The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (18 page)

“A lot better than yesterday,” Morales said.

“So now you're just like the rest of us,” Messick said. Morales looked up quizzically, and Messick said, “Now you don't know when you're going to die, either.”

Morales thought that over, smiling a little, then said, “Yeah, but this is not finished.” Still, he was touched by the visit, saying later, “They're usually very concerned that you're doing fine before they kill you—not after they don't kill you.”

 

W
HEN YOU PASS
through the sally port at San Quentin, you feel as if you'd walked into an old Warner Bros. prison movie, the kind where Jimmy Cagney rattles his cage. Built in 1852, during the Gold Rush, this barrow of crumbling granite on the former Bay of Skulls has held Black Bart, Caryl Chessman, Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, and Richard (the Night Stalker) Ramirez, among many others, and the ferocity of their hatreds seems to linger in the air.

Steven Ornoski, who was warden during the Morales matter, calls it “the worst prison in the California system: it's old, filthy,
noisy, poorly laid out, and understaffed. I told people I'd been dropped on the Titanic—after it had hit the iceberg.” When a federal health-care receiver visited San Quentin last spring, he found that its emergency room had lacked gauze and sutures for four months.

From 2004 to 2006, San Quentin was run by a bewildering procession of nine wardens and might well have been closed, had there been somewhere for its occupants to go. California's thirty-three prisons hold a hundred and seventy-three thousand inmates, twice as many as they were built for. Nineteen thousand inmates now sleep in hallways and gyms, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently classified the prisons as being in a state of emergency. The system's faulty health care has been blamed for one inmate death per week, and a state law requiring that prisoners be brought to a ninth-grade reading level by the time they're paroled is basically ignored. Sixty-six percent of California's released inmates return to prison within three years, twice the national average, but rehabilitation programs are nearly nonexistent: most prisoners are never introduced to anything more remedial than a barbell.

On this conveyor belt to nowhere, San Quentin is the only California prison with both accredited high-school and college programs; four hundred and fifty pass-holding volunteers from the Bay Area regularly instruct its inmates in everything from Hooked on Phonics to yoga. In a deeply conservative environment—the vast majority of the thousand guards who work in the prison grumble about “Camp San Quentin” and “hug a thug” mollycoddling—the flourishing of these programs is almost unaccountable.

They owe their survival, in large part, to Vernell Crittendon. As wardens cycled through, Crittendon became the institution's memory, conscience, and consigliere; the duties he took on included everything from organizing inmate walkathons for charity to running the prison museum. “Vernell seemed to know everyone
in the whole United States,” Jill Brown, a recent warden, said, “and which exact person to go to to help the prison—from who to call at the Mexican consulate to who to contact among Louis Farrakhan's people if there was an issue in our Muslim community. He was Mr. San Quentin.”

Crittendon led many lives at the prison. Early in his career, he became widely known and feared as a member of the prison's “goon squad”—a buccaneering unit that beat down prisoners to gain compliance. But in the years after he was promoted to the administrative staff, in 1988, he began to trade upon that reputation in order to rehabilitate the men whose heads he had so often pummelled. It was a delicate balancing act; nearly every time he made a decision, either the guards or the inmates would complain that he was favoring the other side. Even as he publicly lauded the prison's punitive strictures, he privately began to encourage a multiracial group of inmate leaders to quit “the game”: he'd ask about their families, allow them to make off-hours phone calls to their children, introduce them to reporters as “our success stories,” even organize memorial services for their cellmates. Felix Lucero, a lifer, said, “You always want to feel you can be rehabilitated, that you're not an animal, and Crittendon makes you feel that way. He treated me like we were sort of…friends.”

