Pelican Bay at 20: How the state prison came to be

Pelican Bay State Prison

“It was a strange feeling,” Woods said, recalling that warm October day in 1985. “It was a different world.”

Born and raised in Del Norte County, Woods had spent his entire life along the remote North Coast, save for a three-year stint with the U.S. Army. He never planned on leaving the area, and he especially never expected he would one day be working as a correctional officer.

“If you wanted to stay here, you actually did what you had to do as far as where you wanted to work, and you wanted to work at the best place where you could make the most money,” Woods said.

“It was a good living, but I could see that it was on the downslide because of the way the economy was going, the spotted owl and everything else,” Woods said.

Stilling the axes

Timber was king throughout much of Del Norte’s history. The first sawmill was established in 1853, and by 1955 there were 52.

Ancient redwoods and giant Douglas firs were felled by the thousands and turned into hundreds of millions of board feet of lumber as the hum of chain saws filled the forest air.

But this 100-year heyday would not last much longer. The industry was changing, automation was becoming the norm, a recession had reduced demand for timber products, Canadian imports had increased competition and environmental regulations, in particular the Forest Practices Act of 1973, was forcing loggers to take a new, and more expensive, look at their harvesting techniques.

In 1968, the local timber industry took yet another hit with the establishment of Redwood National and State Parks, which protected 56,000 acres of forests in Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

By 1971, then county-assessor Jerry Cochran said there were only 17 sawmills and plywood companies operating in Del Norte.

“Economically we knew, or at least I knew, we were going to have a real lull,” Cochran said.

In 1973, he decided to conduct a study that would tabulate how much timber was left on private property in Del Norte County. Even though loggers were still “cruisin’ timber,” cutting 250-350 million board feet a year, he found there was only around 6 billion board feet left.

“Just take the average, and in 20 years you’re out of business,” Cochran said. “You’re losing your inventory and you’re expected to keep up the same amount of timber production. Well, it can’t be done.”

Del Norte needed a new industry. Timber was on its way out, and fishing, though Cochran didn’t realize it at the time, was also on the decline.

“It was all economics,” Cochran said. “We knew we needed something.”

Prison business booming

Shortly after Del Norters were coming to terms with the declining timber industry, the state realized it was having some of its own problems. More and more Californians were going to prison and the capacity to house them was running out.

According to data from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, there were 20,345 inmates sleeping in the 24,399 available beds in 1976. Over the next 10 years the population would more than double to around 55,000, while the capacity of state prisons would only increase by about 12,000.

While some of the increase in inmates was due to the state’s overall growth, much has been attributed to tough-on-crime laws passed in the 1970s and 80s that led to longer sentences.

“Certainly, there was an expansion of the prison population, not just in California but nationally,” said Terri McDonald, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Chief Deputy Secretary of Adult Operations. “We also saw an increase in gang behavior in our prisons.”

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s prison gangs, such as the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family, Nuestra Familia and Mexican Mafia formed and then strengthened their hold on the California prison system. Violence and drug trafficking became more prevalent.

The state saw the need for more prisons, and in the early 1980s, shortly after Republican Gov. George Deukmejian took office, billions of dollars had been approved to construct new correctional facilities. It was the beginning of a prison building boom.

“We actually went from 12 prisons to 33 prison in very short order due to just significant overcrowding,” McDonald said.

Meeting the demand

Landing one of those new state prisons wasn’t the only option to bring bring new jobs to Del Norte. Leaders looked elsewhere first.

For about a year Cochran and others analyzed the possibility of attracting a Veterans Affairs Hospital. The preferred site would have been near the corner of U.S. Highway 101 and Enderts Beach Road. The idea fizzled, Cochran said, because Del Norte was too remote and didn’t have a college campus to supply medical students.

They also considered a proposal from a Canadian mining operation that offered the chance for 350 full-time jobs for locals who had been put out of work. But the Canadian company couldn’t get government money to jump-start its operation.

“The prison seemed to be one of the only avenues of economic development,” Cochran said. “It ended up being the only thing that was going to be in Del Norte County.”

Discourse over bringing a prison here started simply enough. In 1983, Sheriff Tom Hopper had made a simple inquiry to state corrections officials about the possibility. From that moment on, he said, it was almost destined.

“I don’t think there were any real challenges,” Hopper said. “The Department of Corrections was very interested in putting a prison here.”

A steering committee was formed, made up of various community leaders and elected officials, with Cochran in the lead and Hopper as one of its members. Its purpose was twofold: to ensure the state didn’t back out and to make sure local residents accepted the idea of having a prison in their backyard.

