We Are Jane Doe E2: Operation Breakdown

August 2nd, 2024, started with a search. More than 150 women rounded up into chow hall as their cells were tossed. What happened next was beyond their imagination. It would be investigated by the feds and the state. Things did not go to plan, or did they? Part 2 of 3. This episode contains violence against women, sexual assault, and strong language. Please take care while listening. "We Are Jane Doe" is a new 3-part series from KQED’s Snap Studios. Over three episodes, we trace Ali Prout's dramatic fight for justice and the stunning ripple effects that threaten to upend the system of power and control at one of the largest women’s prisons on earth. KQED reporters Anna Sussman and Madi Bolaños spent two years investigating this story. They spoke to more than a dozen women incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility, read through hundreds of pages of internal prison documents, obtained leaked audio, and painstakingly watched hours of video footage to reconstruct one of the most complex and devastating use-of-force incidents in state history. This series was made possible in part with support from The Poynter Institute https://www.poynter.org/. Produced by: Madi Bolaños, Anna Sussman & Sukey Lewis Featured Story Voices: Aliksandria Prout, Catrina Cameron, Christina Wind, Wisdom Mohammed, Elizabeth Lozano and Antoinette Yancey Editors: Sukey Lewis, Nancy Lopez & Mark Ristich Fact-checking: Mark Bettancourt Data Editor: Jeremy Sanchez Rue of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism Original Music & Engineering: Dirk Schwarzhoff Director of Production: Marisa Dodge Executive Producers: Glynn Washington and Mark Ristich Season 17 - Episode 44 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

• 0:07Speaker 00

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• 1:11Speaker 01

  Snap Nation, welcome to We Are Jane Doe, Part Two. Part one details how we got a tip about something big, really, really big, that went down at the women's prison here in California. And this tip led our producers to the story of a remarkable woman named Alexandria Prouse. Ali. Ali told us the story of being in prison and being assaulted in prison by a corrections officer and then saving the evidence of the assault so she could take him down later when she got out. And that's exactly what she did. When she left prison, she went to the courts and he was arrested. If you haven't yet heard part one, you're gonna want to go back and listen to that. And listeners, please be aware, this story is intense.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  It includes violence and sensitive listeners should be advised. After Ali revealed what happened to her, other women started to come forward with their stories of assault. And let's just say, the officers at the prison, they were not happy about this. That's where we left off. And right now, we're rejoining the story in the prison where Ali's old cellmate still live with these officers watching over them.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  On the morning of August 2nd, 2024, Katrina Cameron, former cellmate of Ali Alexandria Prouse, was doing her usual morning things. She was getting ready for the day. She was with her girlfriend and roomie Christina Wind. We were drinking coffee, getting our rooms together, making our beds. Like, we were just having a regular morning, shooting the shit, talking to each other. And feeding their pet baby lizard Toby. And Toby lived in a cup next to her bed.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  I consider her just like my child. Other people probably relate to like an emotional support animal, I guess. She kept me centered. She gave me a reason to wake up and smile each morning, you know?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Then she heard the officers coming through their unit, giving orders. They told us they were searching and for us just to walk out with nothing, that we couldn't take nothing with us. I had Toby on me because we weren't going to leave him behind. Cameron tucked baby lizard Toby into her bra and stepped out of her cell. Me and Wind were pretty much the last ones out of our hallway. There were about 160 women in their unit total and all of them filed out to the dining hall. We know what happened next from internal documents. It was really early in the morning.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  The ISU came and dragged us out to the chow hall. We also talked to a dozen women who were there about what happened that day. You'll hear some of their voices. This is Irene Avalos, who's almost 60 years old. It's the rude awakening. They came and just told us to get up, get out.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  That's just it. We go out, get it over with. It's a regular search. That's what we're thinking. You know, we get searched all the time, actually.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Wisdom Mohammed lived on D Yard. She said she knew a search was coming, but...

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Not one time did we think that it was going to be a whole, the whole unit being searched. I didn't think it was going to be that.

