“Gladiator School,” by David W. Reeve and Officer Dave Sanchez Jr., is an oral history of life inside California’s Youth Training School, later renamed Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility. Once the nation’s largest juvenile correctional institution, YTS housed young men alongside the correctional officers, counselors, nurses, teachers and other staff responsible for their supervision and care.
The book examines daily life inside the institution, including its workplace culture, violence and the pressures faced by both staff and wards. It also addresses the 1996 murder of Counselor Ineasie Baker and the questions the case raised about institutional leadership and accountability.
Based on interviews and first-person accounts, “Gladiator School” presents the experiences of the people who lived and worked at YTS. For staff, the effects of the job often extended beyond the end of a shift. For many wards, incarceration was already familiar through relatives and communities shaped by repeated contact with the justice system. Together, these accounts offer a firsthand look at juvenile incarceration and the people who experienced Youth Training School from inside its walls.
In the following excerpt, Officer Dave Sanchez Jr. shares memories of life inside YTS from 1986 to the institutions closing in 2010, and how his training and intuition helped him survive 24 years as a correctional officer inside the nation’s largest juvenile prison.
Officer weapons policy at Youth Training School
As a sworn officer, I could carry a concealed weapon everywhere without a permit, but I wasn’t old enough to buy bullets. The law said I had to be 21. A fellow officer who was a very young-looking 18-year-old also completed the training to carry an off-duty weapon. According to the rumor mill, his mother had to buy his bullets.
The department didn’t provide firearms training, but I could do it on my own at a local community college. I went to Rio Hondo College and took a course to be able to carry the weapon off duty.
When I’d buy bullets at the shooting range, no one ever asked me for ID. I would say that I was an officer with Youth Authority, and no one ever questioned it.
The only armed personnel at YTS were the tactical squad and the parole agents; none of the other staff members were armed. We couldn’t bring a gun past the YTS checkpoint gate. There were gun lockers for us to store our personal weapons.
I came to work for my first shift — a graveyard shift. Most of the wards were older than me and physically bigger. I was given a set of keys and told to go to the Housing Unit and be in charge of 200 criminals. Hopefully I’d make it through the shift, they said, and they would see me in the morning.
The U.S. Secret Service pays a visit to YTS
Wards were not allowed to possess cash, but their families could mail money to them at YTS. It was put on their “books,” an account wards could use to purchase items at the Canteen. Once a month, wards could go to the Canteen and purchase items to take back to their cells. In the 1980’s, along with chips, ramens and soda, wards could buy cigarettes. Unfiltered Camels were called “a pack of humps” and Playboy magazines were sold at the Canteen.
Outgoing mail was collected by the Housing Unit officers who worked on the graveyard shift. Wards would slide their outgoing mail under their cell doors. Almost all mail had to be unsealed so it could be scanned for content. This was because wards had mailed out threats, confessions, conspiracy plans, and other inappropriate content in the past. There was a short list of mail that was considered confidential and could be sealed: letters to the court, attorney correspondence, and letters to Youth Authority management. The mail was scanned, logged, and put in the mail bag. Graveyard staff would drop it off in the mailroom on their way out of YTS.
One night, a ward sent out a sealed letter addressed to the President of the United States. We weren’t certain if sealing this letter was allowed (some outgoing mail could be sealed — but not all), so we asked the Sergeant. He wasn’t sure, so he asked the Lieutenant. He wasn’t sure, so he told us to leave it for the Parole Agent who would figure it out in the morning. Likely, the Parole Agent simply sent the letter out, because a few days later, two U.S. Secret Service agents came to YTS to talk to the ward that had mailed the letter. It contained a threat to the President of the United States.
Altercations with wards were often, “just business”
I worked graveyard shift on Unit Three with a woman who did her job exactly as she was supposed to. She’d go down the halls where the cells were and tell the wards to be quiet, stop smoking, and turn the TV volume down. She’d tell them to turn the lights off at 10:00 P.M. — no one liked being told that. A lot of the wards had small TVs, radios, and things like that.
“Hey, fuck you. I’m a grown-ass man,” one ward would say. “Don’t tell me what to do, you bitch!”
