Meet Luke Whyte. He interviewed a sergeant at Pelican Bay State Prison, California (PBSP). “Pelican Bay State Prison is the end of the line; designed to contain and isolate California’s most dangerous inmates. In the event of an earthquake, its walls are designed to collapse inward.”
Pelican Bay opened in 1989, principally to house the growing population of maximum-security and high-security-risk inmates in the California prison system. Whyte writes that the suicide rate for correctional officers is six times the national average.
Whyte’s article is worth reading. Click on the other links in that article as well to get even more information. After that, check out the NPR article on PBSP’s Security Housing Unit (SHU).
“Associate Warden Larry Williams is standing inside a small, cement prison cell. Everything is gray concrete: the bed, the walls, the unmovable stool. Everything except the combination stainless-steel sink and toilet. You can’t move more than eight feet in one direction. “Prison is a deterrent,” Williams says. “We don’t want them to like being in prison.”
Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) is designed to house California’s most serious criminal offenders in a secure, safe, and disciplined institutional setting. Half of the prison houses maximum security inmates in a general population (GP) setting. The other half houses inmates in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), designed for inmates presenting serious management concerns.
In addition to General Population, B Facility operates the Restricted Custody General Population (RCGP), which is a 96-bed unit designed as a transitional program for inmates who are recently released from the SHU to GP that have custodial/security/safety concerns. PBSP also operates a 400-bed, Level I Minimum Support Facility, which houses non-violent offenders outside of the secure perimeter of the main institution, and a Firehouse with eight full time inmate firefighters.