:Now, I I need the viewers at home to understand a common theme that we're starting to see, man, manufacture problems.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I don't I I I personally don't think anybody did it intentionally. I just think egos get involved and they decide this is what we're gonna fucking. To me, that's intentionally, yeah. Especially when you're going against sound advice. Yeah, you might be right. And it's like I just think that the egos get involved, and once that train starts rolling, I'm gonna throw up.
SPEAKER_01:I'm gonna fucking throw up, bro. So there you are, Jimmy Johnston with the T, prison guard knuckle dragger with fucking 25 plus years experience. You're working around killers, and you are being told this is now about to be implemented. What were the events of that day?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it kind of took course over a few days. A few days. Yeah, it took course over a few days because the inmates were trying to adjust. Like there was talking going on between all the groups. I'm not gonna get in specifics, you know. And during this time, though, that had been going on for a few days, and there's some okie doking going on, I think, whatever. And then somehow this like bullshit story got to the supervisors and they bought into it, whatever. But I'm on the ground level watching, man. I can see like the things pointing towards what's gonna fucking happen, man. So an officer sees a white inmate uh putting a weapon into a garbage can and basically, and you know, finds you know, whatever, locks the guy up, and they decide to do a search on the yard. We go on the yard. Um I mean, we found like five or six weapons, but like three of them were straight killing pieces. They weren't like the shit you have out. There's always weapons on a level four yard, GP, that kind of yard. Any day of the week, there's gonna be weapons, guys get them out there, they stash them, whatever. And you could tell those ones, you could tell riot pieces. A riot piece just put some holes in a dude. So, you know, because you know, riots honestly, it's like numbers, man. Like, oh, they got a couple of us, we got a couple of them, you know, who went out, you know, like right. It's almost like a score on a game, right? So, but no, there's a couple bone crushers out there. There's a couple really well-made, recent weapons out there, and that was kind of my thing, is I could tell those weapons were made very recently. And I looking at the materials, I had a guess of where that came from, and I know that was recently. And I had an administrator come up to me jokingly, oh, what do you think about all these these weapons out here? Blah, blah, blah. I'm like, man, you know what's up. I've been telling you, you know, like, oh, you know, blow me off, man. I ain't shit. I'm just a CO, right? Okay, so we're on lockdown for a while. We're trying to like, we're trying to like get these dudes to we're doing interviews and stuff, and like, man, we're trying to stop this shit, like on every level, man, up to probably lieutenant levels, but you you just you have no control over it, man. And you know, what happened happened. I mean, it just it was inevitable, but it just the way my problem is it's a it's a failure of leadership, you know. Things happen in prisons, man. Like shit happens all the time, you don't know what's gonna happen. Like it just happens, like, okay, fuck, you know, deal with it. That's nobody's fault. And these guys are nobody's making these guys fucking do this shit. Nobody's making these guys kill each other, right? Or come after us or do whatever they do. But man, if you're gonna you you want to be a warden or a director or a fucking captain, even or whatever, you want to get to these levels of authority. Um, man, be ready for the responsibility. And you better be able to like think about what's best for everybody, not just your career. You know, that's what I'm gonna say.
SPEAKER_01:It's not about that for them, it's about their ego.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's ego, and they don't want to defy the people above them because as they promote, I mean, you made it to lieutenant. I never promoted, man. Uh, it just wasn't in the cards for me. It's cool. I'm glad I didn't. But um, once people get to a certain level, all they're tripping on is the next level. The next level, oh man. I mean, you talk to I run into dudes that are still working there. I'm a captain right now. If I got three more years, I'm gonna try to get that AW. They don't give a shit about the job, like what their responsibilities. And to be honest, in their department, now there's so much fat like at the captain and there's like captains and AWs that don't even like do shit. Like, I mean, there's captains that are like downtown that like oh absolutely 100% fucking just sit there. Like, you know, I mean it's it's crazy amount of fat, you know, that there is and how they'll to save money, they'll redirect posts in a in a in a fucking dangerous prison yard like B, you know, so then sack. They redirected us all over the fucking place to save money when you got captains sitting there like doing nothing downtown, man. They didn't give a fuck. Like it just it was obvious, you know, like nobody ever stopped that shit.
