After a disastrous 2009 season, the Kennedy High Eagles are looking for redemption.  For months, the team has been preparing for Friday’s season opener versus El Cerrito, and now players and coaches are brimming with confidence.

“It’s not going to be a game,” Clyde Byrd, the new Varsity Football Coach and JFK Athletic Director, chuckled. “I really feel in my heart that it’s not going to be a game!”

Tough talk from a team that chose to forfeit its season last year after losing its only five games due to injuries and a lack of players, but it’s all part of the team’s — and perhaps the school’s — rebirth.

“There’s a new attitude at Kennedy High School,” said Byrd. The school’s football program, maligned by the previous year’s low numbers and morale, seems primed for a comeback. Byrd, the 20-year coaching veteran, chose Kennedy because, “It’s an area where nobody expects nothing out of it.”

The school board announced last year that it planned to shut down Kennedy High, but Byrd said the school has received enough funding to stay open for two more years. The city council and the West Contra Costa County Unified School District have not finalized the decision, and a city council source told Richmond Confidential that no decision will be made until the end of the month at the earliest.

However, Byrd said the community has already reacted to the news and that enrollment is up as a result.

Byrd and Junior Varsity Coach Mack Carminer have focused much of their attention off the field. The league mandates that students must have a GPA of 2.0 or above to play, and the coaches are doing everything to ensure they don’t lose any players to bad grades.

The students attend tutoring sessions before practice, and the coaches are working with counselors, teachers and parents to keep the players’ grades up.

“These kids needed a spark — the academics was bad,” Byrd said. “We came up with an academic game plan: we didn’t want to lose one kid, academically.”

Students appreciate the difference, said varsity player Ofa Vi, one of two girls on the team. “There’s like 60 some of us this year that are eligible and last year only 20-something that was eligible.”

That enthusiasm is already evident on the sidelines. The number of players doubles last year’s starting roster. Carminer said, “It’s like night and day compared with last year. The commitment and consistency is totally different. They’re buying into it.”

Behind the enthusiasm, grim circumstances hover; one player was conspicuously absent during Wednesday’s practice. The day before, the brother of a sophomore JV player was shot and killed.

“Those are issues we face on a daily basis,” Byrd said.

Despite the adversity, the players and coaches are ready for a fresh start. The JV game begins at 4 p.m., varsity at 7 p.m. at Contra Costa College.

“I think we’re going to go all the way,” Vi said. “This year, we’re coming out strong. I think we’re going to go to state. So if you see us there, holla!”

Andre Taylor did his best to steel his nerves. Brave face. Inner monologue reminding him that his raps were sharp.

But Taylor’s 16-year-old vocal chords involuntarily quavered. His palms felt cold. His first performance loomed, moments away.

Didn’t matter. The lyrics, honed over long hours wouldn’t fail him.

“… just imagine all the people in the hood goin’ wild/and my momma screamin’, ‘that’s my child …’” Taylor rapped to a small but enthusiastic audience.

Taylor was one of hundreds of youths, community members and civic leaders who turned out for the RYSE Center’s 2nd Annual “Back to School Summer Jam” on Aug. 21. RYSE is Richmond’s most renowned community youth center. The center was opened in 2008 after County Supervisor John Gioia and several local community groups secured funding for what was at the time a vacant 6,600 square foot vacant county building.

“The RYSE center is where I come to find a positive place to work on my creativity,” Taylor said. “I have confidence now that I can rise to be anything I want to be.”

RYSE serves hundreds of kids as a comprehensive youth center, including education programs for media arts. On Saturday, several local youths toted cameras and microphones, conducting interviews and recording the festivities.

Supervisor Gioia was one of several local leaders who attended. Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, Police Chief Chris Magnus and City Council candidate Eduardo Martinez were also on hand.

Richmond has been plagued by crime and high drop-out rates in local schools for years. Gioia said the RYSE center is key to the city’s future. The concept for the RYSE center, which has a youthful, idealistic staff and colorful graffiti-style murals adorning its walls – inside and out – was first outlined by local youth organizers after four high school students were killed by gunfire in December 2000. The deaths “galvanized youth and adult allies to address the root causes of violence in and around their communities,” according to RYSE’s web site.

Gioia, whose embrace of the grassroots movement helped secure funding and resources for the center’s eventual fruition, said RYSE has lived up to the expectations.

“It’s great to come out and really support young people, that’s what this is about,” Gioia said. “The center was designed to put young people in positions of leadership, and for them to decide what kind of change needs to occur in the community.”

The Saturday event also drew several public and private resource providers offering health, education and nutrition services.

In addition to Taylor’s performance, other young artists delivered musical performances and artwork by RYSE center youths was on display.