• 4:45Speaker 05

  We started seeing a bunch of bins coming out of our unit.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  This is Sarah Toledo.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Like really big, like trash bins, kind of. Hey, what's happening? They said they're throwing your guys' property away because they went in there to go do a search.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  They watched through the windows of the chow hall as their pillows, shoes, clothing, TVs, even some mattresses. Everything that did not fit in a box that's about the size of a mini fridge or six cubic feet was taken or thrown away. They call this breaking down to six by six. And this was a big deal.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  It was horrible because I bought that stuff. You got people here that have been here for all their life. You feel me? People have been here for 20 years. You throwing away their sentimental things that they have. You feel me? Like stuff that's unreplaceable. And all that stuff is just hot trash.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  Technically, when they do that, they're supposed to give us the option to choose what we want. And we can also mail out property. But they didn't do any of that.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  They did it with like anger. The way they searched us, they were trying to hurt us. Like they were mad about Toby.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Angelina Maria Hernandez says they tried to get the attention of a sergeant. And so we tried to ask Sergeant Arroyo. Sergeant Isidro Arroyo worked on D Yard. Like, why are you guys throwing away our property?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  People are shouting questions like, hey, what's going on? Arroyo, can you talk to us? What's happening? We're kind of bombarding him with questions.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  This is Antoinette Yancy. She's been in prison for almost 30 years. And she has this important role in the prison. She serves as a go-between on something called the Inmate Advisory Council, mediating issues with staff on behalf of other prisoners. So she regularly interacts with this sergeant.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  It's been five hours. So I'm pointing at him. I'm pointing at myself. I'm pointing at myself like, can I? And then I'm moving my hands up and down. Can I talk to you? Can I talk to you? Can I talk to you?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  And as she tried to get his attention in the crowded dining hall, she thought back to something that happened a month or so earlier.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  We were standing by D Hall. He was standing in front of the supply closet in front of D Hall, facing towards me. And I was standing in the dayroom by D Hall, facing him. And he said to me, "Priya, the staff of thought, the complaints and all those, you know, 602s, you know, all of that stuff needs to stop."

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Priya filings, 602s, that's prison jargon for sexual assault claims and all types of complaints against officers. After Gregory Rodriguez got arrested, we found out that women started coming forward to complain about him, but also other officers. So complaints overall were way up.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  I'm going to say, if the complaints do not stop, and this is a call, if the complaints do not stop, then this is what's going to happen. I'm going to lock you guys down, take all your privileges. And this is going to continue until the complaint stops. And I said, hey, you know, that's not fair. We can't police other inmates. We can't make another inmate stop filing complaints.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yancy says he told her if she didn't get the other prisoners in line, there would be consequences.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  And the main thing, I remember when he said that, I looked around at his staff and his staff could not look me in the eye. They looked half their heads down because they knew that was like a wrong thing to say. And my response to him was, that's not legal, nor is it fair.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  CDCR declined our request to interview Arroyo. And they didn't answer our questions about this incident between Arroyo and Yancy. They did say retaliation is not allowed, but in the chow hall that morning, Yancy remembered those threats.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  That's exactly what he said he was going to do. I mean, it was, I didn't think that he would do it to that extent, but it triggered that comment that he made.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Now, the women say Arroyo wouldn't even talk to them.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  We just want to know what's happening. And he's, Mr. Sergeant Arroyo is refusing to speak to us. And he's literally in front of our faces.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  We're all hungry. You guys had us in here for hours. You're not telling us what's going on. We're just tired and hungry. We want to go back to ourselves.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  We were asking the staff that was in there if we can get some lunches. And they said that we needed to hang on. They needed to get approval from the sergeant of the day, which was Arroyo at that time.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  It was still a little standoff for a little second. And then that's when more officers came in.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Here's where things took a turn. And we know that because we got some internal documents and importantly, surveillance footage from the chow hall that day. While there is no audio, we can see what happened. Dozens of officers filed in and formed a line.

• 10:10Speaker 05

  We don't know what's happening. So we just see a bunch of officers rushing in. So it was between like 12:15 and 12:30 now. They rush in and now they're forming like a big scrimmage line against us.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  All of a sudden, all the cops came in with their right ear on.

