California State Prison At Lancaster

The husband and stepdaughter of a slain corrections officer were re-interviewed Tuesday by police investigators who had "questions about the details" of their eyewitness account of the her freeway slaying, a police spokesman said.

City Council members, angry about the escape of a convicted murderer from the local state prison this week, predicted Friday the city will drop its support for a proposed second local prison. On the eve of today's scheduled 11 a.m. City Hall public hearing called prior to the escape, council members reported getting scores of calls from angry citizens.

Less than 24 hours after being released from the confines of a prison cell, Dwayne McKinney, the Ontario man apparently wrongly convicted of a murder in Orange County nearly two decades ago, on Saturday stood on a patch of the Mojave Desert a free man. "I just want to run around this place," said McKinney, still overwhelmed by the sudden turn in his life. "It is very unreal. I know it. I see it, but it is hard to believe it."

To reduce overtime pay for guards in the midst of the state budget crisis, nearly all of the approximately 4,000 inmates at the state prison in Lancaster are being kept in their cells 24 hours a day, a spokesman for the state Corrections Department and an official from the prison guards union confirmed Monday. Lt. Charles Hughes, a representative of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.

Contrary to a warden's report, an inmate who escaped recently from the new state prison here did not flee while the officer supervising him was distracted. In fact, there was no yard officer watching him, a state prison administrator said this week.

This is the gaping maw, the jaws through which convicts pass to be evaluated and processed before they are spit out once again and force-fed into California's swollen prisons. Every day of the week, buses from jails throughout Southern California roll into Chino to disgorge their forlorn and often dangerous passengers behind the faded beige walls of this Reception Center. And every day, buses roll out of Chino loaded with newly processed convicts bound for prisons throughout the state.

Under pressure from state officials, Lancaster state prison has softened its controversial policy of locking inmates in their cells nearly 24 hours a day to reduce overtime costs. But all 32 state prisons are instituting less drastic cutbacks to reduce the projected $70-million cost overrun for the current fiscal year, a state Department of Corrections spokesman said Thursday.

More than 20 inmates were injured Thursday, three of them critically, in a riot involving 300 men at the state prison in Lancaster, the worst violence at the lockup since it opened in 1993, officials said. Guards fired several warning shots and used pepper spray, tear gas and wooden bullets to quell the 15-minute disturbance, which began in a maximum-security yard about 10:45 a.m., according to Department of Corrections officials.

An innovative program that seeks to reduce violence among maximum-security inmates is being severely tested at the state prison in Lancaster, where a population squeeze is forcing officials to house dangerous criminals with others who have vowed to remain peaceful. Since 2000, Lancaster's honor yard program has created a special housing area for prisoners who have promised to stay away from gangs, drugs and violence.

The warden at the state prison in Lancaster was removed from his job this week after officials learned that a sexually explicit comedy performance containing racially offensive material was presented to inmates earlier this year. Charles Michael Harrison was demoted to associate warden in the aftermath of the May 4 show after a guard complained to authorities in Sacramento. The whistleblower, Lt.