Despite his brief bout with nerves, Taylor showed no poverty of ambition.

“I’m going to be famous, and I’m not going to let anything stop me,” he said, smiling.

Jaquan Smith, 12, likes the Los Angeles Lakers and afternoons filled with video games.

But his face has aged just a bit beyond his years. He wears a look of concerned solemnity more often than most.

Like thousands of Richmond children, Smith has lost his parents to crime and incarceration.

“I wish my mom could be with me every day,” Smith said while coolly thumbing a videogame controller at a community center in Parchester Village, where he lives with family friends. “But I know that’s not going to happen.”

Earlier this year, in May, Jaquan took a bus to San Leandro, where he linked up with three siblings who stay with family in San Francisco. They boarded another bus in the pre-dawn light, then trekked though more than 100 miles of Central  Valley haze to see their mom.

It was their Mother’s Day. They spent it in Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla.

At least 200,000 children in California – including Jaquan and his three sisters, 14-year-old Tajanae Jacobs and two 10-year-old twins – have a parent serving time in state prison, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). The children are scattered across the state, often living with relatives, friends or foster families.

California’s overall inmate population has reached 175,000 – larger than the population of Hayward. The number of female prisoners has nearly tripled, to 10,200, since 1987, according to CDCR, which estimates the number of children of incarcerated parents at 200,000; some experts believe the figure is higher.

Almost none of the state’s $8 billion prison budget is dedicated to the children of prisoners or helping them maintain contact with their parents. A 2005 study published in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice found that maintaining the relationship between an inmate and child significantly reduces recidivism. According to a 2009 CDCR estimate, 42 percent of California’s female inmates commit crimes within two years of their release.

Jaquan’s mother was sent to prison six years ago, convicted of robbery and drug possession in Richmond. Jaquan was 6-years-old at the time and his father was also in-and-out of jail. The boy bounced between relatives in Los Angeles and, most recently, a family friend in Richmond. He said he’s changed schools at least three times.

Jaquan hopes he can stay in Richmond until his mom’s release in December 2015.

During the two-hour bus trip in May, Jaquan chatted with other children and scrawled in coloring books. This was the fourth year he rode a Mother’s Day bus – funded by a nonprofit program – to the Valley State Prison for Women.

“The hardest part is having to go, having to say goodbye to your mom,” Jaquan said.

Upon arrival at the prison, a complex of drab structures jutting out from the central California plains, and Jaquan and dozens of other children filed down a line of seated corrections officers who checked IDs and birth certificates. They then walked through the metal detectors and passed through the buzz and clang of the mechanized gates buttressed with razor wire. Guard towers loomed overhead.

Jaquan and his three sisters were led to a large multipurpose room with dozens of other visitors where they waited for their mother.

A few hours earlier their mother, Saprina Fletcher, 38, had risen from her bed in the cell she shares with more than a half-dozen inmates. Fletcher’s eyelids were heavy; she hadn’t slept. “I stayed up all night thinking about this visit,” she said. “I was overwhelmed, wondering what I’m going to say to my kids.”

Now, Fletcher, still weary, emerged from a hallway.

“Mama! Mama!” the twins shrieked as they bolted towards Fletcher, joined by Tajanae and Jaquan, who initially held back.

“I couldn’t move for a second,” Jaquan recalled later, at the community center in Parchester. “I was so excited to see her.”

For the next four hours, Fletcher played games with her kids. The twins got their faces painted. Tajanae bought sugary and salty snacks for the briefly re-united family. Jaquan talked about his favorite subjects in school.

When the day was nearly done, Fletcher walked a few paces away from the outdoor table where they had been sitting. In her prison blues, she looked older than her 38 years. She stared at her children.

“I’m afraid,” she said, her normally commanding voice much softer. “My fear is that I will never bond with them.”

Fletcher paused. She looked down, then up again.

“My fear is being forgotten.”

Fletcher’s absence weighs heavy on her children’s lives, particularly for Jaquan, who finds himself alone, repeatedly uprooted and uncertain of the future.

Weeks after visiting his mom, Jaquan was hanging out at the community center in Parchester Village, and said he knows there will probably be more changes to his already uprooted life. “It’s hard,” he said. “You make friends, then you got to go and you might not see them again.”

When his mother is released in 5 years, Jaquan will be 17.

“Sometimes I dream about me and my mom,” Jaquan said. “We still be living together, we were never separated, and I don’t have to be living in all kinds of different houses and places.”

Like many African American families, Mary “Peace” Head and her brood migrated to the Bay Area from Louisiana just before WWII in search of work and opportunity.

She would go on to work as a welder in the Richmond shipyards during the war. Head, who is now 83, later became one of the early residents of Parchester Village.  She’s been a leader in this small housing development since the 1950s, playing an instrumental role in securing funding for a neighborhood community center and acting as a quasi-guardian to generations of local kids.

