Drama and Politics

Education can be seen as the most compelling alternative to imprisonment. Unless current structures of violence are eliminated from poor schools, these schools will remain the major conduits to youth prison and then to adult prison.
—Angela Davis

There are so many prisoners and so few guards that any appearance of absolute control is an illusion.
—Ted Koppel

“This is nothing but a warehouse.” You’ve heard it before: the U.S. prison system is dysfunctional, designed to punish and put away, not to rehabilitate or reform. Institutions are overcrowded and understaffed, recidivism rates are escalating, and costs to taxpayers are mounting exponentially. Breaking Point, the newest documentary in the Koppel on Discovery series, frames the crisis in an especially cogent way, focusing on the California system as both representative and symptomatic.

The crisis has been building for decades, of course, but it accelerated in 1994, when California citizens voted overwhelmingly in favor of the infamous “three strikes” law. As Koppel recalls, the idea was “to get violent criminals off the street and to keep them off,” coming on the heels of “the outrage over one crime in particular,” the kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas. Her father Marc, a dedicated victims’ advocate and television commentator since then, voices the feelings of many who voted for Proposition 184: “As far as I’m concerned,” he tells Koppel, “You can stack these guys like cordwood and you can keep them locked away forever.”

The response is understandable, but it has created a monster: more criminals and less capacity to deal. The fact that so many third strikers are locked up for the mandatory 25 to life sentence for nonviolent offenses—petty robberies, drug possession—ensures that they will enter into a system that makes them worse. Without funding for vocational training, education, drug rehab or emotional counseling (say, anger management classes), prisons have essentially become criminal training facilities.

Breaking Point‘s focus on California State Prison-Solano in Vacaville is at once enlightening, disheartening, and shrewd. Solano houses inmates with varying sentences and records. As Koppel points out, it is sadly typical of state and federal penitentiaries in a number of ways, not least being its dire overcrowding (173,000 men in space built for 100,000, so that “Even solitary is double occupancy”), shortage of security (a ratio of 100 inmates to each guard), and swelling expenses (each inmate costs some $43,000 pr year, as much as it costs to go to Harvard). Also like most prisons, Solano relies on ad-seg (administrative segregation), wherein certain inmates are confined to their cells 23 hours “because they are a danger to others or, left out among the others, they are so hated or so vulnerable that they will not survive.” Just keeping prisoners alive is daily struggle.

At Solano, Sergeant Crystal Williams is hired as an “overcrowding officer.” It is her job to work out piecemeal and long-term solutions to the emergency that will only get worse.  As she notes, inmates and guards must contend with numerous forces, which she eloquently describes as “the drama and the politics of everything that’s going on around you.” Because it’s literally impossible for guards to keep watch on all or even most inmates, prisoners have developed their own tenuous sort of order: “Security is largely administered by the prisoners,” says Koppel, “All these men who broke the law outside prison scrupulously observe the inmates’ code inside.”

The code mandates distrust of officials and a “cat and mouse game” that makes it extremely hard for guards to find drugs, weapons, cell phones or other contraband (“They secrete them up their rectum,” says a guard). And the code is built on racial segregation. “Race,” Koppel says, “guides every aspect of prison life.” Whenever a new inmate arrives at Solano, a guard asks, “Who you run with?”, that is, what’s his affiliation. This is not to break up gangs, Koppel narrates, but “to keep their members together.” As a large percentage of the population lives in a gymnasium filled with bunks, or cells with bunks stacked three high, you rely on fellow members of your race to watch while you sleep, to stand up for you, to present a united front. 

Though administrators lament this organization, they also see its necessity. Sol Irving, who has worked in the system for 28 years as a correctional officer, counselor, and now, the head of Solano’s substance abuse program, looks forward to next year’s monumental change—when the state has mandated integration of prisoners—but concedes that maintaining control is always the primary goal. “It’s all about who’s running the business inside the prison,” “he says, from drugs to prostitution to who sleeps where and when. Refusing to let inmates dictate rules or desires, he says, is key. And the many years of segregation, while convenient for the administration, has allowed prisoners to dictate—at least as they see it.

When Koppel sits down with black and white gang leaders (“As a general rule, leaders of the Hispanic gang won’t talk to… media”), their observations are matter of fact. They understand the drama and the politics, and only seek ways to endure, not alter them. Mike Donahoe, a building contractor before he beat his wife and landed in Solano, sees “segregation by race as a way of keeping the peace.” The rules are simple and absolute: “Respect everybody and don’t be in debt, for whatever, and you don’t cross racial lines.” Inmate Anji Lynn Baker adds, “The problem with racism is that the administration, they kind of keep it going.”

Against segregation, against overcrowding, against the absurd practice of releasing parolees into precisely the communities that shaped their bad behavior to begin with—without new work skills or social education—Sol Irving, Koppel says, seeks out the abusers he might help (some 400 out of 5,000 who need help). He is, Koppel commiserates, “trying to empty a lake with a spoon.” While it’s plain that Koppel admires the effort, he also shares with Irving the understanding that it cannot possibly succeed, except with the unusually motivated individual, the exception to the rule.

While Breaking Point attends to those who complete their GEDs inside (showing a spirited graduation ceremony), the truth is that hope is limited, the struggle goes on. As Koppel remarks of Travis Tippets, paroled for the 11th time and jobless, living in his father’s garage, he appears destined to be frustrated. “He seems unwilling or unable to make the distinction between suggestions and rules,” says Koppel of his interaction with his parole officer. “A man shouldn’t feel scared and intimidated when he’s trying to find a job,” sighs Travis. Koppel sums up, “He’s halfway up a greased pole and slipping.”

Pulling together a remarkable range of material, this beautifully written, incisive, and powerful documentary reminds you how much you miss nightly Koppel. And yet, he is so well suited for this long-form, so adept at painstaking, timely work. Breaking Point is why you watch TV.