• 10:26Speaker 05

  That's when they just started telling everybody to back up.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  They told everybody to back up, be quiet.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  People were shouting at the officers and banging on the windows and tables. Cameron and her girlfriend Christina Wind could tell something was about to happen. And Wind tried to get the officer's attention. She was worried about Cameron's heart because she has a pacemaker.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  I was asking all the officers that were coming in to please get us out because Cameron was already having chest pain. She couldn't breathe. Every single one ignored me.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Christina Wind said she sat in front of Cameron to shield her. Then a captain from the scrimmage line signaled to Sergeant Arroyo, according to internal documents we got, ordering him to, quote, "put them down with gas."

• 11:20Speaker 01

  We Are Jane Doe returns in just a moment.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. Listening to We Are Jane Doe. And when last we left, 150 prisoners had been corralled in the chow hall, where they waited for hours with no answers. Then an officer was heard saying, "Put them down with gas."

• 11:52Speaker 04

  Officer Royal guy is the one that really got it cracking. And then that's when more officers came in. I guess they was waiting for that Super Soaker to come in before they got it cracking like that.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  The Super Soaker, officially called an MK-46, is a big aerosol canister that shoots pepper spray. In the video, all at once, you just see officers on the line start spraying and throwing pepper grenades. And these women stumble and run to the other side of the cafeteria.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  They did start spraying us and bombing us. So when that started, everybody just ran away from their line. As soon as the first spray hit, we all started running away.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  They didn't ask no questions. They didn't none of that. I feel like they had it up in their head already, what they was gonna do and how they was gonna do it.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  In the video, you can see two plastic cups go flying towards the officers, but they don't hit them. The women are cowering up by the wall, trying to hide from the pepper spray. And the officers are walking closer to them. And then they spray them again.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  I had my shirt tied around my face. I was just trying to survive as long as possible.

• 13:08Speaker 06

  We were crying. We were on our knees. We were begging to stop. We were trying to, but we need help.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  On the footage, you can see Katrina Cameron. You can see by the way she's moving that she's struggling to walk. And wind is helping her.

• 13:24Speaker 07

  I couldn't breathe. I was throwing up a little because I couldn't breathe.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  And I told the officer that she was having this medical emergency. Medical emergency. She needed help. He said, "Okay, come forward."

• 13:36Speaker 02

  You can see on the footage, one officer in the back calls her forward.

• 13:40Speaker 07

  I just felt wind kind of leading me forward.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  After we went to go take this step, all I seen was a shuffle, a commotion, and her go down.

• 13:51Speaker 07

  And I got slammed on the floor.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  A group of officers in the front force Cameron to the ground. One officer throws a pepper bomb at them. And then a group of officers close in around them.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  I went to go down on top of her to protect her. I was beat by nine different officers. I was stabbed with batons.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Christina Wind lost consciousness. This is a closed room about the size of a small school cafeteria, filling up with gas. And there are 160 women on the floor. And they're crowded up against the walls.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  It really, literally felt like we was in a room full of smoke and we was just in there waiting to die. I already took my last breath in there. You feel me? I was just up in there, ready to die.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  And I remember passing out. And I came to, and I looked up, and there's an officer standing right there. And I kind of like, just begged him, like, "Please get me out of here." And that officer finally noticed me and picked me up, cuffed me, and started dragging me towards the door. And I passed out again.

• 15:08Speaker 08

  People were falling out in seizures. They wouldn't let us help our peers. A couple of people ran to my roommate to help her because she was having a seizure. And they started bombing them. So we had to fall back.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  It was like a concentration camp, actually, if I'm allowed to say that.

• 15:26Speaker 08

  Like, it was World Zone, WWII Zone.

• 15:30Speaker 05

  I'm not gonna even lie. It was the most traumatizing experience I've ever dealt with in my life. And I did 16 years in prison. So I clearly committed a crime. And I've lived a lifestyle that wasn't pleasant before. But to experience something like that was something I've never experienced before. And it was the most scariest thing that I've went through in my life.

