, O M E W I T H WHEN INMATES PULL A KNIFE ON A San Quentin guard, or torch tiers at Folsom, or emerge as transvestites at Soledad, the California Department of Corrections sends them to Vaca- ville. Backed up against the Vaca Mountains midway between San Francisco and Sacramento, the California Correctional Medical Facility (CMF), as it is called, is home to the suicidal, the schizophrenic, the acutely psychotic, the manic depres- sive, the flamboyantly homosexual and the transsexual. They are all here, a total of 1,450 inmates deemed unmanageable by other prisons. It s the Grauman's Chinese of the penal Just down the road is the world's largest roadside restaurant, the Nut Tree: while tourists eat their $6 cheeseburgers and gawk at 575,000 motor homes beached in the restau- rant's mile-square parking lot, the nearby psychiatric penitentiary tries to preserve, protect and defend notorious inmates. Eldridge Cleaver preparedfor the bestseller list here in his pre-evangelist days. Donald "Cinque" deFreeze and his Black Cultural Association colleagues, some of whom eventually found their way into the Symbionese Liberation Army, scandalized the place by mak- inglove with women visitors beneath the auditorium stage. Current in- mates, such as Edmund Kemper (who killed 15 women in the Santa Cruz area), serve as clerks for group therapists helping prisoners work out their antisocial tendencies. And President Jimmy Carter's nephew, William Spann, is building a sizable bank account by selling interviews about his robbery record. EVEN in celebrity atmosphere people crane for a rare glimpse of the slight, bearded man in sandals who resides on the second floor of Willis Unit. Locked into a Garbo routine, the re- cluse seldom emerges from his 43- square-foot cell. Taking his meals privately through a slot, skipping yard exercise, dodging efforts to move him out to the main line. Charles Milles Manson laka The W izard) oc- casionally retreats from his semi- private wing to the isolation of the prison hospital. Shunning visitors, ducking interviews and refusing to acknowledge most mail, the Sixties most notorious mass murderer won't even participate in group therapy. He is fearful of getting trashed again by inmates, as he was by the Folsom gang several years ago. He prefers to remain on the Willis tier, illumi- nated by floor-to-ceiling windows at either end. Here he constructs mobiles from bits of cloth and paper, f ractises his guitar and listens to om T. Hall on radio station KRAK (Sacramento). VERY- thing you want is right here." says correctional counselor Dave Caprio, looking up from three overflowing files on the man who masterminded the strange, terrible murders of ac- tress Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Gary Hinman and Shorty Shea. "We've got the psychiatric re- ports, the 47 disciplinary infractions, the letters from admirers and people who want to save his soul. How long has it been? Ten years. You'd think people would no longer care. There've been so many other famous cases since then. But he seems to fascinate and haunt people. You'd be amazed by the number of calls we get from teenagers who have just finished reading Heller Skelter and want to meet this 'really neat' inmate. Just last week I got a call from some doctor in West Virginia who wants to come and see him. He said Charlie was an old West Virginia boy; he thought maybe he could help him straighten out. Just recently a New York woman phoned to say she had a dream that Manson made a break and started going after Jews. She wanted to make sure there's no chance he can escape." There is of course no reason to fear an anti- Semitic inmate 3,000 miles away. But that is the ver y point of the Man- son saga-wholesale irrationality. Sentenced to the gas chamber for his role in the murder of nine people, Manson was taken of f death row in 1972 thanks to a California Supreme Court decision snuffing out capital punishment. A plebiscite reversed that verdict but the new law is not ret- roactive. For nearly a year Manson has been eligible forparole. However, the adult authority has not forgotten the advice of a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who suggested, "He should not, in the course of his lifetime, be released from state prison." Even the star inmate con- curs: "People like me should not be let out." Since 1971 when si x associates were arrested in a-plot aimed at springing the pivotal man, Charles has not .heard much from his ex- tended family. A lousy correspon- dent, he doesn't have any contact with Tex Watson (now residing at California Men's Colony), Bobby Beausoleil (Deuel), Bruce Davis (Fol- somi, Squeaky Fromme (Alderson. West Virginia, federal correctional institution) or Leslie VanHouten, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwin- kel (California Institution for Wom- en). Nor does he seem to nurse much hope of a reunion: "Prison is where I belong." The bastard son of a 16-year-old Ohio prostitute, Manson has spent most of his 44 years in institutions. ever since running away from a fos- ter home at age 8. "Reality is more than getting out of prison," he con- fessed to a Vacaville reporter, Chris Weinstein, not long-ago, in the only interview he's given at CMF. "You're in prison more than I'm in prison. It's all prison. You've got more rules to live by than I do. I can sit down and relax. Can you?" VACAVILLE HAS SERVED AS A PSV- chiatric proving ground for phar- maceutical companies, and had he arrived only a few years earlier, Manson might have been a candidate for behavior modification studies. In Kindand Usual Punish merit, Jessica Mitford described experiments in which inmates received a few dollars a day to try Anectine. a muscle relax- ant causing patients "to lose all con- trol of voluntary muscles, including those used for breathing." This proj- ect was dropped after several sub- jects who took the drug "actually in- creased their overall number of dis- ciplinary infractions." Doctors running the three-storey units swear they no longer use Anec- tine. And a plan by the former state prison director to try "neurosurgical treatment on violent inmates" has been dropped. These days cor rec- tional officials no longer talk about trying to transform career criminals into bank vice-presidents. They tend to agree with Governor Jerry Brown, who doesn't see the point of worrying about losers "not even Sigmund Freud could do anything about . You should rehabilitate jails, not peopl e. Brown's view, consistent with the latest thinking in penology, suggests that "human nature has some basic fundamental weaknesses that are always going to be there no matter what" we do. For many people in this society, crime in fact pays. I don't find much use or comfort for these great analytical studies of why crime is caused and how we can mold people's minds by various forms of treatment and go% r ernment intervention. I think that they have very modest potential." ..KING their cue from the governor, CMF officials are not trying to reprpgram Charles Manson. "In the past." says Caprio, sitting in an office that looks like it was designed for a high school guidance counselor, "we'd move him to a special psychiatric unit when he stopped communicating. But right now he is not in any therapy and receives no drugs. He's sick today but that's just a respiratory thing. Char- lie's got a fever but it is nothing serious." When he's feeling better Caprio s prisoner likes to play his guitar. It ,4-
