and the 2000 riot is a vivid reminder of just how powerful and dangerous prison gangs can be. that's our report. thanks for watching. i'm john seigenthaler. due to mature subject matter, viewer discretion is advised. there are 2 million people behind bars in america. >> got the browns and the whites against the blacks. the first rule of the game is watch your back. it's either kill or be killed. life and the next [ bleep ] will. i will find me some steel and make a strap. cut like a mercenary death trap. 'cause if i got to do time, i rather do it like a real [ bleep ], be down for mine.

>> who is going to stab who? who is going to kill who? who is going to beat who bad? >> guys stomping each other on the head, knocking each other unconscious. >> what we got over here? >> escort! >> you have to join a gang. you have no choice. ♪ ♪ 15 to life, doing 15 to life ♪ 15 to life doing 15 to life doing 15 to life. that's it. >> in an isolated part of california's central valley is corcoran state prison, one of the state's largest maximum security institutions, housing many of its most violent criminals. now, corcoran first opened in 1988 and was the site of so-called gladiator fights in the 1990s in which inmates fought to the death in concrete yards while guards allegedly looked on. the guards were charged and acquitted of subjecting prisoners to cruel and unusual punishment, but when we first brought our cameras into

corcoran in 2000, the prison was still recovering from that scandal. in this hour, we will take you back into the highly charged facility to see whether it has overcome its notorious past. >> my life is in danger. fy stay in there, i'll end up getting stabbed. >> corcoran under extreme pressure, it's a powder keg. a powder keg. >> basically pure hell. it's hell up in here. it's hectic. >> it's nothing here. ain't no roses growing up out of here. >> bottom line, it's punishment. there's nothing rehabilitative about this. >> you lose your freedom, man, you lose everything. >> it's not the place to be. it's not cool. >> corcoran state prison covers a 900-acre site and houses more

than 5,000 inmates. over a quarter of the inmates are in for 25 years to life for violent and gang-related crimes and more than 200 inmates face life without parole. murderer charles manson and robert kennedy's assassin, sirhan sirhan, are among the most notorious inmates. in 1996, allegations against staff brought the prison to its knees. officers were accused of arranging gladiator-style fights between rival inmates that often had to be stopped with lethal force. >> officers betting on these fights, who's going to win, who's going to be stabbed, who's going to kill who, who's going to beat who bad. >> all of the indicted officers were subsequently acquitted. george galaza was warden at the time and had to tackle the

daunting task of getting corcoran back on its feet. >> when i got here in 1996, corcoran frankly was under an intensive media barrage. the impact that that had on the staff here, it was tremendous. you cannot maintain a prison like this well if your staff morale is poor. so the first part of it was getting the staff morale up. the next thing that we focused on was the issue of violence. >> you might have to fight. >> in a prison like this one, because of the types of inmates that we have, violence is a real thing. >> you might have to kill, you might have to stab. >> the inmates generate violence among themselves. >> one of the places where inmates have always posed a threat to one another is corcoran's main yard. while it may look like an open community space, to the educated eye it is a complicated network of neighborhoods ruled by several prison gangs.

>> without order, we have anarchy. when we have anarchy, people die here. so we have to have lines where the races are divided. and we do this to protect ourselves. >> on the south side of it you have your southern mexicans and your whites. they play there. on the north side of it, you have your black crips and your others hang out there, play there. in this area right behind me here, your southern mexicans hang out over there. over here in the far east corner, you have your whites hang out over there. >> in her 15 years at corcoran, officer diane murphy has learned just how powerful prison gangs are. >> when you come to the prison, you have to join a gang. you have no choice. if you don't join a gang, well, you better pack up and go into the sergeant's office and tell him you're ready to leave the yard. because there's no options. you have to be in a gang. >> within these fiercely guarded

activities, the most innocent active become life-threatening in a moment. >> if you're running and there's a man walking out in front of you you want to yell out track. because he's liable to proceed behind you and nail you, either with a weapon or a fist. >> somebody want to control this basketball court or that basketball court or this weight bench or that weight bench. the cos have nothing to do with that, that is amongst the inmates, the convicts. sometimes you be able to talk it out and get it settled without violence. sometimes you have to bring violence. >> this is just like on the street, you can be here today and you can be gone tomorrow. >> with violence always on the verge of exploding, the officers are as much at risk as the inmates. >> the inmate today tends to want to hurt staff. >> you got bad apples in their crew just like you got bad apples in our crew. there are officers back here that are back here simply to make it miserable on us.