She is called “Mary Peace” by neighbors and others throughout the city, a name she earned by flashing her customary “peace sign” with her right index and middle fingers.

In 1950, Parchester Village, named for wealthy developer Fred Parr, opened on land beyond the border of northwest Richmond.

It was billed as a community for “All Americans,” but the idea was ahead of its time.

Few whites wanted to live in integrated communities, and Parchester Village quickly was a de facto African American enclave. Houses sold for $35 down and $95 a month, Head remembered.

“We thought it was so beautiful, it was like a dream,” said Head, who moved with her family from Berkeley to the new housing tract. “And I remember I couldn’t believe it was for us after we had been pushed off from so many other places. It was there for our people, for black people.”

Head stressed that the segregation wasn’t on a civic code, but it was real.

“I suppose white folks could have lived here if they wanted to, but neighborhoods weren’t integrated then like they are now,” Head said.

Parchester Village was annexed in Richmond in 1962.

Today, Parchester remains thought of as an African American community, but new immigrants, especially Latinos, now comprise about a third neighborhood’s population. Many original owners rent their properties to other families.

Head remains one of Richmond’s most beloved and revered figures, said Corky Booze, a candidate for City Council and longtime community advocate for Parchester Village. Booze said Parchester Village – a development initially erected outside the city to serve the housing demand of thousands of new black residents drawn by wartime industry – embodies the African American experience in Richmond.

“Mary has been a leader in that community, a community that was underserved and forgotten from its beginning, for decades,” Booze said. “She’s a local icon.”

Head still takes frequent walks in the small neighborhood, which is circled by railroad tracks and sits against the bay just north of Chevron Corp. She still walks well, and wears colorful bandanas and a consistent smile.

She often stops and chats with men and women who were once children playing in front of her house.

“I’ll never leave my Parchester Village,” she said.

After two years of tireless fundraising, intensive construction and nearly $8 million in costs, the 324,000-gallon Richmond Plunge swimming pool is now open to all.

No one has a richer perspective on the pool, originally built in 1926, than June Albonico. She first visited the Plunge with her father during the early years of the Great Depression, later becoming a lifeguard in 1956.

Albonico, 83, frequently visited the site during its re-construction, and shared her memories during a video interview with Richmond Confidential in April.

“I have waited for the day for so long,” Albonico then said of the Plunge’s re-opening. “When it comes, I’ll know that I’ll never have to be without it again, and so many others will be able to enjoy it like I have.”

While the pool is a throwback to an era when huge, urban public swimming pools were hailed as major social and economic benefits to American communities, it is also outfitted with modern technology.

Solar panels will generate heat to keep the water warm, provide lighting and power operable windows and pumps.

The pool’s long hiatus was precipitated by the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, which heavily damaged the Plunge. Inspectors recommended closure, and a ballot measure to fund repairs was nixed by voters.

The pool closed in 2001.

The Save the Richmond Plunge Trust and other resident fundraising efforts helped revive hope for the pool and drew additional public and private funds. The 60-by-160-foot pool re-opened to the public on August 14, 2010.

Since 1874, the Victorian lighthouse at East Brother Island has continued to be a landmark for sailors.

“The light has to be on. If it’s not we have to tell the Coast Guard and there’s a back-up that comes on,” said Anne Witts, who together with her husband Ed, is the innkeeper at the lighthouse.

As the innkeepers, the Witts have to take care of much more than just the light. Around 26 years ago, the East Brother Light Station became a bed and breakfast destination that receives guests from Thursday through Sunday; its earnings are used to maintain the facilities. For the last year and a half, the Witts have been working around the clock, keeping the light station alive.

In 1971, the station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places—that saved it from being demolished and replaced by a light on a tower. It was falling apart from lack of funding to restore it, until the East Brother Light Station, Inc., a nonprofit corporation group, was formed 1979.

Today, the restored structures at the station are still standing, but because they are more than 100 years old, they need constant attention and care. “We fix things every day,” said Ed Witts. Volunteers come on the second Saturday of every month and work on projects around the island. The volunteer board that meets once a month is constantly doing work, too.

The bed and breakfast is a small and cozy place. Guests stay the night in one of the four bedrooms located in the lighthouse building, or at the one in the fog signal building. To get there, customers must make reservations in advance and are picked up by boat from Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor. From the harbor it takes ten minutes to get to the light station, and passengers can enjoy the marvelous views of the San Francisco skyline, Mount Tamalpais, and the Marin coastline.

