There have been multiple lesions in the security set-up at the California Institution for Men in Chino which would allow and, on occasion, has allowed inmates to take unauthorized leave from the facility, the San Bernardino County Sentinel is informed.
Renewed attention to the protocols and physical barriers relating to preventing escape from the prison has intensified in the aftermath of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s known transfer of 39 Death Row inmates to the 83-year-old institution which was originally designed as a low-security holding yard for the state least serious and nonviolent criminal offenders, which was followed by an August 11, 2024 incident in which double murderer Kevin G. Roby used a makeshift knife he had obtained in an unsuccessful effort to kill a guard.
In the aftermath of the transfer of what was quantified as 39 Death Row inmates to Chino by April and an announcement that another round of condemned inmates were to follow them to the California Institution for Men, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation senior staff and Governor Gavin Newsom’s office offered Chino and San Bernardino governmental officials and residents of Chino Valley assurances that sufficient precautions had been and were being taken and a redundancy of security measures were in place to prevent any escapes.
Prison escape is a particularly sensitive topic in Chino Valley as a consequence of the now escape, more than 41years ago, of Kevin Cooper, who was incarcerated at the California Institution of Men under the falsely assumed identity of David Trautman as the result of felony burglary convictions in Los Angeles County. In June 1983, Cooper walked off of the prison yard in Chino, leaving by means of a hole in the fence. He headed roughly 4.5 miles due west, where he holed up in what he thought was an unoccupied residence immediately proximate – some 450 feet away from – the home of Doug and Peggy Ryen. On the night of June 4/early morning of June 5, 1983, he attacked the Ryens, using a hatchet and knife to kill them, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and Christopher Hughes, 11, a family friend who was spending the night. He slashed the throat of the Ryens’ son, Joshua, 8, who survived the ordeal. Cooper then drove the Ryen family’s station wagon to Long Beach, where he abandoned it after nearly running it out of gas. From Long Beach he headed south to Baja California, where he befriended an American couple on a sailboat. He accompanied them north, where at the end of July 1983, he was arrested upon attempting to flee after boarding another watercraft, a 26-foot sailboat moored off Santa Cruz Island, a few miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, and raping a woman. Ultimately, he was convicted of the murders of the three members of the Ryen Family and Hughes.
Issues with the security of the California Institution for Men have persisted ever since.
A 2,500-acre complex consisting of four facilities under a single warden addressed at 14901 Central Avenue and existing on a campus that extends from Central Avenue on the west, El Prado Road on the southwest, lying generally south of Eucalyptus Avenue, bordered on the east by the westernmost extension of the now shuttered Heman J. Stark Youth Correctional Facility which fronts to the east on Euclid Avenue and set generally north of Kimball Avenue, Chino Institution for Men was constructed in 1941 to less than exacting standards than many other California prisons because it initially was not intended to house the most violent of the state’s inmates. It was augmented with a high fence topped with razor wire, but prisoners seeking to escape in the 1960s were able to, and occasionally did, defeat that obstacle by throwing the thick woolen blankets used on the prison’s beds over the razor wire and climbing atop it to reach the outer side.
After the Cooper escape, state prison officials made what they said were multiple and redundant security improvements that they confidently maintained made escape from the facility unlikely. Specifically, the addition of electrification to one of the perimeter fences, more razor wire atop the other fence, multiple but relatively primitive guard towers, motion detectors, intensive nighttime illumination that creates a 175-yard gauntlet through which a would-be escapee must pass underneath the eyes of constantly vigilant nocturnal personnel before reaching the electrified perimeter, constant motorized patrols near the perimeter and siren signals effectively deter breakout attempts, the prison’s operators insisted.
Nevertheless, there have been constant and recurring breakdowns in the electrical circuitry for the sirens, motion detectors and fence which officials have been loath to admit. Over the years, holes in the perimeter fence which have not been addressed in a timely manner have been observed. In 2018, Michael Garrett escaped from the prison, after which it was revealed that the motion detector on the fence had been inoperable for five years.
