teda boyle is a retired lieutenant from pelican bay. was a watch commander on the day of the riot. >> 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 cement 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 founded 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 riot six mont

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. 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 prison. you kn

be sending a flamboyant homosexual, is pelican bay. >> inmate adolph green was out on the pelican bay yard when our producer noticed him and asked for an impromptu interview. >> i'm a flamboyant homosexual. the ones that prefer to fix up as a girl. and we call each other girls. you understand. some of the dudes around here they call you girl. call me girl this and that. but then have you those that smile in your face and laugh at you behind your back. you walk around the track, you hear somebody call, 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 other inmates. >> you have people that are undercover. you got people that are hiding in the closet. that are doing each other. but the minute they see somebody that is flamboyant, that's out, that they don't understand, then they have something against that. and they go through their fear 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 with because

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, 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 w

. >> reporter: but here at pelican bay state prison, there are no reminders of normal life. >> in no prison does a door his with air like this. >> reporter: it is here that scott works to rehabilitate some of the state's most dangerous and violent criminals, who are kept in isolation for 22 1/2 hours per day, inside the prison security unit. >> this is the pelican bay hand shake here. that's what you do. that's all you get. it's an intense place. you're in an environment that's a scary environment. this is a short corridor. if you see this sign right here, d-shu, some of the most powerful, heaviest inmates, they keep them here. >> reporter: is there any extreme case you won't take on? >> when i find out the commitment offense that's really, really egregious that i can't wrap my mind around, oftentimes it's a very hard core sex offense, it's something i don't know how to deal with. >> reporter: how about murder? >> i've seen people who have committed murder 20, 30 years down the line end up showing real remorse. my man. how are you, brother? >> reporter: flores is serving a life sente

of: and the significance pelican bay?>> representing the hunger strikers of pelican bay state in their case against excessive use of solitary confinement in the political use of solitary confinement, especially the use of gang classification against people are political activists to put them into administrative segregation. he is also representing most of the plaintiffs in cases against u's.use of cm amy: i want to switch gears, mariam ghani, to talk about gulf labor coalition. there are official posters here, part of the biennale, and i want to show this for our tv viewing audience and for our radio listeners, you can go online and see. gulf labor, who is building the guggenheim abu dhabi? it says guggenheim ,louvre, collective bargaining. talk about what is happening in the activism you are involved with as an artist. a well, gulf labor is coalition of artists, writers, scholars, curators, architects and other cultural workers who are organizing to ensure that workers rights are respected in the construction of the cult

our producers first met him seven years ago inside pelican bay, california's toughest maximum security >> i don't care if you the 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

they tried to come up when i was in pelican bay, wanted me to go back to the main line.ad up, man. >> officers. >> ready. >> once back in the privacy of his own cell, angel begins his daily workout. >> i was standing on the toilet. it's easy to do like this. if you don't work out, you going to go crazy in here, you know what i mean? it's like -- >> 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. tomorrow we get yard. we only get yard two times a week. that's our routine every day. we get bored. and we don't know what to do, so we work -- so working out is wasting the mind out, you know what i mean? my english is not too perfect. so after, that birdbath and everything, we wait for chow. it's just wasting time. we got a long time to go. >>> comi

. >> when we first met ivory taylor at california's pelican bay state prison, he had to be flanked byicers for his interview in the security housing unit or the shu. >> okay, you got it. >> look at all the men right there. you got this round bowl cut -- >> who's this for? >> msnbc. >> nbc? >> more than. >> tell us who you are, what's your name? >> they call me double life because i've got two lives. life to parole. they call me godzilla because i've got more points than anybody in the prison system. i'll fight anybody. 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, more than anyone else on "lockup." >> i had my arm broke, foot broke because of problems with police. any place you can get into a fight with, i done got in a fight with. >> when our crew later visited his cell, he felt compelled to let the producer know that nobody is entirely safe around him. >> you can't come in my cell and -- i don't know if you really want to run into me. >> gradually he became

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. >> 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 mainland i ran as a skinhead. 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

i've been in the hot desert, pelican bay, every one of them, major riots with guys getting their heads 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 institutional clas

i tried to visit as many as i could get permission to come in new york, new jersey, pelican bay in california went to many times. and developed these amazing relationships and wove them into a fictional account of resistance behind bars. amy: i want to turn to the reading of your new play, "opening the box." this is a clip from the event last week, thursday night posted yorkrtune society in new which helps people reenter society after they get out of prison. so that was the audience. many in the audience had been in prison. many have been in solitary. this is a scene with a character by the name of rocky, a young prisoner, and this is his reaction when he just learns that he has been remanded to solitary confinement for 18 months. >> i'd rather be somebody else. i've always felt that way. a different guy on a whole different planet. i sit here hating all of the people that have what i've never had. it's like my virus no one can touch. who says i even exist? my brain is like oatmeal. my brain is a piece of [bleep] what do i have left? the color red? minute of my julia every and every time ther

bay area environmental group is reaching out to fishermen to prevent burn deaths. they especially want to avoid this. birds getting tangled in fishing line. nearly half the pelican deaths at the international bird rescue center are caused by fishing line strangulation. that's why the golden gate society has begun putting special plastic resipticals at popular fishing spots. fishermen can dispose of their fishing line. >> fishermen are often kind of careless with excess line and kind of tug it out of the water when they're done with it and wrap it around something and leave it out in the environment. and it's a really serious hazard. >> so far ten receptacles have been placed in fishing spots in oakland, and san leandro. the fishing line will get recycled and made into artificial reefs. >>> bay area experts rehabilitated that found its way into oakland from lake tahoe. found him behind a pot in the oakland hills. this little guy taken to the wildlife museum. he was dehydrated with worn pads on its feet and thin fur. veterinarians say it hitched a ride on the underside of a car perhaps. that's how it got all the way to the bay area. >>> well, do not forget to look