The experience at the bed and breakfast is definitely a unique getaway. Guests enjoy the views, the food, and get to know the other guests and innkeepers. They also get a tour of the island and the restored lighthouse and foghorn buildings. The original, 136-year-old foghorn is demonstrated for the guests every morning. However there’s an electric modern one inside the building that goes on all winter long.

The only water at the island is rainwater collected on a cistern, and the island has its own sewer treatment plant. Only guests who are staying longer than one night are allowed to take showers. “If all guests were taking showers we would have to close,” said Anne. “We don’t have enough water.”

Anne is the cook at the lighthouse. “When people are fed well, they are really happy and Anne feeds them really well,” said her husband fondly.

Lighthouse guests are usually couples that are celebrating birthdays or anniversaries. “We do a romantic theme,” said Ed. “That’s what the lighthouse is known for.”

As innkeepers, the Witts have Coast Guard licenses to be able to pilot a boat, and they have to do a lot of boating to keep the lighthouse running since everything has to be taken on and off the island. “We try to take all of the laundry and propane and garbage off at the end of our week and bring it all back at the beginning,” said Ed Witts. They also have to transport enough food for the guests and themselves. “We try not to make many extra trips because is very time consuming and expensive,” he said.

The Witts have Tuesdays off, which they spend at their home in Pittsburg; the rest of the week the couple has their plate full innkeeping at the light station. When asked what happens if one of them gets sick, Anne said laughing, “We keep going—there is no ‘stop.’”

The couple has loved their time at the light station. Anne, originally from Belgium, and Ed, from the Bay Area, actually met sailing in Italy.  When they moved from Europe they applied for the job as innkeepers. They said that the job was a perfect fit for them, but they are ready to pass it on in four months when their contract expires. “If you keep doing it for too long, you can burn out,” Ed said.

The Witts aren’t tired of the beautiful views and the ocean, though—when they are done with their work at the light station, said Anne, “We are going to take care of our house and then we’re going sailing for a few months.”

Editor’s Note: This story, video and photos were produced by Robert Rogers and Guilherme Kfouri as part of News21, a national journalism initiative led by 12 of America’s leading research universities, including UC Berkeley. To see additional photos and hear interviews with inmates and officials, visit A Close Look at Racial Politics Behind Bars

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California’s sprawling prison system, the nation’s largest, retains deep racial divisions five years after a court-mediated settlement set in motion a plan to limit race-based cell assigning practices.

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court decreed that racial classification alone may not dictate cell assignments for new or newly-transferred inmates in California’s prisons, but today inmates are still housed mostly along racial lines.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) implemented an integrated housing program at Folsom State Prison in Sacramento County five months ago, but a snapshot of the historic outdoor yard yields no clue of any change in the racial climate. “It looks like a normal situation, calm and peaceful,” said Steve Novikoff, a 22-year veteran corrections officer, while fixing a squinted gaze on the yard in June. “But at a moment’s notice we can have violence.”

Racial groups command slices of territory. Black inmates play chess and work out on a stand of iron bars. Whites hold a spot just a few steps away, where they exercise or mill about in clusters. On opposite sides of the oval, Native Americans and northern and southern California Hispanics lay claim to their turf. The thud of handball and basketball courts pops above the din of voices.

“These boundaries have been determined by the inmate population,” said Folsom spokesman Lieutenant Anthony Gentile.

A section of the yard at Folsom State Prison controlled by African American inmates.

In interviews, more than a dozen inmates said integrated housing, which began here in February, amounted to plenty of hype, but no change. “The racial politics here won’t change,” said Ernie Santillan, 50, who is serving an eight-year sentence for drug sales. “The tiers [cell blocks] are already integrated, but the cells, no way.”

Gentile noted that racial tensions among inmates rose during an education period before the policy’s implementation, which included questionnaires, town hall meetings and interviews. “Initially, it was very tense,” Gentile said, “A lot of the inmates believed that we are going to basically shuffle the deck and we were just going to start forcing these guys [together].”

Inmates generally agreed. “In the short run, you would be dealing with a lot of lockdowns and a lot of hospital trips,” said a Native American inmate who would identify himself only by his last name, “Allen.”

Instead of forcibly integrating cell blocks, the California corrections department has adopted a cautious, go-slow approach that critics say falls short of integrating housing. CDCR says their approach is the best way to satisfy the agreement, which mandates only that race cannot be a sole determining factor in how inmates are housed.

“Much goes on behind our prison walls that is not consistent with the Constitution,” said Donald Specter, chief counsel at the Bay Area-based Prison Law Office. “There should not be continuing racial segregation by the government in any area of our society, including prison.”