it is us against them. they threaten us all the time, saying they are going to hit certain officers and so it's scary. >> each day on this yard, 12 officers oversee 500 inmates. outnumbered and armed only with batons and pepper spray, correctional staff must rely heavily on the accuracy of the gunners in the control tower. >> you're always vulnerable for someone to attack you, so you have to have that backup. we don't know what they're doing. we don't know what they're thinking, so we stick together and just watch them. >> anything happen on the yard, i ain't never did nothing. i got a whole lot of things in my file, conspiracy to do stuff to the police, you know what i'm saying. i ain't never got found guilty, simply because i ain't never done it. my first name willy, aka little fluff, 6 deuce east coast crip. i hit a man one time, he fell down and die. i got life without the possibility of parole. i ain't scared of no man in

here, i know a whole lot of dudes feel the same way. >> when corcoran was built in 1988, it was supposed to house no more than 3,000 inmates, today that number is almost double. some cells that were designed to hold one person now house two men in a 6 by 12 concrete box. the overcrowding at the prison forced officials to convert the gymnasium into densely packed living quarters for over 120 of the lowest-risk inmates. >> people are real irritable and tempers flare. this is not a place that you could house so many people for a very long time. >> even among the lowest-risk inmates, violence is always a possibility that officers must guard against. >> we have a gunner up top and he can pretty much see the whole area. these guys, when they want to go off, they're going to go off, okay?

nothing's going to stop it. >> and trouble did break out as our cameras were rolling. an alarm signals trouble in yard 4b. officers run to back up their outnumbered colleagues while inmates are ordered to get down on the ground. >> get down! get down! >> two inmates attacked a third inmate, basically because they wanted him out of the facility. seems each time he shows up someplace, for whatever reason, they don't want him around, so they -- they fight with him and then we end up having to move him somewhere else. >> if officer response is not fast enough, an episode like this can easily mushroom into a widespread prison riot. should that happen, some corcoran officers are trained in paramilitary maneuvers so they can immediately neutralize any escalating threat. next on "lockup" -- >> when i came here i thought, oh, wow, this is going to be a

world of hell. sure enough. it's been a world of hell. >> our cameras return to the shoe, corcoran's maximum security housing unit. urgent diarrhea. now there's prescription xifaxan. xifaxan is a new ibs-d treatment that helps relieve your diarrhea and abdominal pain symptoms. and xifaxan works differently. it's a prescription antibiotic that acts mainly in the digestive tract. do not use xifaxan if you have a history of sensitivity to rifaximin, rifamycin antibiotic agents, or any components of xifaxan. tell your doctor right away if your diarrhea worsens while taking xifaxan, as this may be a sign of a serious or even fatal condition. tell your doctor if you have liver disease or are taking other medications, because these may increase the amount of xifaxan in your body. tell your doctor if you are pregnant, plan on becoming pregnant, or are nursing. the most common side effects are

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corcoran's maximum security housing unit, or the shu, is home to some of california's most violent offenders. influential gang members and inmates who have assaulted prison staff or other inmates are sent here from all over the state. >> in here, i feel individually deprived, i feel individual is neglected. i feel individual is depressed, i feel individual is degraded, continuously. >> everything they do is to humiliate you. degenerate you, you know what i'm saying? all you're trying to do is respect them but they are disrespecting you.

>> the toughest challenge, i think, being in the shu is on a day-to-day basis being fair and consistent with each and every inmate. in each cell is a different individual. the 1200-cell shu unit is california's largest prison within a prison. inmates call it the hole. >> 24 hours a day, living in a cell like that, man, it's going to get to anybody. contact, i think it's the worst

inmate to the shu for destroying so the inmate does not spit on

but, hey, you know, all i can do their favorite exercise is

inmate unconscious and kicking him out in the cage, let him get inmate assaults that were so >> it seems to me that this is just one more step towards administration's divide and conquer tactics. and it's working.

works well. i'll give them that. they know what they're doing. >> next on "lockup" -- >> i want you to take the curtains down, turn around and submit to mechanical restraints. >> do what you gotta do. >> inmates go on the rampage in the prison's hospital ward. then, woosh, it's gone. i swear i saw it swallow seven people. seven. i just wish one of those people could have been mrs. johnson. [dog bark] trust me, we're dealing with a higher intelligence here. ♪ the all-new audi q7 is here. ♪

corcoran has its own 95-bed acute care hospital, where patients recover in

i want everything ready to go in one of them might throw feces at

>> we need to come in, give you medications, you ain't coming i'm the custody operations

