By Joe Blackstock
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
CHINO, Calif. -- The California Institution for Men has plenty of barbed wire, guard towers and its share of tough characters, but nowhere in its name does “prison” appear.
That’s because, at least in its early years, CIM was set up in Chino to be the “prison without walls,” bearing little resemblance to today’s overcrowded institution.
This novel experiment was the work of Kenyon J. Scudder, CIM’s first superintendent who also refused to be called warden.
When the place opened a few months before Pearl Harbor in 1941, the guards carried neither guns nor billy clubs - in fact, there weren’t actually any guards as such. Scudder called them supervisors.
The place did have a wire fence but the guard towers were never manned except for 14 months when prisoners were stationed there as aircraft spotters early in World War II.
Under Scudder, rehabilitation was the goal at Chino and punishment the last resort.
He believed that many first-time wrong-doers could be turned into productive citizens by not being mixed in with hard-core criminals at San Quentin and Folsom.
“A prison experience is too apt to bring out the worst in a man and leave its permanent scar upon his personality,” he wrote in “Prisoners Are People,” his 1951 book about the Chino experience.
In CIM, between 1941 and 1957, there was a full-fledged farm, with hundreds of head of cattle, a slaughterhouse, dairy, welding shop and classes teaching all types of mechanical skills.
Prisoners often were trucked up to the San Bernardino National Forest where they fought fires and worked on trails, staying at night in special camps with little special security.
This prison environment, so different from today, came about in the late-1930s when the Legislature decided to segregate the hardened criminals from those “capable of moral rehabilitation and restoration to good citizenship.”
Scudder, a former Los Angeles County probation officer, was warden of a federal reformatory in Ohio when he was offered the job at the new Southern California facility at Chino.
One condition, he told Gov. Earl Warren, was that he would accept no political appointments as employees. (Later, he had to stand up and refuse Warren’s direction to hire a friend for a prison job.)
Scudder picked supervisors “with integrity, a sympathetic understanding and ability to work with people.” They were trained in psychology and problems of discipline and got two hours of judo training each day.
Scudder made the new facility work by hand-picking his inmates at San Quentin and Folsom, taking new arrivals with no violent background and likely to succeed within enlightened incarceration.
Once at Chino, prisoners were allowed to talk among themselves, eat at their own schedule, have a choice in wearing apparel and have some say in the conditions there, all quite different from their previous experience.
Scudder did not segregate white, black and Latino prisoners as was done at other prisons. He tolerated no prejudice on the part of supervisors or prisoners, getting rid of anyone who crossed that line.
Early on, the prisoners built a 9-hole golf course, softball diamonds and tennis courts. Scudder allowed the prisoners - as both an incentive for good behavior and to give some the opportunity to use heavy equipment - to build a swimming pool. The pool was built at a cost of a couple of hundred bags of cement.
As the pool was being completed, Scudder was confronted by a group of white prisoners who asked whether whites would swim at the same time with blacks and Latinos, something rarely allowed in public pools at that time.
“They helped build it, didn’t they?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” the leader said, “but...”
“Listen,” Scudder said, “Take your choice. Either they swim or you do not.”
End of discussion.
But issues were rarely solved as quickly.
Occasionally, to make a point to a disciplinary problem, he arranged for a prisoner to spend a few days in less comfortable conditions at the Ontario jail. The jail time, for which Scudder charged the prisoner from money earned at his prison job, usually took care of future issues.
Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t work under Scudder’s system were sent off to San Quentin.
During the early years, CIM was almost self-supporting, growing much of its own vegetables and raising beef, pork, mutton, chickens and rabbits.
In fact, the prison at times produced more beef than it could use so the Army asked if canned beef stew and corned-beef hash could be produced there for its forces in the Pacific. The prison had received some used canning equipment so Scudder set upon creating a slaughterhouse and processing facility that quickly filled four train cars with canned goods for the Army.
In 1943, the Mira Loma Quartermaster Depot in south Fontana did not have enough laborers to load train cars with material destined for transport ships waiting at the harbor. Chino prisoners worked three days around the clock to load the cars which got to Long Beach on time.
A number of prisoners, who learned key skills such as welding, were released on probation to work in war industries.
Scudder’s operation received some notice for its successes. In 1955, a movie “Unchained” was filmed at CIM by Warner Bros. showing the conditions there. Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, a Los Angeles Rams star, starred with such actors as Chester Morris and Barbara Hale.
During Scudder’s 15 years at Chino, there were about 250 escapes, some of which alarmed the local community. He spent a lot of time explaining to the civilian population just what was going on at CIM.
Scudder left Chino in 1956, but for years many of the programs and formats he created were left in place.
By the 1970s and 1980s, however, times began to change and politicians passed more “tough-on-crime” legislation, putting many more people behind bars and jamming prisons. CIM, which had 1,474 prisoners in 1944, had 6,229 in 1991 and about 6,600 at its height several year ago.
Overcrowding, and the growth of gangs in and out of prison, have resulted in guards armed with guns and rifles, manned guard towers and a more traditional prison environment.
The escape in 1983 of Kevin Cooper, who went on to murder a Chino Hills family and is still on death row, tightened CIM security even more.
If Scudder were alive today, he might argue that today’s prison has the same problem of creating career criminals that existed at other prisons when Chino opened 70 years ago.
“If, during incarceration, punishment is permitted to take the upper hand, so that there is no chance or incentive for the prisoner to adjust, then society is behaving in a ridiculous fashion, because society does not profit in any way from the punishment of criminals.
“Ultimate savings are enormous, however, when we assist the prisoner to make his own adjustment, so that he can become a good citizen.”
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