The state initially opposed the lawsuit that brought the Supreme Court ruling, which was brought by Garrison Johnson, a black inmate who alleged that segregating reception center cells violated his right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Today, CDCR officials say they agree in principle with the court decision, the result of which has been the “Integrated Housing Program.” CDCR says the program ensures that inmate housing assignments are made using “rational objective criteria,”  which takes into consideration inmates’ safety, security, treatment and rehabilitative needs.

“We began implementing integrated housing in 2008, and our intention has been to roll out gradually,” said CDCR spokeswoman Terry Thornton, in Sacramento.

The process has been anything but swift. The policy has been implemented in four of the state’s 30 male facilities.

CDCR is unable to provide data about the percentage of cells that have been racially integrated so far.

“We are not tracking [racially integrated cells]. That’s not how we are going to measure success,” Thornton said, adding that each inmate has been assigned an “integrated housing code” based on several factors other than race, such as offense, behavior and associations.

In Richmond, where police say about 400 active parolees live and thousands more residents and former residents have spent time in state prisons, those who have seen the inside are skeptical about the plan. “I think the pressures of the convict code and the gang code will make it difficult,” said Kevin Kemp, 50, a local musician who was recently released from San Quentin after 19 years. “The divisions on the inside are so ingrained. It started, I think, as a divide and conquer approach, but now it’s got a life of its own among the inmates.”

But to critics, abolishing an antiquated system of racial sorting has been too long in coming, and the process itself has been too slow. “It’s not a simple problem, but progress could be faster,” said Barry Krisberg, a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. “How can we continue to condone overt segregation in any [state-supported] accommodations?”

The Texas comparison

In the early 1970s, the Texas prison system still resembled something out of the Antebellum South. Work crews, dining halls, cells and other accommodations were segregated based on skin color.

But the system changed when challenged by Allen Lamar, a career criminal who filed suit in 1972 against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). He alleged systemic segregation deprived inmates of rights guaranteed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lamar, who is black, argued that segregation resulted in inherently unequal treatment of prisoners.

The case was decided in Lamar’s favor five years later, in 1977. But it wasn’t until 1991 that the Texas prison system began forcibly integrating cells.

“When the rubber meets the road, the question is whether you have buy-in across the structure,” said James Marquart, co-author of First Available Cell, a book on Texas’ integration. “Everyone within the system has to be on board. There has to be buy-in from all the interests. In Texas, it took over 20 years to get done.”

In California, where inmates are not forced to integrate, broad support appears to be lacking, according to many inmates and staff. “The CDCR won’t talk to us,” said Ryan Sherman, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), the union representing prison staff. “We have no say as to how this process should be implemented.”

Also important, Marquart said, Texas’ abolishment of segregation coincided with growth in prison capacity. The state added about 60 institutions in the 1980s and 1990s. With space to separate racial agitators, other inmates could integrate without fear of reprisal.

In California, overcrowded conditions present another obstacle. In Texas, about 160,000 inmates are distributed throughout more than 120 facilities. Most of California’s 33 prisons are already well beyond capacity. “If you’re not going to build, it’s not going to get done,” Marquart said.

In interviews, inmates and staff at Mule Creek and Folsom prisons in late June expressed fear that forced integration would trigger bloodshed. Such sentiments were also widespread in pre-integration Texas, but were never borne out. During the first seven years after cell integration, violent assaults reported among integrated cellmates were lower than non-integrated, according to TDCJ statistics.

From 1990 through 1999 there were a total of 35,579 violent incidents in Texas prisons. Out of those, 1,691, or 4.7 percent, were racially-motivated. Of those, 1,358 (3.8 percent) were among inmates who were not racially-integrated. Less than one percent of the nearly 36,000 incidents recorded during the period were between integrated cell partners, according to TDCJ.

Michael Parks has seen integration programs in both Texas and now California state prisons.

The numbers don’t surprise Michael Parks, 46, an African American inmate at Folsom. Parks first did time in Texas prisons. “[In Texas] you don’t have a say-so who your celly is,” said Parks, who is serving a life sentence for second degree murder. “You move into a cell, and whatever race the guy is, you learn to live with him.” At Folsom, Parks said he has been housed only with blacks.

In Texas, the TDCJ reports that 62 percent of its double-occupancy cells are now integrated.

“Integrating prisons has tended to have the same sort of effect as integrating schools,” said Robert Perkinson, a University of Hawaii history professor and author of Texas Tough, a history of that state’s prison system. “After initial fears, violence instead is reduced, people get along better, racial lines dissipate.”

An unwritten legacy

Garrison Johnson is a notorious name in California corrections. Johnson, an African American inmate in state prisons since 1987, filed the lawsuit that ultimately drew the Supreme Court’s attention to segregated cells.

During inter-institutional transfers over the years, Johnson shared cells only with other black inmates.

