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 nor

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 is the same. 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. [ bleep ] 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 have caught over 30, almost 40 felonies in pris

be sending a flam buoyant homosexual, is pelican bay. >> adolph green was on the pelican bay yard whenour producer noticed him and asked for an impromptu interview. >> i'm a flamboyant homosexual. and we call each other girls. you understand. some of the dudes call you girl, call me girl this and that. then you have those that smile in your face and laugh at you behind your back. you walk around the track, somebody say look at that punk, that [ bleep ], a bunch of disrespect day in and day out. >> green told us that those who are open about their sexuality face retribution from inmates. >> you have people that are undercover. you have people that are hiding in the closet. that are doing each other. but the minute they see somebody that is flam buoyant that's out they don't understand then they have something against that. and they go through their fever day, every day, a bunch of people telling you what you can, and can't do, who you can live with and can't live with, it's wrong. half of all the ones who are telling you not to do it are doing it in the closet. >> in this environmentmen

i think that's what pelican bay is about. only the strongest are the ones that are going to make it, you know. >> while leon refuses to disavow loyalty to his gang, the prison sees a slow but steady flow of inmates who do. through a process called debriefing. they not only break the code, they smash it to bits. >> it's basically when existing gang members want to get out of a gang inside a prison. and in order to do that, there's a whole debriefing process they have to go through. and it basically entails the inmate coming in and confessing everything's he's done with the gang and sometimes even throwing some people under the bus and confessing against other people. so it's really a deadly thing for someone to do inside a prison. >> when inmates debrief, they must write a lengthy account of their criminal history both in and out of prison. the review process can take months. but if accepted, the inmates will be allowed to live in the safety of a protective custody unit and be granted many more privileges than they would have

at pelican bay. a corrections officer offered to hold it in place for our camera.t another california prison, one inmate's artwork is either immediately confiscated and destroyed or kept in a secured location. the inmate is charles manson. >> we have some manson memorabilia that charles manson has created since he's been incarcerated here at corcoran. >> during one of our shoots at california state prison corcoran, our crew barely got a glimpse of manson before he covered up his window. a recent mug shot shows how much he has aged since first coming to prison in 1971. but his artwork provides a unique insight into his life behind bars. >> here a scorpion that he's made. basically, taking thread from various types of items, socks and t-shirts and towel, he creates it and uses -- it looks like a marker to color. this is probably one of the items that he makes the most of. scorpions and spiders. i would assume this is something like a harp. and he's made it out of toilet paper and newspaper. it looks like some dental floss, a small stick, and probably for the coloring

the action was originally filed by two inmates in pelican bay state prison. each of the prisoners involved spent more than 10 years in solitary. lawyers for the center for constitutional rights once the immediate release of over 500 prisoners from solitary confinement and general improvement in living conditions. >> another case of bullying on school grounds as one north a community demanding action. the second case in just a few weeks. some parents say that the district is not doing enough. >> as the academic year warrants to a close, this is the last thing the vallejo school district wanted to see. another bullying beat down captured on video. this time a 12 year-old, seen here in purple, attacked in a bathroom admit the middle school two weeks ago. >> if i did not get out of the bathroom it would really try and hurt me. >> earlier this week another videotaped beating surfaced. this has parents questioning how much control the school has over the students. >> there's too much violence. we too much policing. >> her son was attacked recently. suffered convuls

our producers first met him seven years ago inside pelican bay, california's toughest maximum securitythe peace officer, if you are the governor, if you are the president, if you do something to me, it's on. >> he's bucking right now, he's struggling. >> hymes is a career inmate with 19 of his 37 years spent behind bars. >> turn around. turn around. >> nope. you all use that force on me. >> officers in several california prisons have gotten plenty of opportunities to document his bad behavior on videotape. while most inmates try to deal with prison life the best they can, hymes has fought the system all the way. >> ha, ha, ha. going to be like starting a whole new life. i can go anywhere. i can get a passport. i can do anything, you know, if i want to. i'm not under supervision of law enforcement at all times like i have been. so basically i can do anything i want to. >> although hymes has reached the end of his sentence, the stakes are higher than ever. >> hymes has two strikes against him right now, and i think he is aware that if he commits another crime and is prosecuted for that,