Crittendon helped oversee inmate self-help programs like No More Tears and the Vietnam Veterans Group, and was an adviser to many others. Every other Friday, as the centerpiece of a program called Real Choices, which tries to set wayward urban kids on responsible paths, he would escort a group of ten-to-eighteen-year-olds into the prison to meet lifers, who tried to talk—or shout—some sense into them. Crittendon, who is married to a nurse and has a fifteen-year-old son, inaugurated Real Choices in 2001, but, characteristically, he encouraged the inmates to speak of the program as their own creation. Once, he had hoped to become warden himself, but as warden after warden fell to internal politics within the C.D.C.R. he came to under
stand the uses of stealth. When he publicly declared that the Crips gang co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams—one of the prison's most famous inmates—was a con man whose later good works were intended solely to avoid execution, he lost the trust of many inmates he'd so carefully cultivated. The Williams matter nags at Crittendon still.

Crittendon's approval, on the other hand, can open doors. Of the fifteen lifers he originally used in Real Choices, four have been paroled, an unusually high percentage. Crittendon had written to the Board of Parole Hearings on those inmates' behalf because each met his five criteria: being responsible while at San Quentin; pursuing an education; serving as a volunteer; having a solid support system on the outside; and believing in God or a higher power. He asked Jerry Dean Stipe, a bearded Vietnam veteran known as Wolf, to be a co-founder of Real Choices—yet he didn't write a letter for Stipe, he told me, “because he was an atheist.” Crittendon said, “Without a belief in something larger than yourself, you backslide. I don't help the men to be a nice guy or to make them into nice guys. The inmate's going to benefit from being rehabilitated, but it's really about protecting the decent people out in society who he'd victimize.”

 

I
SPOKE TO
C
RITTENDON
over a number of months. Whenever I joined him at one of the Denny's or Chevy's restaurants where he suggested we meet, he always sat in the back, facing the door. Before venturing an observation, he invariably paused, making rapid calculations about message, diction, tone of voice, and the likelihood of being misinterpreted. It was of a piece with how he never attended guards' barbecues, never let anyone get in back of him or see him off duty. “I can't be effective with each camp in the prison if they know everything about me,” he said. “Vernell's world is a lot neater and more controlled that way.”

Crittendon's ability to shift among lingoes and affects is a common prison adaptation. But his speed is astonishing: he's like an actor who glides offstage in a tuxedo, pops his head out in an Indian headdress, and then shambles from the wings in a bear suit. When he was accompanying two clergymen out of the prison last year, Crittendon mentioned that a middle-aged lifer they'd met had been the first juvenile in San Francisco to be sentenced as an adult. “He has not even had the luxury of—the privilege of—knowing a woman,” Crittendon told them. While amending his word choice, he deepened his timbre, so that what began as a salacious aside sounded, by “knowing a woman,” almost Biblical. Yet Crittendon's ingratiating reserve helped prevent him from becoming just another guard. “Our training is not designed to broaden an officer's mind,” Mike Jimenez, the president of the state's correctional officers' union, says, with regret. “Everyone wants to be seen as the meanest, craziest officer, because then no one screws with you. It's dog psychology.”

One of Crittendon's many duties was conducting on-the-job training on such topics as “Gangs,” “Drugs,” and “Application of Restraint Gear.” One morning last summer, Crittendon was giving a “Use of Force” class for twenty officers in a trailer behind the prison. “O.K., you're in reception and an arriving criminal refuses to give you a DNA sample,” he said. He hopped to the side and played the inmate, strutting and pimp-rolling: “You ain't stickin' nothin' in
this
mouth, nohow.” Then he shifted back. “You say, ‘O.K., Jack, you can either give us a DNA sample from your mouth or we'll collect it as it leaks out of your nose.'” There were appreciative chuckles. “What gives you the right to say that? Because you are
gaining compliance with a lawful order.
But if some knucklehead says”—side step—“‘I ain't gettin' out the shower yet, dawg, I gots soap on me,' can you use force? No, because you do not have a
lawful order
requiring you to effect the removal.” He smiled, slowly. “When I came here, in the seventies, that inmate
would have been touching every fixed position, every wall, post, and floor, all the way to Ad Seg”—Administrative Segregation, more commonly known as the Hole.