In his 1995 lawsuit, Johnson argued that race-based housing “effectively erected whites only, blacks only, Hispanics only signs over the portals of the California prison system.”

After winding through lower courts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that even temporarily segregating inmates by race is constitutionally suspect and should be subject to tight judicial scrutiny. The court, in a 5-3 decision, reasoned that in the absence of a justification that is “narrowly tailored” – such as achieving prison safety when other methods are insufficient – housing based solely on race is legally indefensible.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the only black justice, was joined by Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens in dissent, although Stevens’ dissent argued that segregation is always unconstitutional. Thomas and Scalia argued that the court should not interfere with prison officials on matters of race.  “The Constitution has always demanded less within the prison walls,” Thomas reasoned.

Segregation in cells in California had its beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, experts say, when a combination of prison population growth, slashed rehabilitative programs and increasingly race-based prison gangs persuaded administrators to accept de facto segregation in double-celling, or two inmates to a cell. This practice was never formally proclaimed.

“You would get a group of inmates, just off the bus, all the paperwork not caught up, and there were decisions to make, sometimes based on race,” CDCR spokeswoman Thornton said. “It was just a desire to keep people from killing each other. It was never a policy, never written down. But it was done, we’re not going to deny that.”

Asked if the segregation of cells later helped fuel the rise of racial hostility between racial groups, Thornton said she did not know, but that CDCR is “hopeful in-cell integration will assist in gang management, reduce racial tension and violence and reflect community values.”

Some inmates and critics were adamant that racial animosities have been deepened by corrections policy, and demand more forceful action. “Going into prison in California has, for decades, meant getting inculcated with an extremely racist mentality,” said Krisberg, the senior fellow in criminal justice.

Jesse Reed, a Richmond resident, saw the culture up close for 25 years, mostly in San Quentin State prison, before his release last year. He said he doubts whether integrated housing can be successful. “I just can’t see where it’s going to work,” Reed said. “When you put people together in a living situation, every act of violence is going to become a racial conflict that gets people upset and lining up on both sides.”

Will California cells be integrated?

CDCR hopes to begin integrating housing at two more prisons this year – the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad and Avenal State Prison – and three more in 2011.

Not all of the approximately 165,000 state prison inmates would be eligible. Many live in dormitories including several races. Others, such as Pelican Bay inmates, are judged to be so dangerous that they are housed alone.

Thornton says the CDCR has no statistics on roommate assignments because it does not “track the number of single- or double-celled inmates or how many are in dorms.”

Nevertheless, achieving race-blind integration would probably require reassigning thousands of inmates. More than half of surveyed inmates system-wide were found to be eligible for living in integrated cells, according to department statistics.

CDCR says it doesn’t have all the resources it needs to implement desegregation in all prisons any faster.

“The state has no budget, so there is no money for traveling and training of staff,” Thornton said, adding that CDCR cannot quantify the costs of the program. “It’s like asking how much it costs to fingerprint [inmates],” she said.

At the same time, CDCR officials have sought to curb expectations. “It’s unrealistic to think that all cells are going to be integrated,” Thornton said.

The go-slow approach may have helped keep the lid on a volatile situation. Not a single incident of racial violence attributed to housing integration has been reported after the program was implemented, Thornton said, although there was a brief, nonviolent protest at Sierra Conservation Center in 2008, and violent eruptions at Folsom and Chino Institution for Men last year, before the program was implemented at either institution.

But concerns linger. In a letter addressed to CDCR’s Secretary Matthew Cate, in mid-July the Prison Law Office urged the department to take immediate action to stop discrimination based on race.

According to the letter, California’s men’s facilities consistently conduct prison lockdowns based on individuals within racial groups, even if the incident that triggered them involved only a small number of inmates of that race, amounting to a “disturbing policy and practice of racial discrimination within the prison system in violation of the Equal Protection Clause”. The Law Office alleges that disturbances sometimes result in lockdowns of all inmates of a particular racial group.

Prison officials said the PLO is using an expanded definition of the term “lockdown,” making basic security measures seem more severe and disruptive than they are.

Thornton stressed that occasional, “modified” security lockdowns on certain populations are “operational necessities” to maintain safety behind the prison walls.

“We are going to review the claims made by the Prison Law Office,” Thornton said, adding, “We have policies in place to prohibit the use of race based lockdown targeting a specific racial or ethnic group unless there is a legitimate interest in doing so.”

Thornton said the department could not say whether the modified lockdowns were used with greater, declining or similar frequency compared to past years.

At Folsom, several inmates alleged that staff spread misinformation about integrated housing to stir unrest last year, before the program was implemented. Lt. Gentile acknowledged that swirling rumors fanned tensions leading up to the disturbance last year – which inmates described as a “riot” – but denied that staff deliberately planted them.

