Facilities
Pelican Bay opened in 1989. Pelican Bay's grounds and operations are physically divided. Half of the prison holds Level IV prisoners in a "general population" environment with outside exercise courts. The other half of the prison contains Pelican Bay's best-known feature: an X-shaped cluster of white buildings and barren ground known as the Security Housing Unit (SHU). An electric fence surrounds the entire perimeter.
The 8 × 10 foot cells of the Pelican Bay SHU, or Secure Housing Unit, are made of smooth, poured concrete. They have no windows. Instead, there are fluorescent lights, which the inmates can control. For at least twenty-two hours every day, prisoners remain in their cells, looking out through a perforated steel door at a solid concrete wall. Food is delivered twice a day (breakfast, sack lunch, and dinner) through a slot in the cell door.
A correctional officer in a central control booth controls these doors; he can press a button and allow one prisoner at a time to go out to a shower, or to his court-mandated five hours per week of outdoor exercise. This exercise takes place in a cement yard, often called a "dog run", which extends the length of three cells, and has a roof partially open to the sky. The correctional officer in the control booth is always armed; from his central vantage point in the control booth, he can shoot onto any one of six pods, each containing eight cells.
Read more about this topic: Pelican Bay State Prison
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