But when the inmate was paroled from her Housing Unit, he’d stop and try to shake her hand. He would tell her, “Hey, thanks for everything you did for me,” before leaving. It always stunned her. She would turn to me and say, “That guy has been threatening me for the last six months, and now he’s thanking me?” She could never understand that maybe she was the mother they didn’t have, but needed.
I had an incident once where we had two guys in a cell acting up. We had to get them out of the cell, and they didn’t want to come out. We ended up in a fight. We opened the cell door, ran in, tackled them, handcuffed them, and dragged him out. Because there was a scuffle, we took them to the Infirmary to get checked out by a doctor to make sure they weren’t seriously injured.
When the medical staff was examining them, I had unhandcuffed one of the guys, and the first thing he did was turn around and stick his hand out — he wanted to shake my hand.
“Wow,” he said to me, “that was awesome. I didn’t think you’d come in like that!”
I said, “Well, that’s what we do. That’s the job.”
There was no animosity. There was no anger. It was just business.
Key policy and testing the will of a young officer
Keys are very, very important in an institution. It’s a very big deal if you misplace your institutional keys. If a ward has possession of a set of institutional keys, he could wreak havoc. As new employees, we were told if we lost our keys, we must immediately report it, and everyone in the institution would need to start searching for them. If they couldn’t be located, whoever lost them would have to personally pay to have all the institution locks changed.
A veteran staff placed his keys on the desk in the middle of the Control Center and turned to the sink immediately behind him to wash his hands. A new staff member thought it was a good idea to take the keys and hide them to teach the veteran staff a lesson about not putting their keys down. When the veteran staff turned back around and saw his keys were missing, he asked, “Who took my keys?” The new staff reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys, and handed them back to the veteran staff. The veteran staff took back his keys, and immediately punched the new staff in the face, and said, “Don’t you ever touch my fucking keys!”
When I was new, I placed my keys down and turned away just for a second. I was in a locked Control Center with fellow staff members only, and there were no wards out of their cells. A veteran staff nearby picked them up and hid them to teach me a lesson. This lesson was often taught to new staff. After unsuccessfully searching for my keys, I realized I was being taught a lesson, so I announced to the staff nearby that I couldn’t find my keys. I assumed I would be given back my keys, lesson learned.
Nope. Instead, one of them rudely remarked that my keys were lost. I was offended, so I responded by telling the staff that I was going to call the Control Tower emergency number, report my keys as missing, place the institution on lock-down and have all staff begin a search for my keys, and they could then explain how they allowed the lesson to go too far.
My keys were immediately returned to me.
They grow up inside prison
One night I was doing bank checks — counting, making sure everybody was there and okay. I would do this every night, every hour, every half hour.
I walked by a cell, and an inmate stopped me and asked me to show him my hand. He looked at my ring finger on my left hand:
“You’re not married?”
“No, I’m not married.”
“So how do the rings and stuff work when you get engaged and married?”
“Okay, well, the way it works is when you propose to a girl, you give her a diamond ring, and then when you get married, you both get a wedding band.”
He thought about it for a moment and began to get angry.
“Wait a minute. Let me understand this,” he said. “You mean she gets two rings, and I only get one?”
He got very angry at that, as if it was unfair.
About the authors
David W. Reeve is a writer, photographer and historian of juvenile incarceration, with a particular focus on Youth Training School in Chino, California, and the greater California Youth Authority. His work documenting life inside Youth Training School, titled “Gladiator School: Stories from Inside YTS,” has been featured on Medium, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, The Los Angeles Times, and in collaboration with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In 2023, his work debuted as a photo exhibit and lecture at the University of Redlands Center for Educational Justice. Follow David on Instagram.
Dave Sanchez Jr spent 30 years working in the California Department of Corrections. He started his career in 1986 at Youth Training School, where he served until the facility closed in 2010. He finished his service at the California Institution for Men in Chino, retiring in 2016. After decades on the inside, Dave turned to teaching. He’s now a criminal justice professor at Columbia Southern University and has taught at Strayer University, University of California, Riverside, and California State University, San Bernardino. He’s also a dedicated academic, holding two Bachelor of Arts degrees in Psychology and Philosophy, a Master of Science in Criminal Justice Administration and a Law Degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.