“There was confusion among a lot of staff and inmates as well, a lot anxiousness,” Gentile said. “There was some bad choice of wording and bad interpretations.”

At Mule Creek, the reality of integrated housing is a mix of progress and persistent division. Mule Creek, which announced double-cell integration as policy 2008, is a “special needs” facility, where many inmates are overt homosexuals or targets for violent reprisals from members of their own racial group.

The dry-erase board on the wall of one housing wing lists 100 cells. The colors that corrections officers use to identify race indicate that 31 were racially-integrated in late June. That’s about half of the integration rate reported for the Texas prison system as a whole.

Out of earshot of prison officials, several inmates at Mule Creek said the housing integration initiative was ineffective. Some said integrated cells were predominately the result of mixed-race homosexual relationships.

“If you take homosexuals out of it, probably like two percent of cells are black and white,” said inmate Frank Baldizan, 30. “Me? I cell with my own race.”

City leaders applauded groundbreaking on a new parking garage at the Richmond BART station during a Tuesday morning ceremony.

“I envision people parking cars in clean, safe spots, hopping on BART or Amtrak and saving gas money,” Mayor Gayle McLaughlin told a small crowd. “We in Richmond are focusing on the shift away from fossil fuels.”

The new parking garage is scheduled to be completed by early 2012, and will consist of six levels and 764 parking spaces. Meanwhile, a section of existing parking lot on the west side of the station between 15^th and 16^th streets will close beginning August 16, while parking on the east side of the station will remain open, according to BART’s website.

McLaughlin, who will campaign for re-election this year in part on her green development and transportation agenda, touted the development as part of a larger trend. “We are clearly changing our image here in Richmond,” she said.

Other speakers included Randy Iwasaki, executive director of the Contra Costa Transportation Agency; Maria Viramontes, councilmember; a representative of Congressman George Miller; Joel Keller, BART board member; and Otheree Christian of the Iron Triangle Neighborhood Council.

Men in hardhats stood waiting for the festivities to end so they could get back to work on the hulking blue equipment, which already sat in the parking lot where the garage will be built.

The project is led by Richmond Community Redevelopment Agency as part of their transit village project at the Richmond BART Station, which first brought mass transit into the city in the early 1970s.

The $25 million project is also funded with money from a variety of city, county, state and federal sources.

The parking structure is envisioned as a replacement for parking spaces on the east side of the BART Station, where a mix of retail, commercial and residential construction will comprise a new Richmond Transit Village, according to BART.

Construction on the parking structure creates about 200 jobs.

Reporting was provided by Rob Gunnison.

Editor’s Note: This story, video and photos were produced by Robert Rogers and Guilherme Kfouri as part of News21, a national journalism initiative led by 12 of America’s leading research universities, including UC Berkeley.

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He was free, again. But Anthony Woods’ days outside the walls would be numbered.

Three months after being imprisoned for missing parole appointments and failing drug tests, a corrections bus scooped him up from San Quentin State Prison and dumped him a few blocks from his mother’s home in Richmond, just off Cutting Boulevard. He looked down as he walked at first, watching one foot step in front of the other. It didn’t take long to slip.

“I remember thinking ‘Don’t look up, just go straight home,’” Woods said. But on the walk from bus stop to mom’s house, he couldn’t elude his long time tormenter: crack cocaine.

“I had a few bucks. It was burning a hole in my pocket,” Woods said. “This is a neighborhood that’s infested.” He shook his head. “I can’t walk two blocks without the opportunity being there.”

Woods has two felonies on his record stemming from an armed robbery in the early 1980s. He’s been on parole ever since. First released in 1986, Woods has been in and out of California prisons at least 17 times according to prison records, mostly for dirty drug tests, missed appointments and “technical violations” of his parole.

Woods is just one of a group – tens of thousands strong – of ex-convicts paroled in California every year. They often face bleak prospects for employment and debilitating drug addictions. About 400 reside in Richmond, a city long plagued by crime.

More than 70 percent of the time, they prove unable to comply with the terms of their parole.

“A lot of our ongoing crime is committed by folks who are recidivists,” said Richmond Police Chief Chris Magnus. “Budget cuts for important programs inside prisons mean that inmates land on our streets often worse off than they were when they went in.”

Last year, more than 66,000 paroled felons in California were returned to custody without being convicted of a crime. The violations that land them back in prison include failing drug tests and missed appointments with parole agents.

Woods has been on parole for more than 20 years.

“They go in, they spend on average about two months, they continue to get released, they’re out about an average of four to six months, they’re back in,” said Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford. “Prisoners on the inside refer to this as ‘doing life on the installment plan.’”

