Authors: Bill Barich
Coalinga knew plenty about loss. Some of the world’s richest asbestos deposits surrounded it, but asbestos miners were hard to come by anymore. The oil in the famous Coalinga field didn’t flow as freely as it once did. You had to feel for a town whose chief claim to fame was that a monster earthquake had almost leveled it on May 2, 1983.
I was in a new part of the San Joaquin now, a tougher part. The land was drier, whiter, harder, more trashed and scorched, and even less forgiving, although it didn’t seem possible. Trees that had found a purchase in the crusty alkaline soil shimmered greenly in the heat, while buzzards and red-tailed hawks hunted for carrion by riding
the thermals that bounced off the mountains. The parched air made my throat scratchy, and my eyes began to burn.
In places like Coalinga, there were pockets of substantial wealth, fortunes earned in oil or in cotton, but borderline poverty was the norm. The streets in town were flat and dull, and the faces passing often appeared to be without prospect, robbed of hope, heavily lined, and singular in their avoidance of any upbeat emotion.
Coalinga was a corruption of Coaling Station A, a stop on the Southern Pacific spur that was added in 1888 to permit access to some lignite mines, but a petroleum boom had put the town on the map. Oil had first disclosed itself by bubbling up in diatomaceous seepages in the foothills, and enterprising men had scooped it up in cans and sold it from corner to corner.
By 1897, Blue Goose Well, 1,400 feet deep, was producing as much as a thousand barrels of oil a day. Other fertile pools were discovered on the west side in 1900, and Coalinga had its own version of the Gold Rush, that old California story retold, fueled this time by another mineral and giving rise to a Whiskey Row with gambling, prostitutes, and thirteen saloons.
People used to say that Coalinga wasn’t known for its farms. All it raised were jackrabbits and hell.
The oil fields nearby were not so munificent now, but they were reliable. Everywhere rigs pecked at the earth like big, mechanical birds, dipping their beaks up and down. Chevron had outfits working, and so did Shell, but whatever profit they made did not readily spill over into town.
At the local museum, all alone among the exhibits, I looked at some chunks of asbestos with their terrible fibers and at some materials pertaining to the Horned Toad Derby. I looked at photos of the earthquake aftermath, too: houses unmortared and reduced to piles of bricks, streets splintered with foot-long cracks, and the contents of shelves dumped and broken. When I stepped outside, I saw waves of heat ripple off the pavement, one hundred degrees and
counting, and listened to a withered old fellow prescribing a cure for Coalinga to his equally bent companion.
“What Coalinga needs,” he said, “is a damn prison.”
T
HE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY HAD A NEW NICKNAME
, Prison Valley. There were prisons in Madera, Corcoran, Delano, Avenal, and Wasco. In other sections of the Central Valley, in Chino, Folsom, lone, Soledad, Stockton, Tracy, and Vacaville, there were also prisons. More prisons were being built in California than anywhere in the world. Frequently, they were built on farmland stripped of its value, gone to pebbles and hardpan. Corporate farmers, the titans of agribusiness, often sold the dead land to the state for a handsome score.
If you thought of prisoners as a new sort of crop, drought-resistant and growing incrementally, the future in California seemed bright. In the early 1970s, fourteen out of a hundred convicted felons were sentenced to a prison term. The current ratio was thirty-five out of a hundred. Drugs were an excellent fertilizer, and the crop tended to reseed itself. A high rate of recidivism was guaranteed. No wonder, then, that prisons were known as “gray gold.”
Avenal was just down the road from Coalinga, so I drove over to take a look at it. Along the way tumbleweeds blew across Highway 41 and caught in fences. A single black cow stood in a huge field that was so dry and rock-strewn that my eye couldn’t pick out a hint of green. The temperature kept rising.
Avenal made Coalinga look like a cultural mecca. How poor, small, and isolated the town was—as isolated as some towns in the backwaters of the Far North. The distance from Avenal to a supermarket or a movie theater was about thirty miles. Nobody wanted to live there. Correctional officers earned $2,400 a year in hardship pay just for working at the prison. The warden got as far away as he judiciously could and had a house in Hanford, near Fresno.
