When Jason Zapata was arrested for allegedly firing a gun into the air, he was thrown in a dimly lit holding cell with trash strewn across the floor and a broken payphone on the wall. It had nothing more than a rusted toilet, sink and three wooden benches that looked as though they had never been cleaned.Two older men with shaved heads sat in the back, eyeing the 24-year-old’s wristband that the jail used to display his personal information. One was over 6 feet tall and 300 pounds. The other was covered in tattoos from head to foot. They were gang members, they said, in jail for murder. It was 2015 and Zapata, a slight Hispanic man at 5 feet 9 inches tall and 180 pounds, had never been incarcerated before. His new cellmates in the Riverside County jail told him they had spent years in and out of the most violent prisons. As they boasted about the people they had stabbed to death, Zapata tried to hide how fast his heart was beating. “Your life is in their hands,” Zapata told CalMatters in a recent interview. “Anything could happen to you in that type of environment. Not everybody makes it out. You gotta do what you need to do to survive in this place.”
When they pressed him about why he was in jail, he tried to tread lightly as he maintained his innocence. But as the hours wore on, the men accused him of disrespecting them by not coming clean. Eventually, they threatened him with a “calentada” — Spanish prison slang for a beating or stabbing.