SPEAKER_01:You used the 40 millimeter during that Pennell hit.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, yeah, as part of the riot response team, whatever it was, code three, because I was on the response, bro.
SPEAKER_01:Alarm response, that's what it's called, man. Well, whatever. Yeah, I mean, it's been a long time. It's been a long time. I know you're an old guard, man, but alarm response, man. How did you feel after that entire incident?
SPEAKER_02:Honestly, I was kind of pissed because after, I think it was the next day we kind of had like a meeting, you know, they want to bring us all in, tell us what a good job we did and shit. And um, I don't specifically remember what supervisor were there, but I basically told them, hey man, you guys fucking caused this whole thing. And nobody like, you know, luckily I had two months to the house to retiring, right? So I I brought it out. It's like, hey man, this could all been avoided. Uh, you know, well, you can sit here and fucking give us all a hand job because we went out there and did our jobs and shit. But like, man, this is bullshit. You know, it's fucking bullshit because all the things that happen in here, the ones that you could avoid, are the ones that you should really be focused on, man. Like the shit that happens, happens. And they didn't like that. But I mean, it just wasn't like that. It was just why, you know, is what I had to say, man.
SPEAKER_01:I know, I know for the love of me, for the I've been three years trying to get through these youngsters, these new correctional officers, man. And I refuse to give up. I don't know. What advice, if any, knowing their circumstance, they're 22 years old, they have to do 40 years in the fucking department, the current climate, what would Johnson tell them?
SPEAKER_02:What I would tell younger guys coming in that I kind of like, you know, started being friends with and stuff, um, that were sharp, like good officers. Um, they're all lieutenants and captains now, they're all outside of the institution for the most part. And and that's what I told them to do. I'm like, look, man, there's there's like even then, let's say that was like in the from 2010 to 2015 when I retired. I already knew like if you're a new CO, you're coming out on this new contract, right? Don't do what I did and just be a cop. Like, it's not it's not, it's a bad trajectory for you. It's not gonna work out well for you. Promote, just deal with it, man. Being a sergeant fucking sucks. Like it's be a sergeant is probably in some ways worse than being an officer. But it's a stepping stone. Get to lieutenant, get to captain, and I would tell him, I go, hey man, try to get somewhere where you can actually influence how this department's ran, man. I go, because it's like being at my level and seeing all these dudes, like, hey man, I had dudes that were like captains, AWs, wardens and shit that I remember as a new cop, you know, and like, you know, I've seen their career paths and shit. So it's like, I would just tell them, hey, get out of this and get somewhere where you can like influence, even if it's just like part of IST or somewhere where you can, you know, you can be like a positive influence. You're not in this bullshit, and you've got less people on your ass, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Now, if you're a youngster that promotes, what advice do you have? Because clearly they will be lacking experience. Yeah, they will be. What advice do you have for them to be able to offset that?
SPEAKER_02:Man, listen to your senior staff, you know. I mean, obviously, listen to your peers as well. And man, I, you know, I kind of learned from an early time, you know, like how to kind of sift through bullshit, like who to listen to and who not to. Correct. You gotta have some common sense in that place. But um, yeah, just learn who who has good, you know, there's people, there's lieutenants and captains are gonna be able to school you and and and kind of tell you the the right way to be. Um just, you know, don't mess around with no female COs, don't get yourself in trouble.
SPEAKER_01:Damn, bro, we didn't even get into that.
SPEAKER_02:Don't get caught up, don't get caught up in the C in the CDC cycle. Um and it is a cycle, a vicious fucking cycle, bro. Yeah, basically, you know, and and most of them that I've had those conversations with, that's what they did. Now I'm proud of them, you know, because now they're in places where they don't have to be caught up in the bullshit so much, and they can maybe have a little bit of influence on how the department functions in the future, you know. I don't know how much, man, because there's a lot of a lot of fuckery in that place, man. You know, all the way to the top.