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doing time at corcoran state prison can be like living in a war zone. the main culprits for most of corcoran's crime and violence are the powerful prison gangs that prey on each other and on the weak. their booming drug business not only pervades every facility at corcoran, it extends far beyond the prison walls into the outside world. lieutenant terry norton knows that being locked up does not stop inmates from conducting business as usual. >> the gangs inside the prison control drug trafficking, extortion, any kind of crime you can think of that happens in the streets, happens within with the prison system.

they have their politics, they have their pecking older, their soldier that has to eliminate the guy they want off the yard. they all have their little jobs that they have to do. >> gang members communicate with each other both in and out of prison, by microwriting on scraps of paper. >> even though the individual is locked up, they have a lot of access to individuals on the street. they have visitors that see them on a regular basis. they have the mail. they're able to give messages to other inmates that are paroling to go out on the street and pass that message along to other street gangs or whatnot to carry out their deeds. >> through these coded notes, senior gang members are able to continue running their street operations from behind bars. once decoded, officers pass the information on to police. more often than not, the orders are to kill. >> anybody that thinks that a

prison gang like the mexican mafia can't reach out and touch anybody on the street are a fool for thinking that way because they can. they can reach out and touch anybody they want. >> most often it is about smuggling drugs, most often heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana into corcoran. >> this would be a state boot. take the bottom of the heel here and actually cut and remove the heel and carve out an area in this section here in order to put the narcotics underneath the heel. this is actually -- we opened up the packaging of it. we have marijuana on this side, marijuana in the center. the way it's wrapped there is so the inmate could actually insert it into his body cavity and traffic it from the visiting room into his housing unit area where it's sold. >> even a simple greeting card can be a vehicle for transporting drugs. >> in this case, the peacock here, the bird, the parrot was soaked in methamphetamines and it's mailed in. once it's mailed in, the inmate will cut up pieces of the

picture and actually sell it. >> narcotics inside prison can be sold for almost 30 times their street price. a ounce of heroin that might cost $800 can be broken up and sold here for thousands. >> get to the house, the guy was selling dope out of the house, so there's probably dope in that building. >> to crack down on the gangs' narcotics network, corcoran has formed a highly trained intelligence gathering team called the investigative service unit. our cameras were allowed access to follow this unit, along with a local k-9 team, while they set out on a surprise contraband bust. searching inmates' cells for drugs, weapons and gang paraphernalia. >> nobody else knows we're coming. the captains don't know. nobody knows we're coming. so this is going to be a complete surprise to staff and everybody. >> head of the isu, sergeant john montgomery knows that inmates will destroy or hide the contraband if they find out about the raid.

>> heading for building four, be released for chow, going to go up to the building and we will go inside, make sure all the building is clear before we bring the k-9 units in. >> any inmates who are still in their cells when the isu sweep begins are carefully searched before leaving to make sure they are not removing drugs. >> all the way around. open up. all right. >> when the cell block is clear of all inmates, the search begins. >> by looking inside the cells, by how much content they have in the cell, we can kind of tell who is probably running drugs because they're running drugs on the yard, they have a lot of what we call canteened store goods, canned goods, tuna, chicken, soups, they have a lot of stuff in their cell. in the drug trade that's how they're paid. so we have a cell that has a lot of that kind of stuff in it we'll mark it, we'll tag them, start following them through phone conversations, mail.

and we'll gather some intelligence out of this. if nothing else, we'll get that. >> first one. >> it's a game to the dog. they're trying to find their toy. that's how they're trained. and after a while, we don't find anything, you get tired, you get bored. >> find the toy. let's go. >> that's why we try to hit the

people were saying, oh, he was for him, then you will deal with

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hm, wouldn't mind some of that beef wellington... to see how much you could save on car insurance, go to geico.com. ah! (car alarm sounds) it's ok! gang politics dominate every aspect of prison life, especially for the members of those gangs. should any of them refuse orders to carry out hits on other inmates, the prison says they are likely to be assaulted or killed as punishment. their only other option is a process called debriefing, during which they agree to cut all ties with their gang and provide prison officials with detailed information. in exchange, these inmates are moved to a special needs housing unit and permanently segregated from the rest of the prison population. >> an individual can be in good favor with the gang for years,

can do their dirty work, smuggle drugs, stab people, beat people, do whatever, but if he says the wrong thing to the wrong person someday, or looks funny at somebody, somebody thinks he is disrespected by him, he's through. they'll stab him, they'll kill him, they'll toss him away like he's nothing. >> a lot of them get tired of prison politics. they're tired of being asked to go out there and asalt other inmates. they just want to kick back, do their time and get out of prison. >> when we first visited corcoran, thomas spiller was a high-ranking gang member who requested a debriefing. he was just four years into a 35 year to life sentence for second degree robbery. >> there's a process that we have to go through. first of all, you have to turn over any weapons and refrain from associating with any of your former gang member friends. list everything that i've done and all my activities.