With Del Norte’s unemployment rate hovering around 15 percent in the mid-’80s, about twice the state average, it wasn’t hard to convince people to support a prison that would provide hundreds of good-paying jobs that could replace the timber work and wouldn’t be subject to the seasonal lulls associated with fishing. Local politicians, business owners and even the newspaper were salivating at the prospect of infusing the economy with millions of dollars of income.

That enthusiasm shocked some people, as several California communities were apprehensive, even vehemently opposed, to having inmates in their midst.

A 1984 Wall Street Journal article about Del Norte put it this way:

“Elsewhere, this would be the municipal equivalent of trying to catch herpes, but the prison would provide 540 year-round jobs and the county can’t afford to be fussy.”

Not all Del Norters were enamored with the idea. Some residents formed an opposition group that tried to dismantle any plans for the state to bring a prison here.

Their concerns echoed those of other small communities. They worried about escapes, the influx of inmates’ families, larger populations that would lead to more competition for existing jobs and the idea that a prison might repel businesses looking to locate in the vicinity.

The dissenters’ efforts were futile. Too many people wanted a prison, and the state wanted a community that wanted a prison.

A done deal

It took a couple years and a bit of legislative wrangling to finalize plans for a prison in Del Norte County.

A medium-security facility evolved into a maximum-security fortress, which meant more jobs. Sites were considered and discarded, including one in Klamath, another at the southern entrance to Crescent City and one at the intersection of Inyo Street and Washington Boulevard, before a forest was cleared in Fort Dick. On Aug. 20, 1986, Gov. Deukmejian signed a pair of bills that set aside $325 million in bonds to construct a state-of-the-art facility in Del Norte County designed to house 2,200 of the state’s most dangerous and disruptive criminals in Del Norte.

Initially called “Prison of the Redwoods” by then-California Sen. Barry Keene, it became Pelican Bay State Prison after a Crescent City woman won a naming contest.

Reflections

“Everyone has problems,” Jerry Cochran said as he reflected on his efforts to bring Pelican Bay to Del Norte County. “The thing that happened with us is we were able to address some of those problems.”

The timber industry has all but vanished in Del Norte County. Cochran remembers a time when there were about 2,500 people employed in the logging industry; by the early 1990s, when some of the last sawmills were closing, he estimates only 250 jobs were left.

In the years since Pelican Bay’s arrival, the population of Del Norte County has increased by nearly 10,000 people to around 29,000, including the 3,300 inmates at the prison.

According to 2008 annual figures from the California Employment Development Department, about 30 percent of the county’s total payroll of $286 million comes from the 1,700-plus people working in state government, most of them at the prison.

Unemployment rates are still in double-digits, though some of that can be blamed on the current recession.

“I think that people felt that this was not the best economic development that we could do,” Cochran said. “But there wasn’t much else we could do at the time.”

Even though Del Norte is still economically challenged — today it has the highest poverty rate in the state, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data — Cochran said without the prison things would be worse.

“You wouldn’t see Wal-Mart. You wouldn’t see Home Depot. You wouldn’t see Walgreens. Safeway would probably be gone,” he said. “You would have a much poorer community with your infrastructure failing drastically with no way to improve it.

“The community would be much different. I think it would be pretty dismal.”

Like Cochran, Hopper looks at Pelican Bay and doesn’t feel regret. In a way he was a casualty of the prison coming to Del Norte County, and a direct beneficiary.

He said he lost his bid for re-election to someone who ran on a platform that blamed him for bringing Pelican Bay into the community. But that loss allowed him to take a job at the prison working as a community liaison, a job he kept until retiring.

“It’s been a godsend to a lot of people. A lot of people are employed out there,” Hopper said. “I don’t see anything coming in here that would have replaced what the prison’s done.”

Homecoming

The first inmates arrived at Pelican Bay State Prison on Dec. 1, 1989. When they did, Correctional Officer Dennis Woods was there to greet them.

He had already been in Del Norte about six weeks as part of a security detail to watch over the grounds before the prison officially opened.

It was then that he knew his decision to leave his family in Del Norte County to work at San Quentin had paid off. When he’d taken the job there in 1985, he had known a state prison was on its way to his community and he wanted to improve his chances at getting a job near the house he’s owned with his wife since 1979.

Twenty years later he’s still a Pelican Bay correctional officer, living in the same house.

Woods isn’t sure what he would’ve done had the prison not come to Del Norte, but he’s glad it did.

He’s noticed the changes over the past 20 years and has been a part of them. He traded in his leather apron, gloves and hardhat from his days in the mill for a green jumpsuit, baton and gold whistle.

When he talks to people in the community, few of them know someone  working in timber. But they all seem to know someone who works at the prison.

“I don’t think anything else that would have come here would have been as long-lasting as the prison’s going to be,” Woods said. “As we say, it’s a renewable resource. There’s guys waiting to get to Pelican Bay.”