i charge pelican bay with racism, promoting inmate-on-inmate violence. how it was in the beginning it shall be in the end. the righteous shall live and the wicked shall perish. >> ever since it opened in 1989, pelican bay state prison in northern california has always had a reputation as one of the most violent and volatile penitentiaries in the nation. when we first visited the institution in 2000, it was under lockdown, still reeling from one of the worst prison riots in u.s. history. five years later, we went back inside pelican bay, where the staff has worked to curb gang activity and prevent violent outbreaks but in an environment simmering with bitter rivalries and racial tension. finding any long-term solution is a never-ending battle. >> inmates in the general population right now consider everything a state of war, so they are ready for everything. >> some guys gonna get their head blown off, some guys are going to get stabbed real good. >> there's no hope. >> we are in the new alcatraz. >> isolated on the northern coastline, some 300 miles nort

teda boyle is a retired lieutenant from pelican bay.watch commander on the day of the right. >> the kind of people that were there were guilty of some of the most heinous crimes. murder, strong-armed robbery, rape. >> within the 275-acre penitentiary is the security housing unit known as the shoe. a prison within a prison. shoe inmates spend about 22 hours of every day in solitary confinement. locked up in an 8 x 10 windowless comment windowless see meant cell with little human contact. inside the shoe are about 1,000 level four prisoners. what boyle calls the worst of the worst. inmates that other wardens don't want or can't handle. dangerous gangs found within the penal community. >> because of their gang leadership, they have the authority to authorize other people in the community to commit these types of crimes. >> and on that day two alleged gangs go to war. it's sunday, and it's raining. 200 shoe prisoners are released into b yard for exercise. boyle says that the entire prison is on edge dating back to a smaller racially charged

that violence could be against other inmates or against officers. >> it was here in pelican bay's most secure unit that we came across perhaps the prison's most dangerous inmate. >> my name is scanvinski hymes. i got the name from my mother. she wanted me to have the name no other black man in america would have. >> hymes was originally sent to prison for possessing a weapon in a youth facility. at the time our cameras profiled him in 2000, he had been locked up for more than 12 years, almost half his life. >> everything's the same every day. nothing really changes too much. i mean, wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to the yard. when i get bored, i got -- i got to get into stuff, you know? >> the stuff hymes most frequently gets into is provoking officers to extract him from his cell. each inmate is assigned a security risk classification score based on his disciplinary record. the average score ranges between 19 and 27 points. >> i probably have the highest classification score in this prison system. i'm over 2,000 points now. i've caught over 30, almost 40 felonies in prison.

. >> when we first met ivory taylor at california's pelican bay state prison, he had to be flanked byinterview in a secure housing unit or the shu. >> hi, guys. okay. you got it. look at our man right here. he got this rambo camera. where you say you from? >> msnbc. >> nbc? >> msnbc. >> tell us who you are. what's your name? >> they call me double life because i've got two life sentences, a life without the possibility of parole and 25 to life. and they call me godzilla because i've got more points than anybody else in the prison system. so i fight everybody. i'll fight anybody who will fight with me. and i've been in the hole 19 years straight. >> taylor spent all those years in the shu because of a list of violent infractions rivaling any inmate we've ever profiled on "lockup." >> i've had my nose broke, hip broke, shoulder broke and foot broke, all in confrontations with the police, distractions, yard distractions, hospital distractions, shower distractions. anyplace you can get in a fight, i've gotten in a fight. >> when our crew later visited taylor's cell, he felt compelled to l

after doing ten years of hard time at pelican bay state prison for manslaughter, he returned to l.a. for the very crime he claims to condemn, garafalo offers his unique perspective on the new breed of street criminal. >> jails are too full. look at the new generation. carjacking. these kids will go out and stick a gun in someone's face to go joyriding in a car. and turn a misdemeanor crime into a death penalty case. because seven out of ten times they carjack, they kill the person they steal the car from. you got to tell me, there is not something wrong with that. somewhere in that confusion, these kids don't know how to act like proper gangsters anymore. when my dad was a small-time mafioso back east, he used to say there are two kinds of gangsters. there are thugs and there are gangsters. thugs come and go. gangsters are about making money and respect. and if you are going to be a gangster in this life, there are two things you got to know. you don't kill cops and you don't kill innocent women and children. >> 900 max is the home to nccf's discipline module, otherwise known as the

bay. this one according to the l.a. times included reports of pelicansound drunk and throwing up anchovies. they were in turn consumed by birds to drunk and lethal effect. i got biological oceanographer wondering could that same algae that got them drunk in 1991 have caused all the other sea birds to go nuts 30 years earlier? it's a question for which there is data available. sea birds and turtles gather back in 1961 after the mess in monterey bay, had had the stomach contents collected and preserved. a scientist had her team study what had been saved and indeed, bingo, toxic algae, they found it present in 79% of the plankton that the unfortunate 1971 drunk birds had eaten. so the sea birds that helped inspired the birds most likely ate anchovies that had eaten toxic algea and in a toxic confusion they plunged themselves.

bay, freshwater moving down. violent wind; tropical storm, hurricane. all keep the chesapeake shoreline in tenuous ebb and flow. holland island, nesting home for hundreds of brown pelicans, was once a thriving community... hundreds of residents, a general store, school, church, and a fleet of schooners and skipjacks. but the chesapeake encroaches, almost at will. decades of erosion from wind and tide, and the ravages of hurricane isabel in 2003, the island slips into memory. sharps island lighthouse stands near the entrance to the choptank river, warning seafarers of the shoals off poplar island. the towering, cast iron, concrete-filled hulk, proved no match for the mighty force of winter ice that thrust sharps island lighthouse into a precarious 20-degree list. prime real estate high atop the cliffs at calvert county comes with spectacular views. but these edges, where land and water meet, are on the move. every now and then, eroding earth tumbles down to the shore. the cliff top is receding. breakwaters and riprap slow, but cannot stop the process. the forces of nature are continually at work, shifting the shoreline, reshaping islands, creeks, rivulets, marshes. a lon