Crittendon arrived at San Quentin in 1977, at age twenty-three, having worked previously as a police cadet and a security guard in San Francisco. San Quentin at the time was a maximum-security prison, housing the most violent criminals. (It's now a medium-security facility.) In the early eighties, the prison reported three felonies a day, bloody incidents with spears and match bombs and blow darts and zip guns, not to mention routine “gassings”—cups of fermented urine and feces hurled in a guard's face. San Quentin recruited Crittendon as part of a belated effort to integrate a heavily white officer corps that gave the prison the feel of a plantation. Crittendon saw a prison run by “the Europeans”—“white guys who were not going to give the others a piece of the pie.” Though his own father had deserted his family when Crittendon was twelve, and though he would eventually come to see himself as a role model for black inmates who had grown up in similar circumstances, he soon found himself reluctantly beating up black prisoners—and only black prisoners—on white lieutenants' orders. Even today, the prison both reflects and accentuates the broader racial divide: blacks are six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and once at San Quentin (and most prisons) they are housed with other blacks, on the theory that segregation reduces racial tension. The golden rule at the prison, according to an officer named Jeff Evans, is “You hang with your own.”

In his class, Crittendon, who while on duty shot more than twenty men, none fatally, began explaining the complex algorithm that permits the use of deadly force: essentially, an imminent threat of death or severe injury. “Now, this is the scary part—God willing it doesn't happen,” he said. “Say this C.O.”—correctional officer—“comes back on the block and his son just got killed by some criminal and he pulls out a nine-millimetre and starts firing
into the cells—
boom! boom! boom!
—taking the inmates out.” Crittendon was pointing an imaginary pistol at the officers, mowing them down. “What do you do?”

“Wait till he runs out of bullets,” someone said, and everyone cracked up.

Crittendon threw his head back to guffaw, but instantly stopped. “That was a joke,” he said. “You do have to shoot him, because otherwise the inmates' families will sue you. You have that responsibility.”

 

O
NE AFTERNOON,
a female San Quentin employee approached Crittendon as he was guiding some visitors around the prison museum and asked him to show her the execution chamber. In 1967, the chamber was shut down at the beginning of a series of constitutional challenges to the death penalty; since 1992, when it reopened, it has been in regular use, starting with the death by gas of Robert Alton Harris, who had shot and killed two teenage boys and then eaten their Jack in the Box hamburgers.

“Sure,” Crittendon said to the woman. “Let's go.”

“Oh, neato! What's it like?”

“It's a gas!” Cackling, he led her just south of the prison's main entrance and unlocked an iron gateway to a narrow courtyard. It was here, early on April 21, 1992, that witnesses assembled to observe the Harris execution. Crittendon, who had been placed in charge of the prison's programs by Warden Daniel Vasquez four years earlier, was by then the prison's spokesman, and Vasquez had told him how to publicize the event: “Don't personalize it, don't dramatize it, don't embarrass the Department of Corrections, don't embarrass me, don't embarrass yourself.”

Crittendon also had significant responsibility for discharging the execution, and he recalls having “a whole sense of anticipation as the plan I had helped to create was unfolding.” That final
evening, he oversaw Harris's last meal: “He'd asked for pizza, and I directed that it be Tombstone Pizza—”

Tombstone? “I have a sick side of me, I guess—my own little personality thing,” Crittendon said. “He put a whole piece in his mouth and he says, ‘Critter, you want some?' But it wouldn't have been appropriate.”

Crittendon had created a meticulous timetable, but it fell apart as the courts issued four separate stays, the last called in when Harris was already strapped in the chair. As the Supreme Court was preparing to vacate the final stay, Vasquez, under heavy pressure from the attorney general's office, told Crittendon to get the witnesses back as soon as he gave the word. “He gave the word at 6
A.M.,
and by 6:05 all the witnesses were entering the chamber,” Crittendon says. Vasquez recalls, “There was a haste, an urgency to get it all done that to this day is a source of shame to me.”

As the final witnesses passed through the courtyard Crittendon made a gesture that two witnesses remember as an excited fist pump. One describes Crittendon's gesture as “distinctly celebratory”; another, Michael Kroll, says, “Crittendon raised his fist in the air three times, as if his team had just scored a touchdown. To win, for him, was to get this done.”