SPEAKER_01:There's a lot of fuckery for sure, man. Any last closing words? The fucking floor is yours, bro. Anything.
SPEAKER_02:Uh obviously, I'm 60 years old, man. You're 60 years. Holy shit, I didn't even know that, dude. Yeah. And I look back and I think, man, there's all this other things I could have done. You know, you look younger than Don Garrett, my friend. No, just kidding, but but like in hindsight, man, I mean, I feel like for whatever reason, man, it's where I was supposed to be. Right. It was what I was supposed to do. It got me through multi, you know, a divorce, different child support eras of my life, paid my bills, always had, you know, you know, benefits for my children, was able to buy a house, able to function, you know, like get through all my bullshit that I did the rest of my life. That's the department was there as, you know, because I I knew what its place was. I always came into work knowing, you know, this is what puts food on my table. This is, you know, why I'm here. So just kind of like these new officers, just keep that in mind, man. Just, you know, it's gonna be tough. I I couldn't be a CO now. Me neither. Like, I mean, I know I'm gonna incriminate myself a little bit, but like if I wore a body cam to work every day, I'd be fucked. I'd have got fired almost every day of my career. Like I just for nodding off. But I mean, like, I mean, nothing, nothing crazy, but like I couldn't function under, you know, you can't even say cuss words and like, I mean, come on, man. I mean, I get it, you know, to a certain extent, but I uh I don't know how these guys do it. You know, I get it. I understand why they're so stressed out, you know.
SPEAKER_01:But you're you're 60 years old, bro. What what from your perspective, man? Because not for they're tired of hearing from me. Do you recommend they stay in the department, leave the and I know you can't make anybody do anything, but you knowing the current circumstances, and if you were 21 years old, what would you do? If I was a CO? Yeah. Just like what I said, promote up.
SPEAKER_02:Promote up, and just fucking like when you're doing your bids, try to make sure you're bidding into a place where there's there's people around you that you know you want to work with, you know, not just necessarily for the cherry jobs. I mean, shit. I was probably, you know, 30 on the seniority roster, whatever my last bid, and I bid for B2 floor. You know, I could have bid for some tower and you know, so some gate, no inmate contact, just kicked it. But that's not like I wasn't gonna go out like that. It's just, you know. That speaks volumes of you, dude. Well, and it's just like, man, that was my career, and I'm gonna just go out the way I, you know, came in basically. It took me a while to get there. But um, yeah, man, I just don't want to go out like that. I want to be, and I felt like my experiences were valuable to people, whether or not they're gonna listen to me on the line. Yeah, exactly. My experience is being right there in the cell block with the inmates.
SPEAKER_01:Um would you bring a diaper bag to work every day, bro, for these young fucking cops? Come here, you guys. I got some stories.
