by Mateo Hoke
For the first couple of weeks that I was home, I stayed with my parents in Compton. My parents helped me get a job through a friend about a week after I got there. I was working at a place called Jackson Products, in Santa Fe Springs, California.
My youngest son, Roberto, was born in 1985, and that same year I was arrested on a first-degree murder charge. I was charged with being one of three people who were armed with three different weapons in a shooting. My alleged codefendants and I were all accused of firing shots into a victim’s body. My alleged codefendants and I were tried separately. There was no physical evidence: no guns, fingerprints, bloodstained clothing.
In many ways my trial on this case was much like my trial in 1974. I have statements from a number of potential witnesses who spoke to my former investigator and told him that I wasn’t at the scene of the shooting when it occurred. None of these witnesses were called to testify on my behalf. There was a substantial amount of evidence that showed that I was, and am, innocent. After deliberating for almost four full days, the jury convicted me of first-degree murder, but they found that I didn’t use a weapon in the commission of the crime. This basically means that the jury didn’t believe that I actually shot the victim. In spite of this, I was sentenced to life without possible parole. I was sent directly back to solitary in the SHU at Chino.58
The first eight years of solitary
It really is hard to define what solitary is like in words. I could probably talk forever about the experience and still not explain it. There’s no way that you can be subjected to long-term isolation and not be affected by it.
When I first came to prison in 1975, solitary confinement was very different. There were four major solitary confinement units in California: San Quentin, Old Folsom, DVI Tracy, and Soledad. Every SHU had its own degree of isolation, but for the most part prisoners in solitary were allowed to go out to the outdoor yard that was built inside each unit.
The food was much better then. We were also allowed to have appliances in our cell. And in three of the SHUs we were allowed contact visits if we remained disciplinary free for a year.59 So the degree of isolation that we were subjected to was offset by the number of programs that were available.
Even then, it was the violence, or potential for violence, that took its toll on you psychologically. In every SHU, including the SHU in the reception center at Chino, you knew you were in an environment where you could lose your life. But San Quentin was the worst. It was overtly racist in prison, and particularly in solitary, in those years. It was very common that when cell doors opened, an Afrikan was set up to be attacked by two non-Afrikans. We had to be on guard constantly, every day. And this meant being awake, dressed, and ready for anything that might happen before breakfast.
Afrikans are guys who follow certain principles. They study and read to become critical thinkers who are connected to humanity. “Afrikan” is a term we use that has to do with shedding the influences of capitalist, racist, sexist, misogynistic America. That “k” is symbolic of the transformation into a new, critically thinking, person. The term symbolizes our struggle together and care about each other. Knowing that you were in such a violent environment, especially if you were an Afrikan, and knowing that the violence was culturally motivated, by staff, certain prisoners, and the culture of prison, it meant that you had to be hypervigilant. To live in that state of awareness every hour of every day was enough to create some serious mental health problems. There were guys who decided they could not take this, and they chose to be housed in protective custody.
In the late 1980s in the SHU at Tehachapi—and particularly at New Folsom—there were ongoing incidents of violence.60 New Folsom was described as a killing field because of the number of shootings that occurred there. But it was with the opening of the SHU in Corcoran in 1988 that the violence really accelerated.61
In 1988, they rounded up about thirty Afrikans and placed us in solitary pending an investigation into what was being called “BGF activity.” For the entire time that I was in solitary, I was told that the investigation was ongoing. As far as I know it’s still ongoing.
I was on the first bus to open up Corcoran SHU and was housed there from 1988 to 1990. It was as racist and as foul a place as any prison I’ve been to—as totalitarian as well. The inhumanities at Corcoran SHU took place for several years and were kept from public view.
The first eight years of solitary were the most trying. The infamous gladiator fights were being staged at Corcoran when I was there. The administration would house people on the yard together who were classified as enemies with each other. This was done knowing there would be a fight or stabbing on the yard. Prisoners would be allowed to fight, and then an officer in the gun tower would shoot the people who were fighting, sometimes with a nine-millimeter rifle, sometimes with the block gun. The block gun would shoot hard rubber projectiles and at close range could be lethal.
Every day, people were deliberately put into positions that would and did result in fights. Very serious fights, many of which resulted in a number of people, particularly Afrikan people, being shot and killed. I was attacked once by two non-Afrikan people, and even though it was clear that I was being attacked, somehow I was the only person who was shot with the block gun.62
I can remember in Corcoran SHU when you were released to the yard, you could take a deep breath and smell cordite in the air. The yard smelled like gunfire. And throughout the day, all day, you could hear gunshots being fired.
WHAT MADNESS FEELS LIKE
The animosities that developed at Corcoran SHU carried over to Pelican Bay SHU.63 Pelican Bay opened in 1989. I was sent there in May 1990. The IGI (Institutional Gang Investigators) in particular, the so-called gang experts, had complete control over every aspect of the environment.