Asking around town, I learned that the prison had come to
Avenal through the efforts of a local pharmacist, Nick Ivans. He had read an article in the paper about how the state had $495 million to spend on prison construction, so he and some other town leaders began their successful lobbying.
Avenal State Prison, built in 1988, was a Level Two facility for lower- to medium-security inmates. It had 3,034 beds, but 3,289 cons had to jostle for space two months after the cells were opened for business. There were about 4,200 inmates now.
Around Pelican Bay State Prison, I had witnessed a weird euphoria and had seen the impact a prison could have on real estate speculation, but only in the San Joaquin did I hear about the most significant wrinkle in the scheme—prisoners could be counted as residents of the town or city where the institution was located. By kiting its population with bad guys, Avenal had set itself up for an annual bonus of several hundred thousand dollars from various state agencies, earning funds that it would not have been eligible for otherwise.
No other bonus seemed to be accruing to Avenal, though. The vaunted boom was sounding no more loudly than the tap of a spoon against a washtub. A new motel, its parking lot empty, had rooms by the month, the week, and quite probably by the minute. A new apartment complex let the public know that it was “Now Renting,” as if the privilege had not been available yesterday.
Hillside Vistas, a proposed subdivision, amounted to an arrow pointing to open fields. Foxborough had fared a little better. A few three- and four-bedroom houses had gone up, but the carpenters had put down their hammers halfway through some others, leaving behind framed walls and two-by-fours in stacks. Tagged stakes marked the borders of many lots where no houses stood. Instead of lawns, weeds sprouted copiously from the annealed and useless earth.
Through Foxborough more tumbleweeds were rolling, great, thatched spheres bowled across the plain by unseen hands. The smattering of luckless owners who’d closed escrow before the demise had
a view of migrant shacks, laundry hanging on clotheslines, and scrawny children with even scrawnier dogs.
A Mexican man moved along the semipaved streets of Foxborough, pushing a white cart and crying, “
¡Helados! ¡Helados!
” His icecream bars found no takers.
For a long time, I studied the tumbleweeds and heard the vendor’s plaintive cry, thinking with a warped brilliance brought on by incipient sunstroke that the California Department of Corrections ought to cut a deal to buy the unsold Foxborough units at a discount and transform them into prison adjuncts for the bedless cons of Avenal. The houses could then be allotted by crime, with the rapists here and the molesters there, all the bug-eyed killers and the narco-creeps thrown together on the same block to create an entire suburb dedicated to casual mayhem and first-rate violence.
The plan had a simple elegance. It would please everybody from developers to reprobates to penologists to homeowners who were concerned about drugs and crime in
their
suburbs. They all came out ahead. Any way you looked at it, from any angle, the plan was a winner.
C
ORCORAN STATE PRISON
, where Charlie Manson was taking a long vacation from the streets, was not far from Avenal, so I made an appointment to talk with Warden Bernie Aispuro there. Aispuro had put in forty years of service at California’s penal institutions and was the ranking warden in the state. He had worked at Soledad, Tracy, Susanville, and San Quentin before coming to the San Joaquin, and Corcoran was his last stop before retiring.
A sharp, chemical stink infected the air in Corcoran. It came from a plant that processed cotton and alfalfa seeds. The plant belonged to J. G. Boswell Company, an agribusiness titan in the West. Named after a retired colonel from Georgia who’d established the company in 1924, Boswell held more than 140,000 acres of farmland
in California alone, the Miller and Lux of its time. Its fortunes had been built on irrigation and on loans made to other farming concerns in the San Joaquin, and its global operations were directed from some high-tech offices in a Los Angeles skyscraper.
In effect, Boswell owned and managed Corcoran, another dry, desolate, unredeemable place. Prison families, black and Hispanic, strolled the streets and cashed their checks at a check-cashing outlet painted a shocking pink. They had a new, pork-barrel YMCA and a theater that alternated Hollywood films with movies in Spanish. There was a boarded-up, rust-colored Santa Fe Station where the trains didn’t stop anymore.