but we have a pretty good following and the chino and pelican bay, even on the gp yards, there are gayoy gangsters that are not on the sny yard. we're just a group of people that are gay and pretty much stand for our own. you know? that's our car is gay and then pretty much we're -- that's our car. >> while clements says the gbg is not a violent gang, some members can't leave their violent lifestyles in the past. >> i usually go by the nickname demon. i'm a gay boy gangster. you have to be able to fight to get in the gay boy gangsters. most gay boy gangsters are previous gang members that dropped out or kicked out because of their sexual orientation. on the mainline i ran as a skin head. i just tried to be that guy, the tough guy. someone needed to get beat up i raised my hand. anybody that tries to forcefully take property, rape or in any way hurt a homosexual that can't defend themselves, that's where we step in. we come in and tell them, check this out. this in your one and only warning. leave our people alone. do not put hands on our people. do not try to hurt them. you will -- you

they tried to come up when i was in pelican bay, wanted me to go back to the main line.. keep your head up, man. >> once back in the privacy of his own cell, angel begins his daily workout. >> it's easy to do like this. you don't work out, you go crazy in here, you know what i mean? >> how long do you work out? >> maybe two hours. i start with 1,000 push-ups, right? after i do that, i come and do these. >> fights inside the prison can initiate a lockdown at any time. revoking yard privileges for all inmates. making the in-cell workout their only option. >> they call it burpees workout. we do different kind of stuff. we do burpees. we do abdominals. we do arms. we in lockdown right now. tomorrow we get yard. we get yard two times a week. that's our routine every day. we get bored. we don't know what to do. so working out is wasting the mind out, you know what i mean? my english is not too perfect. after that, we bird bath and everything and wait for chow. it's just wasting time. we got a long time to go. >>> coming up on "lockup: extended stay," it's the bottom of the nin

i've been in the hot desert, pelican bay, every one of them, major riots with guys getting their heads blown off. but here, nothing happens. because they want to keep you on lockdown for nothing. >> what's wrong with change? >> another inmate faces the icc after fighting with a cellmate. >> they put crazy people in your cell, and crazy things happen. he was having problems with somebody else, so they moved him in my cell. this guy is having problems, why is he moving this guy in my cell? i don't need no problems. i had an operation on my testicles, because one of them swelled up as big as a softball. so when they let me out of the hospital, i came back to the cell, and there was this guy and he jumped on me and kicked me on my testicles after i had my operation, and hit me in the head with a cup. so i grabbed him and held him and choked him and made him quit. >> what really happened, nobody really knows, because we were in the cell, and an altercation occurred. he wound up getting hurt worse than i did. so it looked like i'm guilty. >> michael callans is brought before the institutiona

. >> designed to look and function like pelican bay, a maximum security prison in california, the shu is composed of windowless, concrete cells measuring 7 by 12 feet. of the 288 inmates housed here, 179 have been diagnosed by psychiatric staff as mentally ill. >> i heard the horror stories of this place back when it first opened up. >> sergeant dan haskins is a veteran of the secure housing unit. >> out of sight, out of mind. the outside world, out of sight, out of mind. they don't -- probably don't want to know what goes on in here. >> the population of the shu lives on 23-hour lockdown. leaving their cells only for showers and solitary recreation. >> some people will tell you that segregation unit is not the place for people with mental illness because we didn't design that particular unit for treatment. particularly for mental health treatment. we just didn't anticipate us having the numbers we have and going the way it's gone. >> although acute cases are referred to the psychiatric unit at a neighboring correctional institution, the staff in the shu deal with a variety of mental

. >> when we first met ivory taylor at california's pelican bay state prison, he had to be flanked byicers for his interview in a secure housing unit, or the shu. >> hi, guys. okay. you got it. look at our man right here. you 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 got more points than anybody else in the prison system. 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, cell extractions, yard extractions, hospital extractions, shower extractions. anyplace you can get in a fight, i've gotten in a fight. >> when our crew later visited taylor's cell, he felt com

we are looking for a generally seven days a round the bay area. pelican had a lot of 70 degrees around area. you can see a closer to 80 is your head south. the warm spot on the map will be in the east bay valley where it averages a concord will reach the 80 degree mark. fairfield should be 83 and antioch 82. let's take a look at the north bay. you're lucky admit that for seven days in increasing to 80 degrees in santa rosa. tamara is a different story. -- tomorrow is a different story. then we will be enjoying cooler temperatures friday but the temperatures will bounce right back for the weekend and on into next week. let's get you an update on the commute. >> traffic is moving well. westbound the approach is living well. there's no problems at the toll plaza of the favorites. the golden gate bridge is also living well this morning. there is nothing getting away. it's a good start to this thursday. >>justine: if you want to get anywhere in our time, start early. there is a job fair to try to help this plant get back to work in irian a lot of workers feel