Pelican Bay was built in the most remote part of California. We were intentionally made to feel as though we were separated from everything. The cells were arranged in pods: seven pods in each building, and eight cells to a pod. The pods were designed in such a way that you could only see and speak to people in the other seven cells in the pod with you. For the first few years the policy was that you couldn’t pass anything to another cell, even the cell next to you. When you came out on the tier for yard or showers, you couldn’t speak to anyone, nor could you acknowledge anyone in one of the other pods. Doing so would result in your being issued a rules violation report for engaging in gang activity. If you were fortunate enough to receive a visit you were only allowed to visit for one hour, which actually meant only about forty-five minutes.
We couldn’t write to our families about the conditions because we didn’t want to worry them. It is doubtful that any mail to them would make it out of the prison anyway. The mail was routinely and intentionally held up or thrown away. No phone calls were allowed except for emergencies, and what constituted an emergency was up to the administration—the same people who were responsible for your oppression. Part of the constant efforts to isolate us included not allowing phone calls and withholding letters.
There were also the same gladiator-type fights occurring at Pelican Bay. But what made Pelican Bay SHU different from every other SHU past or present was the isolation. I cannot ever remember any SHU that was comparable. Solitary at Pelican Bay really is isolation. You don’t see the sky, you see a piece of the sky. Everything was geared toward destroying the humanity of the people housed there. You watched people being driven crazy and even if you didn’t know the person, it affected you. There were guys who would get so crazy they would throw feces and urine into your cell.
After decades of being told that you’re “the worst of the worst,” you have your moments when you question your own self-worth, your sanity. You feel as though no one cares. You are, literally, all alone. It is so damaging that you can start to believe that you have nothing in common with normal people. And there is no way out. This feeling of dread engulfs you. And at that m
oment, you’d rather be dead than breathing in isolation.
It was after my tenth year in solitary that I became convinced that I’d be in solitary for the rest of my incarceration. There is this black hole that is all around you. The nothingness. Waking up to the same identical thing every single day. And going to sleep knowing what you’ll be waking up to. You look up, and you can see a light. It is miles away, but you can see it. You know that if you don’t make it to that light, you’re going to go crazy. You know exactly what madness feels like and what it looks like.
I’ve seen a lot in my life. Not much is worse than seeing another human being completely unravel. All of us who were housed in solitary, especially at Pelican Bay, had moments when we actually felt ourselves slipping psychologically. Some of the staff at Pelican Bay were clearly trying to intentionally contribute to driving people with mental health problems crazy. Or get them to debrief. It was really shameful. We saw it regularly, and maintaining our sanity became uppermost in our minds.
It’s said that the key to maintaining your sanity in solitary is to stay as creative as possible. And I agree, creativity has its place. But at some point, at least for me, you run out of creative space. We would, for example, constantly switch up on our exercise routines. Instead of doing, say, eight-count burpees, we would do ten count. And then the next month we would do twenty-two count. But they’re still burpees.
There were people in solitary who went crazy; people who tried to commit suicide, some more than once. At Pelican Bay SHU, the officers would help facilitate a person losing his mind. We were issued razors during showers, and people would try to cut their wrists while in the shower. They would be taken over to the hospital and put on suicide watch in the suicide cells, strip cells that were freezing cold. Guards would keep the person in the suicide cell for about three days, provide him with a psychiatric consultation, and then put him right back in the same cell he was in before, give him a razor, and the suicide process would repeat itself. I’ve seen this go on with the same prisoner several times.
TO BREAK PEOPLE
I think that many of us reclaimed our humanity. Fighting back will do that. We did a lot of reading, studying, discussing with each other; those were the kinds of things that kept us as sharp as we needed to be to stay focused. Pelican Bay became a school, a university. The more that we learned and understood about what the challenge really was, the more prepared we became. We were ready for the protest when it was time. We understood that we had to fight that battle. Or there would be no light at the end of that tunnel.
We would complain about our treatment. The complaints started when we first arrived at Pelican Bay and continued over the years that we were housed there. None of the complaints resulted in changes being made, which was the same with Corcoran SHU and other SHUs.64
A unit was opened up called the Violence Control Unit: VCU. All of the prisoners who had serious mental health problems were moved there. It was still isolation and nothing was done to provide help for anyone who needed it. The VCU simply made it possible for Pelican Bay to hide the people who had problems. In truth they used the VCU to house prisoners who didn’t have serious mental health problems in an effort to break them as well.
Over in the VCU staff constantly abused those prisoners. The people with mental health problems would be denied showers. The stench in the building could be overwhelming. Some of the staff who worked the evening shift would make sure inmates didn’t get their food. The dinner trays were given to prisoners through a slot. When the officer slid the tray through the slot and the prisoner would come to the door to pick up his tray of food the officer would slam the slot shut, intentionally causing the food to fly all over the cell. The officer would laugh and walk away.
