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

green was out in the pelican bay yard when our producer noticed and asked for an interview. >> i am flamboyant homosexual. we call each other girls. something to do around here they call you girl. then you have those smiling face and laugh at you behind your back. you walk around hearing somebody calling. look at that punk, that passionate. a burn of disrespect day in and day out. >> you have people that undercover. you have people that hiding in the closet, doing each other. the minute they see each other that's flam boint that's out, they have something against that. to go through this every day with a bunch of people who tell you what you can and can't do is wrong. the ones that tell you not to do it are the ones doing it in the closet. >> in this environment sexual partners can turn into blood enemies in the blink of an eye. >> in here you don't have no friends. you can laugh and talk and play cards and dominos. the minute something happen to you they all go the other direction, leave you to die. the minute you do something they don't like, they will cut you. that's what pelican

. >> this is the last place they need to be sending a flamboyant homosexu homosexual, pelican bay. >> adolf green was out in the yard when our producer noticed him and asked for an impromptu interview. >> i'm a flamboyant homosexual. the ones that prefer to fix themselves up like a girl. and we call each other girls. you understand? some of the dudes, they call you girl and this and that. but then you have those that smile in your face and laugh at you behind your back. you walk around the track and you hear somebody call, look at that punk, look at that [ bleep ]. >> green told us those who are open about their sexuality face retribution from other inmates. >> you have people that are undercover. you have people that are hiding in the closet that's doing each other. but the minute they see somebody that's flamboyant that's out, that they don't understand, then they have something against that. and to go through this here every day, every day with a bunch of people telling you what you can and can't do, who you can live with and who you can't live because of your sexual preference

or is it just binding on pelican bay, and california prisons? >> well, as a matter of whether it's actually binding on other courts, it won't be binding beyond this one prison. courts consider what is called persuasive authority. in cases that are legally similar. so this does have the sense to set a national precedent. there come as time, when being locked in a wind with doeless box the size of a parking space violates the 8th amendment. >> to rewering maine, new york, colorado, others? is is there a momentum now for a re-examination of the use of solitary, or are there so few tools that it's going to stick with us even among administrator whose don't want to use it. >> i think both are true, there's no question that the people that i speak to, my colleagues correctional administrators all over the country, understand the da bill tating effects of extreme isolation. and for the most part, many of them especially at the state level less so than perhaps the county jails are taking steps to reduce the reliance on this kind of isolation. t'slation

i think that's what pelican bay is about.es 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, you know, 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 had as confirmed gan

. >> at pelican bay, we saw the definitive guide to distilling white lightning, a hand drawn illustrationa cell search. >> i found that in an inmate's cell. it explained to the people on the tier how to manufacture one, you know, pure alcohol. but they're actually making 150 proof. that's not your regular pruno. a little more sophisticated. >> this is the final result. this here is about the equivalent of grain alcohol. extremely potent. >> how does this taste? >> white lightning tastes exactly like whiskey without any cut. some guys in prison will cut it with, say, something like kool-aid or something because it's too strong. then you have other guys that just down it just raw. and a lot of these dudes that make this stuff, they don't realize that the bacteria in the stuff they're drinking doesn't do anything but give them tuberculosis and other diseases because it is nothing but rotten food that it's made from. >> since drunken inmates can lead to big trouble, correctional officers are constantly on the lookout. >> they're out there searching. cells. they'll find it. three days later, t

months after his 2011 release, he traveled to pelican bay state prison.nd in solitary confinement there. shane is now a senior reporter at mother jones and joins me now. thank you, shane, for sharing your story and what you've seen as a reporter, which is also striking. i want to get to -- >> thanks for having me. >> -- your piece in a moment. is solitary confinement torture? >> well, torture is a legal definition. there's kind of a fine line between what's torture and what's inhumane, which has to do with the treatment of the person put in solitary confinement. what i felt was torture -- i felt myself losing my mind. i saw my thoughts slowing down. i saw myself becoming kind of more animal like and just being separated from human beings for just months really kind of changed my psychological makeup and was terrifying. time was the most terrifying thing to me, just the minutes that were coming, the hours that were coming, the days that were coming. >> you write about this very eloquently. one quote from that article. for hours, days, i fixated on the patc

. >> the groom, raul hidal has been in california's pelican bay state prison since age 18. >> i was involveda gang. street gang. drugs, violence all that. and got in a shoot-out. there were six guys in the car. and they say i shot at. and actually they gave me -- six life terms for that. >> because of his gang affiliation, vidal is assigned to the secured housing unit where contact visits are not permitted. >> right now here together you stand free and apart from all other people in this world because right now you stand within that charmed circle of your love together. >> vidal and his bride were childhood friends and had reconnected five years earlier. though it's unlikely vidal will ever be free, laquisha agreed to marry him anyway. her son reuben stood in as best man. >> you have a ring picked to go on your hand. >> oh, my gosh the ring. >> she sees me, she opened up her house, here heart, she gave me her family. >> i raul take you laquisha. >> i raul take thee laquisha. >> to be my wedded wife. >> to be my wedded wife. >> to have and to hold from this day forward. >> to have and to hold

but we have a pretty good following and the chino and pelican bay, even on the gp yards, there are gay boy 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. >> they call us gbgs. 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 hu

our producers first met him seven years ago inside pelican bay, california's toughest maximum securityicer, 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, it could very

. >> when we first met ivory taylor at california's pelican bay state prison, he had to be flanked by 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. who do you work for? >> 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. 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 let

after doing ten years of hard time at pelican bay state prison for manslaughter, he returned to l.a. county jail. while awaiting trial for the very crime he claims to condemn, garofalo offers his unique perspective on the new breed of street criminal. >> jails are too full. but look at the new generation. carjacking. these kids will go out, 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. now, you've got to tell me, there is not something wrong with that? and 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's 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're going to be a gangster in this life, there's two things you've got to know -- you don't kill cops and you don't kill innocent women and children. >> 900 max is also the home

. >> 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 b

she's also going to be the author of a forthcoming book about pelican bay.so welcome to all of you. [applause] >> just to start i would love it if you could give us a sense of what you made of the news today. was the optimism misplaced that things were starting to change any fundamental way? >> i think for me what i begin to see was twofold. so there was some optimism that dwindled just because we want to see constant declining numbers, but i think there was a new optimism that arose to me which is targeting of the second strike within her to strike law. we built a huge campaign for the third strike with the three strikes law, but the second strike doubles the amount of time that people actually get once they commit a second strike bulletins, which was happened in california is that's not increased the length of time that each inmate is spending in our prison system. and so i think because of these numbers will be able to open a dialogue on how do we no we know reform the second strike as well and continue to strike -- take these incremental steps to see ref