Ex-Chief Says He Didn’t Know of Violence at Prison

SACRAMENTO —  The former head of the state Department of Corrections testified Tuesday that he did not learn about a pattern of violence at Corcoran State Prison until years after the San Joaquin Valley penitentiary had become the most violent in the nation.

At the fifth and final scheduled day of hearings before a joint legislative committee on violence at Corcoran, former corrections Director James H. Gomez attributed its problems to the state’s massive prison buildup beginning in the mid-1980s. He said the growth forced the Corrections Department to staff key posts with poorly trained officers and administrators.

“The department is growing too fast, too quickly. It doesn’t have seasoned people in many important places,” Gomez said. “The growth in the Department of Corrections was unmanageable.”

But state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) challenged Gomez’s contention that he had been left in the dark about Corcoran guards allegedly setting up inmate fistfights and then shooting at the combatants.

Hayden asked Gomez to explain why the allegations failed to reach him until mid-1994, after the FBI began its own investigation of Corcoran.

The senator inquired how Gomez could head the agency and not know about allegations of improper shootings.

“Communication. The sifting of information as it goes up the chain of command,” Gomez replied.

“When you say ‘sifting,’ it makes it sound like sand is sort of sliding through my fingers,” Hayden said.

“Information from the bottom of the organization to the top, it gets abbreviated as it goes along,” Gomez said.

The hearings began more than three weeks ago after reports in The Times detailed how the Corrections Department and local and state watchdogs failed to scrutinize Corcoran, a prison where 43 inmates were wounded and seven others were killed by guards firing assault rifles. Rival gang members were pitted against one another in human cockfights watched over by guards and then shot if they didn’t stop fighting.

When the department and the state attorney general’s office finally did examine Corcoran last year, their investigations were so limited that it became virtually impossible to uncover wrongdoing, The Times found.

Much of the violence took place on the watch of Gomez, who headed the department from 1991 to 1997. He left the job to take a top position with the state Public Employees Retirement System.

During questioning Tuesday, the former corrections director said he was aware of allegations of excessive force throughout the state prison system as early as 1992 and 1993. But he said he did not learn there might be a problem at Corcoran until after 50 inmates had been wounded or shot dead by guards during fights in the prison’s exercise yards.

Gomez asked legislators to consider new laws that would slow the flow of criminals into the system, a recommendation that the members of the joint committee conceded would be difficult to adopt in the current climate of tougher sentencing laws.

The legislators Tuesday also sought to question former Corcoran Warden George Smith, who oversaw the prison during its most violent period in the early 1990s. But Smith, who retired in 1996, was accompanied by an attorney and refused to answer any questions, repeatedly invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Hayden, who has emerged in the hearings as a vocal critic of the Corrections Department, then asked Smith how he earned the nickname “Mushroom George,” which some of his staff gave him because of his supposed preference for being kept in the dark about wrongdoing.

“What is it about the nickname ‘Mushroom’ that would tend to incriminate you?” Hayden persisted. “Is that not the heart of the issue about whether or not there was a cover-up of brutality at Corcoran?”

“I assert my 5th Amendment rights on the grounds that the answer may incriminate me,” Smith said.

The FBI investigation, which led to the indictment earlier this year of eight officers at Corcoran, is continuing, and Smith is known to be one of its subjects.

The legislators also focused on the investigative tools that were taken away from a special team of corrections agents assigned to Corcoran last year. The investigators on the team told The Times that they were not allowed to compel witnesses to talk about alleged wrongdoing because of an agreement between the guards union and top corrections officials.

Gomez said Tuesday that it was his decision not to compel witnesses to talk after the department received a letter from the state attorney general’s office. The letter asked Gomez’s department not to compel testimony from an officer because it would result in immunizing that officer from possible criminal prosecution.

The attorney general’s office ended up investigating only a single case of possible criminal wrongdoing by officers at Corcoran.

Gomez also said he did not want state investigators to probe Corcoran shootings because that was the province of federal investigators.

“I could no more intervene in that than I could fly to the moon,” he testified.

Steve Fama, head of the Prison Law Office, which represents inmates in suits across the state, testified that the Corrections Department routinely yields to the union.

Fama also said the department’s policy of allowing union representatives to sit in on witness interviews impedes investigations.

“This is exactly the opposite of the way that it works in other law enforcement agencies,” Fama said. “That can be very dangerous to an effective investigation.”

Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco) said, “The record is clear. This union has exercised inordinate influence on this department.”