When the Department of Corrections had chosen Corcoran for a prison site, they had bought a parcel of land from J. G. Boswell—land that was maybe not quite so useful for farming anymore. It was a few miles from town in a belt of cotton fields furrowed with irrigation ditches. In the standing water, in mosquito-dense clouds, avocets were wading and feeding. The soil was grayish and dotted with cotton bales.
In the distance, behind a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire, loomed the prison complex. It bore a strange resemblance to a power-generating facility. The prison building proper was a concrete block with slits for eyes, and what the eyes looked out on was so much nothing. Even sounds were in limited supply, rationed like every other tactile sensation—cars coming and going, the clank of a flag against a metal pole, birds chirping obliviously under a gnawing sun.
How remote the prison seemed from anything having to do with California, I thought. Few Californians would ever see it, much less know that it existed, and yet, increasingly, our prisons and all that they represented were becoming more and more integral to life in the Golden State.
At a guard station, I identified myself and the purpose of my visit. After that, I sat for a while in a sterile waiting room in the prison’s reception area. The room had a hospital feel, an antisepsis
meant to disguise all the festering illnesses within. A sickness of the soul was the chief complaint at Corcoran, and those who suffered from it were supposed to be just as invisible as AIDS patients or the victims of terminal cancer. We had given up on trying to heal the soul’s complaint.
Correctional officers marched through the waiting room at intervals, going at a military clip. Their combat boots rapped against the clean, unscuffed surface of the glossily waxed floors. They were dressed like commandos in green camouflage uniforms. They looked rugged, solid, and devoid of all sympathy, particularly the younger ones, who seemed years away from making a compassionate gesture. Not a few of them had grown symbolic moustaches, as boys do when they’re sent to war.
The guards didn’t appear to be the sort of men who’d have much in common with the prisoners. Instead, they projected a soldierly apartness. You could have dropped them into any foreign jungle and put them to work killing guerrillas. Doing time at Corcoran, out in the vast reaches of nowhere, would not be easy.
M
OVIES HAD CONDITIONED ALL MY NOTIONS ABOUT PRISON WARDENS
, so I expected to find Bernie Aispuro closeted in a dark little bunker smoking a cigar and barking orders over a loudspeaker to armed guards on a catwalk, but he was in a modern, efficiency-oriented office that could as easily have housed a tax accountant.
Aispuro was a gregarious, outspoken man. His suit was an inoffensive bureaucrat’s suit, but he also wore a Navajo bracelet and a turquoise-and-silver belt buckle. When I inquired about his ancestry, thinking he might have had an Indian father or mother, he chose not to respond. He did this slyly, in a spirit of fun. He seemed to like his secrets. There was a flare about him that he kept under wraps.
For Aispuro, the challenge of a warden’s job was in trying to maintain his dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. He wanted
to be seen as fair, as a decent guy, as someone who took no more bullshit from his bosses than necessary, while at the same time refusing to be manipulated by any of the prisoners and their whining.
He shared a common background with many of his inmates, being a poor kid. He had grown up in Gonzales, a farming town near Soledad, and had known hard work from an early age. As a teenager, he had stooped in the fields to pick vegetables under the grueling valley sun and had learned that the price of the labor was to wake in the morning with hands so stiff and sore that he almost needed a crowbar to pry apart the fingers.
It did not take long for Aispuro to decide that the fields were best avoided. He signed on at a milk plant when he was a few years older, but the work was almost as bad. He froze his butt through the winter in an unheated brick building. Then, at twenty-two, he took a job as a correctional officer at Soledad State Prison, not for the badge or the gun but because it was the best-paying job that he could find.
Conditions at the prison were abominable at the time, Aispuro told me. The inmates slept in bunkbeds squeezed into cramped and fetid rows, and he had to listen through the night to their weeping, their farting, and the grinding of their teeth, consoled only by the size of his salary, more money than he had ever thought he would make.
It was okay with him if the job was rough, he said. He had never anticipated an easy life or dreamed of getting something for nothing. His mother had always kept him in line. Every year, at the start of school, she would go to his teacher and give permission for her son to be smacked if he fooled around in class, which, in consequence, Aispuro seldom did.
The prison world had changed substantially since January 3, 1949, the day that Aispuro had first punched in at Soledad. Prison technology was much more sophisticated, and guards had to graduate from a rigorous academy.