• 15:51Speaker 08

  When they let, give us air. We're choking. We can't breathe repeatedly, repeatedly. And we couldn't breathe. We're trying to tell the officers, and we thought we're nice, or that, "Please get us out and give us air."

• 16:04Speaker 04

  I was begging them to take me out. Like, "Please handcuff me." I ain't never been begged to be handcuffed. I'm like, "Please cuff me."

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Eventually, one by one, the women are zip-tied and walked outside away from the choking fumes to the yard, where they sit on the grass in 90-degree weather. In the surveillance video, you can see they're all there. And then the officers kind of form this half-circle around them. And at this point, it seems like things are calming down.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  I assumed that they were gonna start letting us go back into the building, you know, one hallway at a time. That's usually what they do after something like that happens. Instead, the officers came out and then they started doing a march around us.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  One officer tells a guy holding the MK-46 chemical weapons sprayer, quote, "I want that shit empty," according to internal documents. A woman who's on the ground gets up. Her hands are zip-tied behind her back. And she takes four steps to go sit by another woman. And at this point, the officers start bombing again, throwing grenade after grenade, seemingly at random. The prisoners try to run away from the gas. And then the officers on the other side of the yard unleash pepper grenades as well.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  And I just remember at that point, I just started screaming. I didn't even realize I was screaming that much. I was just screaming and screaming. Now, all officers are coming from everywhere.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Another officer races across the yard with an empty wheelchair and comes back with a woman in a wheelchair, head slumped forward.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  It's like everybody, it's like a free-for-all. It's like a party for them or something, you know? And they're just continuing to bomb us over and over again.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Eventually, the officers stop. An officer is recorded on his body-worn camera saying, "Fun, fun, fun, baby." A woman collapses to the ground. Four women are carried off in stretchers.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  I had a seizure. I woke up in the hospital. I pissed on myself. And I was just, I feel like my body was full of so many chemicals. I was like, "Damn, like, that's how y'all do us? How y'all supposed to protect us? We in y'all custody every single day. And the first chance y'all get, y'all do us like this." Like, man, they did us cold. They did us bad. They did us bad.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Most of the women were sent back to their cells, where they found their stuff was either missing or destroyed.

• 19:02Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. They took my TV. They took my clothes. They ripped my blankets. Like, the little bit of comfort that I did have, they destroyed it. They took our shampoos out and dumped them. Like, there's no reason to take our hygiene, our shampoos, our conditioners, and dumped, emptied them out. And some of them were empty out on our beds. Like, they were just being ugly. And the way that they attacked us, they attacked us like they were trying to kill us, like they were trying to hurt us. I knew it was retaliation because the way that they came in, they didn't even give us a chance.

• 19:30Speaker 08

  I've never experienced anything like that in 13 years I've been here. It was awful. It was awful.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  When Katrina Cameron was brought back to her cell in D Yard, she couldn't see out of one eye. And her glasses had been lost.

• 19:48Speaker 07

  So I came into my room. And I was just trying to breathe. I was trying to breathe. And I got in the shower.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  When she went to wash the pepper spray off her body, that's when Cameron found Toby, the baby lizard, dead in her bra.

• 20:07Speaker 07

  It broke my heart, having to take Toby out. And I was just hoping maybe I could try to save her. But she was already gone.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Cameron's girlfriend and cellmate, Christina Wind, who tried to shield her with her body in the dining hall, she wasn't back in their cell. Cameron had no idea where she was. So this is when Cameron called her former cellmate, Ally.

• 20:32Speaker 09

  She said, "I can't see." And she's like, "I don't know where Christina is." I could barely understand her. She was very, very upset.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  When Katrina called you, was after it had happened?

• 20:44Speaker 09

  Yes. They started getting aggressive with the girls, started backing them into the back of the chow hall and started spraying them with CO gas and gassing them in the face. I'm shocked. I'm angry. It makes me sick. I felt guilty.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Cameron wanted Ally's help. She wanted her to call an attorney and try to find out what had happened to Wind.