SPEAKER_02:You know, I mean, something like so so anecdotally, right? So I was always kind of like a smart ass, but I was fair and I like took care of business. Like some inmate, I might not even like the inmate, hit me up, like, hey man, like I'm trying to um find out if this visitor's approved before the weekend or they, you know, some shit with their property, whatever. I always take care of business because it's like there's a lot of lazy ass. I do the sometimes we have lazy counselors, I do their job for them and you know, look shit up, whatever. But um, but I was a smart ass dude, like, you know what I mean? And so years later, man, I was working as a bouncer in a nightclub, right? And I see, you know, I'm standing in this hallway and I can see that like the dance floor, this one part of the club. I see this dude walking towards me, right? And I remember this motherfucker lived in my block, man. He was he was an inmate of my block. Me and him used to kind of like talk shit to each other, like, you know, kind of sarcastically, whatever. And uh he comes up to me, he's drunk as fuck. You know, he comes up to me, goes, Hey man, where's the bathroom? And he looks up at me, and and I and I called him by his aka. I couldn't remember his last name. He looks at me, he goes, Johnston, man. Yeah, fuck. This fucker give me a hug. Like give me a hug, bro. And he, I mean, like the rest of the night, this dude wouldn't leave my side just bullshitting, you know, like because and I've run into other dudes that like were inmates that were in my block during that time period at different places in Sacramento. And um, I've never had anybody have an issue with me. And if anything, it's almost like cathartic. Like they're like now, they're on the streets and they're trying to make they're trying to do this shit. And it's like people don't understand their experiences they had in there, you know. And um, maybe they're trying to put it behind them, or maybe they just whatever. And so we end up like talking about different things and stuff that went on in there, and kind of like, you know, just hey, talking like two regular guys and stuff. And uh they always leave me with a handshake, you know, like good luck, man. I hope you do well, you know, and and that's it. Like that's the way it should be. Um, we used to call it like uh, you ever see that uh it was a Wiley Coyote cartoon, man? And it it was with, but it was Ralph Wolf. They call Ralph Wolf, but he's Wiley Coyote, and he he goes and there's Sam the sheepdog, right? And they go like whatever, and there's a flock of fucking sheep, right? And they both punch in, like they walk up, they got their lunchbox, they're bullshitting, you know, on their way in there. They both punch in their time cards and it's on and cracking, they're fucking chasing each other, dropping rocks on each other's heads, all that bullshit, right? That they do. End of it, man. Check their time card, you know, get their time cards, uh, you know, the hole poked in or whatever in the little machine, and they walk away in the sunset with like, you know, with arms around each other talking. It's like kind of how it was with the inmates at a certain extent, like, hey man, we're in here, you're in here, I got a job to do, you got a job to do. I don't take this shit personal, you know, don't take my shit personal. And if you believe it's the best, you can you can be an effective officer and and you know, not not be a fucking asshole. You can do it. It's it's it's possible.
SPEAKER_01:That is the best fucking analogy, bro. Like by far, the whole thing you clock in, you fight each other, and then you clock out, and that's a wrap, dude. Because I had the same similar experience. I mean, that's the way it should be, you know. All business. Yep. Like the OGs used to tell us.
SPEAKER_02:It makes it makes look, man, I'm not there to punish the inmates. They are already being punished. They have their freedom taken away, right? So, and you know, I don't really feel any kind of way about that. You know, we all get consequences in life. You probably knew that was coming, bro. Like doing all the shit you were doing, whatever. You're there. I'm not there to punish you. I'm not there to make your life harder, but I am there to enforce rules. And there's certain levels of enforcing the rules. There's certain shit that does not need to be worried about. There's certain shit like, hey, I don't let this shit slide. Um, and in, you know, in in return, most of them didn't really try to make my time any harder. Like, you know, we're both programming in our own ways.
SPEAKER_01:You know, exactly. Yeah. So dude, this fucking whole entire episode covered everything about being firm, fair, and consistent. From communicating to your inmates to uh voicing your concern when you saw something wrong, and from utilizing force when your partner got stabbed. Slash fucking well-rounded CO, man. I'm proud to have known you, to have met you, call you a fucking friend, dude, and thank you for coming down, man. I know you were kind of hesitant because you got like that mentality, bro.
SPEAKER_02:Like you don't want to talk, but well, my main thing is like I don't want to say anything that's like offensive to anybody or I think we kept the clue, you know, like judgmental or that I'm talking shit. I uh I'm not here to make myself look like I was this badass dude because I wasn't. I was just I was a young, skinny, you know, dumbass kid that came into CDC because I really didn't have any options. And I I turned it into a career, you know, and I tried to improve myself while I was there as far as my level of expertise as a correction officer.
SPEAKER_01:Fucking badass, dude. There you guys have it, folks. I knew this episode was gonna be a hit, man, to trip down memory lane. But if we capture all these moments in histories, hopefully it can help the future generations with that. If you like what you saw, make sure you hit the link in the description. Love you, keep pushing forward.
SPEAKER_00:Never been taken from the hood to the pen. Truth and tales, pen, actor brother one ends, story never ends up.
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