The number of parolees returning the streets is on the rise, thanks to the state’s attempt to reduce prison overcrowding. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitiation (CDCR) is working to reduce its population to comply with a ruling last year by a three-judge federal panel, which decided that overcrowding in state prisons contributes to unconstitutional conditions.

State law SB3×18, which took effect in January, released parolees convicted of non-violent crimes from traditional parole supervision. The new law aims to lower the costs of imprisoning and supervising convicts who pose little threat.

As part of the reform, parole agents are handling reduced caseloads while thousands of gang members and other felons have been put on electronic tracking devices as an alternative to incarceration.

“It’s estimated that about 10,000 people who would have gone to prison last year will not go to prison this year,” Petersilia said.

Meanwhile, those who do go to prison continue to face lengthy sentences, Petersilia said.

Before the mid-1970s, prison sentences were indeterminate, Petersilia said, so inmates could be released earlier than their original sentence if they completed vocational or academic classes in addition to good behavior. Now, sentencing reforms have resulted in “determinant” sentences, Petersilia said, which has resulted in inmates receiving guaranteed release dates, despite cuts in rehabilitation programs leaving them ill-prepared to return to society.

Woods, with his robbery convictions from the early 1980s, still qualifies as a two-striker and as a parolee who could pose a threat. Due to his ongoing “technical violations” and misdemeanors like shoplifting, Woods is still on parole more than two decades after his original crimes.

Recidivism has been a major driver of skyrocketing corrections costs, which gobble up about 11 percent of the state budget, or roughly $8 billion — more than the state spends on higher education. The state spends about $49,500 per year to house each prisoner, Petersilia said.

Stanford professor Joan Petersilia, one of the state's foremost experts on parole.

More than seven in 10 parolees return to prison within three years in California, the nation’s worst rate, according to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office.

“A major part of what determines whether a parolee will be successful or not is employment,” said Theodore Pacheco, a parole agent who has worked specifically with Woods’ case. “We show them the vocational, educational and drug treatment opportunities available to them when they get out.”

Woods says he has no special skills and hasn’t held a steady job since he worked as a grocery clerk in the late 1990s. His lengthy criminal record scares off potential employers, he said.

In July, Pacheco remanded Woods to custody barely a month after his release, claiming that he had missed several appointments and tested positive for drugs. Woods spent more than two weeks in custody, including a trip back to San Quentin State Prison for just a few days, where he said he went through a familiar battery of intake processes.

Stories like Woods’ are a big part of California’s corrections crisis, said Barry Krisberg, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. “We’re just recycling people over and over and over through this system,” Krisberg said. “And a lot of them for fairly minor offenses, who continue to have drug problems or whatever, and we lock them up for 90 days, which costs a lot of money and does not advance public safety.”

According to CDCR records, of 84,882 paroled felons who were returned to prison last year, 66,261 were returned for violating conditions of their parole, not for committing new crimes.

“This makes no sense,” Petersilia said. “Unfortunately we don’t have the political will to change it because there will be a parolee … now out on parole and they’ll miss an appointment or test positive and we won’t send them back to prison and they’ll murder someone.”

The California Rehabilitation Oversight Board (C-ROB) issued a report in March warning that cuts to already stripped-down educational and vocational programs in state prisons jeopardize efforts to reduce prison populations. “The recent budget cut to inmate programming may well mean that the hope for reduction in recidivism will not be achieved any time soon. Without some reduction in the parole return rate it seems likely that California will be unable to get control of the inmate population crisis,” the report read.

Woods supports his habit by doing odd jobs around the community.

Recidivism wasn’t always an intractable problem. In 1980, only about one of four parolees ended up back in prison, a ratio that has more than doubled. A 2003 report from the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency, brought California corrections’ recidivism problem to the fore when it showed that most parolees were returned to prison for technical violations, memorably calling the system a “billion-dollar failure.”

Back in Richmond, Woods has little hope that any reform may affect him. He said he is resigned to a life of cycling in and out of prison. The reason? He has no illusions about ceasing his use of crack cocaine.

“I don’t see how I’ll ever quit,” he said, rolling a small, glass crack pipe between his thumb and forefinger, adding that he wishes he could stop.

Moments later, he’s ambling off to a liquor store on the corner near his mother’s home. Within minutes, he scores $8 worth of crack cocaine – a small bag with two BB-sized rocks pressed into a handshake – some of which he quickly loads into his pipe.

He takes refuge in a nearby park. He squats behind some weathered bleachers, which shelter him from a mild breeze.

He reasons that because he smoked crack on the day of his release, he would already “test dirty” if required by parole to submit urine. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said, lowering the glass pipe into the orange flame of his cigarette lighter. “If they want to send me back, what can I do?”

This story originally published on UC Berkeley’s News21 site.