Even when the motion detectors were fully functional, their utility in preventing escapes was marginal. Moving objects as insubstantial as insects, birds, rodents and even rain, wind, shadows and reflected light can trigger them. The constant repetition of such false readings can lead to desensitization and decreased vigilance in the guards who are charged with multiple tasks which include watching the prison perimeter and monitoring electronic sensors and adapt a reflexive disregard for what they consider to be false alarms or misreadings. Moreover, the sheer size of the prison campus results in multiple spots which fall outside the reach of the motion detectors.
In addition, the Sentinel is told, the lethal electrified fence that rings the highest level security unit contained within the prison’s 2,500-acre campus provides a false sense of security in many respects. Installed 19 years ago at a cost exceeding $1.5 million between two parallel, chain-link perimeter security fences which surround what is referred to as the prison’s “C” yard consisting of dormitories, a dining hall and facilities reserved for the most dangerous portion of the population incarcerated at CIM, the electrified fence consists of 16 stainless-steel stranded wires, horizontally oriented and installed on insulators attached to metal fence posts. The top wire is a foot higher than the two perimeter security fences. A concrete-grade beam elevates the bottom wire to approximately 13 inches above the finish grade and prohibits anyone from crawling under the fence. Circular, stainless-steel detection rings, attached to the lower electrified fence wires, trigger an alarm if the wires are spread vertically and come in contact with an adjacent ring/wire. The electrified wires are charged with more than 5,000 volts and very low amperage many times the intensity needed to electrocute a human being. Alarms are transmitted by radio to a dedicated 24-hour roving patrol vehicle should the electrical fence be touched.
The fence has resulted in the occasional electrocution of rodents such as squirrels and gophers as well as birds, rabbits and lizards. On multiple occasions the fence has gone inoperable, the most recent example of which was a five-day interlude nearly six weeks ago.
While under normal conditions the electrified fence presents a daunting barrier to anyone who would leave the C Yard without authorization, there have been circumstances in which members of the serious offender population that is, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, to be constantly and without exception confined to C Yard have roamed outside of C Yard, either as part of a rehabilitative assignment or, far less frequently, out of some other necessity or by mistake. Outside the confines of C Yard, there are other sections of the prison that have varying levels of security, ranging from yet-substantial restriction measures all the way to the largest set of dormitories reserved for the prison’s Level I inmate population, composed of non-violent offenders who were convicted of what are generally considered to be offenses at the lower level of seriousness on the criminal spectrum. These Level I inmates are housed in open dormitories within a less than fully secure perimeter from which escape would be difficult but nonetheless possible.
An issue creating the possibility for the serious offender population, including those who were formerly on Death Row to migrate into the general population and from there, conceivably, into the Level I population is the raison d’être for having transferred the Death Row Inmates to facilities such as the California Institution for Men in the first place: fulfilling the requirements of Proposition 66, passed by California’s voters in 2016. Proposition 66 stipulated a requirement that condemned prisoners work at in-prison employment settings, receiving what was originally 8 cents per hour to 37 cents an hour and is now 16 cents an hour to 74 cents an hour, depending on the skill level, to earn money used to pay restitution to their victims. Proposition 66 required that the prisoners be housed in a facility that had the workshops or foundries where such work could be carried out.
Beginning in 2020, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation undertook the Condemned Inmate Transfer Pilot Program in which what was limited to 100 Death Row Inmates were transferred to seven institutions that had the workshops and space therein to put them to work. Those seven did not include the California Institution for Men but rather the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi, the California Medical Facility – Stockton, California State Prison–Corcoran, Centinela State Prison, Kern Valley State Prison, the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility and Salinas Valley State Prison.
After that pilot program was deemed a success, the plan was hatched to eliminate Death Row at San Quentin Prison altogether a transfer all of the states condemned prisoners to 19 difference institutions, one of them being the California Institution for Men. As it turns out, CIM-Chino now houses the fourth highest number of condemned prisoners outside of San Quentin, 46, behind California Health Care Facility, Stockton, California State Prison, Sacramento and Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
According to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Jeff Macomber, his department has made efforts to ensure the former Death Row prisoners are institutionalized in settings where the requisite degree of security is available to thwart any attempts at escape those inmates might make.
“Participants are placed in high-security institutions while still integrating with the general population,” Macomber stated.
It is that integration and what it might lead to – namely that these condemned killers will blend in with their less mayhem-prone prison colleagues and escape – critics maintain, that is keeping many people in Chino Valley awake at night.