2 Inmates Killed in Lancaster

Two inmates have been slain over the last three weeks inside a cellblock at the Lancaster state prison, renewing concerns about overcrowding at the institution.

The latest victim was found Tuesday morning, stuffed under the bottom bunk of his cell and wrapped in a bedsheet, said prison spokesman Ken Lewis. Richard Ponton, 36, also reportedly had a pillow over his face and a cardboard box shielding his body.

“There was a significant amount of blood on the floor,” Lewis said. “He apparently bled to death.”

The killing came two weeks after another inmate was found wrapped in a bloody sheet in his cell.

That victim, Robert Painter, 59, had been beaten to death and died from multiple injuries to his head, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said.

Painter’s cellmate is being blamed for his death. Ponton’s death remains under investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, though his cellmate is a suspect, authorities say.

Both deaths occurred within one cellblock in a unit segregated from the general prison population for inmates who need extra security.

Officials acknowledged that having two prisoners killed in the same cellblock within the same month was unusual. But they said it was too early to know whether changes were needed there.

“We don’t know all the details yet,” said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “But any time there’s a homicide in one of our prisons, it’s always a cause for concern and investigation.”

Some prisoner-rights advocates say the incidents highlight the danger of having two potentially violent prisoners in one cell. So-called double-celling is one of the ways that Lancaster and other facilities in California’s prison system have been dealing with the growing inmate population.

“The deaths are due to overcrowding,” said Cayenne Bird, whose son was once incarcerated at Lancaster and who heads a support group for prisoners’ families. “The guards have a campaign going on that it’s too few officers, but what it is really is there’s too many inmates. They’re carelessly double-celling the mentally ill with regular inmates.”

Officials at the Lancaster prison have no immediate plans to change their screening process for placing two inmates in one cell. The prison houses about 4,500 minimum-, high-medium and maximum-custody inmates but was designed to hold fewer than half that number when it opened in 1993 as the only state prison in Los Angeles County.

Lewis said prison policy prevented him from disclosing why Ponton, Painter and their cellmates had been placed in the “administrative segregation” unit, adding that none of them were known gang members.

“Prison is an unpredictable environment,” Lewis said.

“There’s only three officers assigned to each cellblock, and each one holds 200 inmates,” he added. “How can you do it? We have procedures in place with security checks to ensure everyone’s safe. But anything can happen at any given time.”

Charles Hughes, whose firing as a Lancaster correctional officer last year is on appeal and who heads the officers’ union, said there is plenty of time for cellmates to hurt each other or for a prisoner to sneak into another inmate’s cell.

“We could be releasing prisoners into the yard and be totally distracted, or the inmates will do something to divert our attention,” he said. “These diversions happen all the time.”

Furthermore, he said, prisoners often successfully lie their way into “sensitive needs” units with orders from gang leaders to kill another inmate.

“They say, ‘We don’t care where you are, we are going to get you,’ ” Hughes said. “My first nine years, we hardly ever saw any murders, but the last two or three years, there’s been a lot of murders at Lancaster. Why? I don’t know.”

Ponton was serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for a murder in Los Angeles. His cellmate, Christopher Bass, was imprisoned for second-degree robbery in Ventura County.

Bass was being held as a suspect Thursday but had not been charged, and sheriff’s investigators said they had not ruled out that someone else may have killed Ponton.

Painter was serving a 25-year sentence for setting fire to then-state Sen. Ray Haynes’ office in Riverside after Painter became upset over having to register as a sex offender for a child molestation conviction.

State prison officials are also investigating the deaths of two inmates this month in Monterey County.

One occurred Jan. 3 at Salinas Valley State Prison and the other the previous week at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad.

A cellmate is a suspect in at least one of the cases, prison officials have said.