• 21:09Speaker 07

  And I said, "I need to know what happened to Wind. Where is Wind?" I was scared. I didn't know if they were gonna try to kill her. I didn't know if she was okay.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Later that night, Katrina Cameron finally found out where Wind had been taken. It wasn't the hospital or the medical unit. She'd been taken to segregated housing, the jail within a jail, and accused of assaulting an officer.

• 21:36Speaker 07

  They gave me replacement clothes, but I wasn't allowed to shower or anything. And I could not take care of myself. I didn't understand. My body had stopped moving. I didn't understand how badly I was beaten. So I couldn't...

• 21:52Speaker 07

  I couldn't, uh, I couldn't wash myself or anything. I was taken into a room for four days, uh, with me still all over me.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  On her fifth day in solitary confinement, Winn says she was finally allowed to shower. After about 10 days, a woman from CDCR headquarters in Sacramento came to visit her.

• 22:16Speaker 07

  That was the first time in my entire career, and I have done over 24 years in prison. The first time I have ever had Sacramento come see me, first of all. Second of all, had a lady looking at me with a tear in her eye for my safety. That was crazy. She apologized to me for what I had went through and said she's seen that. And she doesn't ever condone what she's seen in that video.

• 22:41Speaker 10

  I did relay my concern for the incident and, you know, tried to provide,

• 22:52Speaker 10

  and I mean, the apology for the overall situation, right? And to let her know that we didn't condone the incident.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  This is Angela Kent. She's retired from CDCR now, but when the August 2nd incident happened, she was working in administration, appointed by the governor as the associate director of the whole women's division of the agency.

• 23:20Speaker 10

  To have something like this of this magnitude, it's all, I was in disbelief.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Kent sat and watched the video, frame by frame.

• 23:35Speaker 10

  Looks to me like, almost like the civil rights riots, where the students, you know, are being hit with batons and being sprayed. And it's just unacceptable. It was excessive. It looks like they're lining them up for the firing squad.

• 24:01Speaker 10

  And there's nothing in what those women were doing that even warranted the kind of force that was delivered.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Kent's worked for CDCR for 18 years, 27 in law enforcement overall, and had never seen anything like it. She went to the prison itself to show the staff and population this was serious. She made sure Winn was released from restricted housing that day, and the disciplinary charges against her were dropped. As Kent drove away from the prison, all she could think about was how to prevent this from happening again.

• 24:44Speaker 10

  I know at the time, my opinion, it was anyone involved should be fired.

• 24:53Speaker 10

  There is no doubt in my mind that if you start to empower women that are incarcerated and you start to give credibility to their voice, that there's going to be tremendous resistance.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  In the course of our reporting, we found out that the operation on August 2nd had a name. It was called Operation Breakdown.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Coming up next time, our final episode. What happens in the dark always comes to the light.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  We would like to thank all the women inside CCWF for sharing their stories with us. And you are absolutely going to want to hear the conclusion of this story, Part Three of We Are Jane Doe. Producers of We Are Jane Doe are Madhi Bolanos, Anna Sussman, and Sukey Lewis. It was edited by Nancy Lopez, Mark Ristich, and Sukey Lewis. Executive produced by myself, Glenn Washington, and Mark Ristich. It was fact-checked by Mark Bettancourt. Original music and engineering is by Dirk Schwartzoff. Production support from Marisa Dodge. Jeremy Rue from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism was our data editor. And again, special thanks to Amika Moda and all the women still inside

• 26:18Speaker 01

  the Central California Women's Facility brave enough to share their stories. This reporting was made possible in part by funding from the Poynter Institute. And if you missed even a moment, know you can hear Snap's We Are Jane Doe series in its entirety on the Snap Judgment Podcast. KQED in San Francisco allows Snap to broadcast stories like this one.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  On Team Snap, the union representative, producers, artists, editors, and engineers, members of the National Association of Broadcast employees and technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51. And this is not the news. No way is this the news because sometimes the news does not care. But we do. And this is PRX.