I was housed in VCU for about a month because of a rules violation. Every single day these things happened. There was one officer who came to work and immediately called out to one of the prisoners on the tier where I was housed. He would call this prisoner’s name, the prisoner would answer, and the officer would yell back, “Fuck you!” Then the two of them would begin an exchange of insults that would last until the shift change at 10 p.m.
That prisoner had serious mental health problems. The officer was just amusing himself. But when things like this happen day after day it affects you. People who have mental health problems are made worse in solitary. There were guys who would smear themselves in their own body fluids and excrement, eat and drink it.
There were no mental health professionals in the SHU to provide people with any assistance. This was by design. Policy makers at both Pelican Bay and Sacramento weren’t interested in anything except the outcome that was being produced. The SHU was built for that specific purpose, to break people.
THIS AFFECTED OUR FAMILIES AND LOVED ONES
In 1996, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I submitted a request for an emergency phone call. I was denied the phone call and told that my mother having cancer didn’t qualify as an emergency. I was then told that if I agreed to debrief, I would be allowed phone calls whenever I wanted one.
Then my mother had a stroke—the first of two, in 1997. She almost died and the strokes left her partially paralyzed. My father notified me through the mail, and I requested that I be allowed an emergency call after showing the letter to a counselor. I was told that my mother’s stroke did not constitute an emergency and my request was denied. A buddy of mine who was housed in the same pod was informed that his wife jumped out of a window on the first floor of her apartment and sprained her ankle. He was allowed to make an emergency phone call.
My father had multiple heart attacks. I was told that this didn’t qualify as an emergency. When my grandmother passed away while I was housed at Pelican Bay, the IGI held onto the letter that my parents sent me informing me of her death for forty-five days after it arrived at the prison. I was allowed to make a call almost two months after my mother had buried her mother.
Sometimes we wouldn’t receive mail for months, and then one day we’d get three or four months’ worth of mail. This affected our families and loved ones. When they didn’t hear from us in months, they would think that something was wrong. And when you are in isolation, and you don’t hear from the people who have always been there for you, you start to look for what you may have done to cause people to abandon you. My parents were my dearest and most trusted friends, but I still worried I had done something wrong. Then you find out nothing is wrong when that stack of mail shows up in front of your cell. I would feel this sense of relief come over me. Even though I knew, all the while, that it was the IGI doing this, it would still affect me the same way every time. I would always feel as though I’d been abandoned. It’s a horrible feeling.
Isolation puts in your head that you are never far from being alone. Every day you wake up and are reminded that you have to be strong and stay on guard so as not to be broken. I did have moments when I wanted to just give up. Not debrief, just give up. I couldn’t do it, because if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.
MOMENTS WHEN I JUST WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE
The system really was rigged in such a way as to use any and all information as a basis to keep us in solitary. In 2006, while I was housed in Tehachapi SHU, I had no information submitted on me in five and a half years. Well, less than six months before I would have been released from solitary, I was called out by the IGI and accused of engaging in all kinds of illegal activity, ranging from ordering the assault on an inmate to providing BGF material to inmates. And of having in my possession BGF training material, codes, names, and addresses of BGF members. My assigned cell was never searched. No evidence existed. In spite of this, and simply because someone told the IGI that I had the information and ordered the assault, it was used to justify my continued retention in solitary for another six years!
The same thing happened in 2012 when I was in Corcoran. The prison administration said there w
as a letter that contained gang information. But because it was characterized as gang information I wasn’t allowed to see the letter or know why they characterized the letter that way. Any challenge to something like this has to be sent to the people who classified the material as gang related in the first place.
As a result of the peaceful protest that occurred between 2011 and 2013, the CDCR agreed to release those prisoners who were in solitary confinement serving indeterminate terms based on their being validated.65 A special committee was established to accomplish this, and people were released, according to the length of time that they had been housed in solitary, starting with those who’d been housed the longest.
According to the CDCR, I was the one who organized the hunger strike at Corcoran, with a lot of the people on the outside, but it was something we all participated in and contributed to. The longest I went without food was twenty-eight days. After that I had to be rushed to the hospital.
I was released from solitary confinement at Corcoran SHU and transferred here to Solano on November 6, 2015. The biggest adjustment that I had to make in gen pop after being in solitary for so long was not thinking or acting like I’m still in solitary. It never occurred to me that I had to retrain myself to think differently. I’ve always known that it is constantly necessary to change the way that one thinks. I just never thought or considered that it applied to my being released from solitary to the general population.
There are 250 cells in the building, top and bottom tier combined. As I understand it they have four facilities or yards here, two level 3 facilities (I am housed in one of the level 3 facilities) and two level 2 facilities. The level 2 facilities are dorm living and the level 3 facilities are cells.