hits i've ordered, hits i've done, who sponsored me into the gang, so on and so forth. >> state your neighbor and number for the committee. you are here for your cdc annual. we have some question about your request to debrief. >> deputy warden marv mesky, social worker janelle johnson and captain nate dill have to decide whether spiller's desire to renounce his gang was genuine. >> i do have some questions about your sincerity for debriefing. >> i have questions of my own if i may. >> the officials are concerned some of the debriefed inmates whom spiller would join in housing were former hits of his. >> you will not be denied a debrief process it it may take a while because we have to look at it very, very hard. >> for my own understanding, what is the main source of your change of heart? >> basically, i'm tired of doing other people's dirty work. i'm simply just a middleman

passing on orders. and it doesn't make sense. i was ordered to kill a dear friend of mine and i really didn't appreciate that. >> the committee decided spiller would be allowed to debrief. he was then moved into protective custody in the special needs unit. >> you have a good day. thank you. >> since then, he's been transferred to another prison in california for his safety. >> once they elect to go ahead and debrief and cross that line, you cannot put that inmate back on a general population yard, because ultimately he will get assaulted and possibly even killed. >> but the prison can only protect the inmate from his gang's fury. they can't protect the inmate's friends and family. >> that individual decides to debrief, he has to get his family out of the old neighborhood because they will retaliate against his family if they can't get to him. >> the information provided by former gang members, like inmate spiller, is used to identify and track high-ranking gang leaders inside the prison.

it has also proved invaluable to law enforcement. >> they've actually solved homicides on the streets that they had no suspects on through the debrief process. >> debriefing is not enough to destroy the vise grip of prison gangs at corcoran. >> it's just one tool from breaking some of these gang members up from the gang. because for every one inmate that debriefs you have ten in line waiting to get into the gang. >> since our last visit here, officers say they have seen a big shift in the type of inmates who are joining gangs. >> the changes i have seen in gang members coming into csp corcoran have been a lot of the younger kids coming off of the street. coming into a gang they feel is going to take care of them and come in here and find out it's not that way at all. and because he wants to make a name for himself, will be the first one to grab a weapon if told bay somebody that's got seniority on the yard, say, hey, i need to you go hit this guy, they will. >> they are a lot younger, a lot younger out here.

they don't care at all. they are the ones who will be first to get in your face and tell you where to go. >> they are told that what they're doing is for the betterment of, you know, their race or their group or whatever it is. when in reality, what it is, it's all about making money for those guys that are running or controlling the gangs. >> there are a few inmates though who manage to avoid the dangers of gang membership by forming their own small factions and keeping a low profile. surprisingly, one of those groups consists of inmates who are openly gay. >> the boys seem to have no problem. they love us. i mean, we are like gold in here. we really are. very few of us. oh, please, maybe not for you. but anyway. i mean, they treat us just like they treat anybody else, you know, as long as we give them their respect and don't cross those boundaries, we get treated just like anybody else. >> but being gay in prison does have its challenges.

>> being what i am is very hard to find a good celly, 'cause you know, some people, they -- because you're homosexual, they expecting you to do certain things and the you're not with all that, know what i mean? >> when they turn down a proposition, the reaction can be vicious. >> it's just like being the proper word is stalked, harassed, because of rejection, you know a lot of people here can't deal with rejection, especially coming from a transsexual. >> yet, these inmates find doing time at corcoran less difficult than life on the outside. >> it's much tougher in society because it's nothing given to you, it's no program to follow, no nothing, all based on you. so that's a tough challenge. next on "lockup," the toll of serving time and the taste of freedom. n my family to graduate from college,

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itswhen you're engineeredct to literally to drive circles around the competition.

almost half the inmates at babysitter how everybody was and he wouldn't go out, he was

i just know in my heart i don't

society and hope that i learned ♪ they got a brother locked up

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