COLUMN ONE : Prison--A Cop’s Worst Nightmare : In the inmate caste system, ex-officers rank down near child molesters. They often are sentenced to a life of fear--shunned at best, attacked at worst. Officials must decide how to protect Koon, Powell.

Daniel Garner always walks alone in the prison yard. He avoids the television room, where convicts gather each evening. He never talks about his case with the men in neighboring cells, even though many inmates do little else.

The former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, convicted in 1990 of money-skimming, keeps his past a zealously guarded secret because being a lawman in prison can mean living in unrelenting danger. “For an ex-cop, prison is a miserable life made even more miserable,” Garner said from a federal detention center. “It’s a cop’s worst nightmare.”

That nightmare is about to befall two more officers, who will exit the spotlight of the nation’s most searing police trial and enter the grim corridors of the federal penal system. On Wednesday, Los Angeles Police Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Officer Laurence M. Powell each were sentenced to serve 30 months for violating the civil rights of Rodney G. King in 1991.

The sentences were a solemn denouement to more than two years of legal skirmishes and urban violence. But for Koon and Powell, the saga will continue as they attempt to adapt to the harsh routines of prison society.

By most accounts, especially those of jailed ex-cops themselves, convicted officers are marked men, ranking only a notch above child molesters and snitches at the bottom of an inmate hierarchy. They have been beaten with pipes while waiting in line for clothing, bombarded by handmade explosives tossed into their cells, and jabbed with shanks and sharpened spoons. Every encounter with another inmate, whether in the chow hall or on the yard, is a potential confrontation.

No matter where Koon and Powell go, and no matter how staunchly officials try to ensure their safety, they are likely to be the most visible targets for any inmate with a grudge against law enforcement, according to attorneys who specialize in defending former officers.

The strategies to protect them could vary widely: Send them to minimum-security camps far from where they committed their crimes. Put them in the protective-housing units of medium- or high-security prisons where they would share cellblocks with a mostly hard-core band of other endangered prisoners. Or, in extreme cases, allow them the ultimate protection of “the hole”--a solitary confinement cell normally used as punishment, where the days pass in a slow blur of excruciating tedium.

Federal officials often go to great lengths to provide security for former officers, but critics say the efforts often prevent the ex-cops from taking advantage of routine privileges accorded to other convicts. The system, they say, should better balance the need for protection with basic prisoners’ rights.

“For (Koon and Powell) to be in the general population, they’d never be able to turn their heads or shut their eyes,” said Pasadena attorney Carol Ann Rohr, who represented a former officer whose life was frequently threatened during a long prison term. “A lot of these prisoners . . . would think nothing of killing or maiming (a cop).”

The notoriety of the King case would make Koon and Powell known almost instantly in cellblocks, where the gossip grapevine tends to be fast and dangerous. “Let’s say you sent them to (prison in) South Carolina,” Rohr said. “They might not be recognized by everybody the first moment. But they’re going to be (seen on) television for probably the next 10 years. Some inmate is going to be watching TV in the recreation room and, lo and behold, there’s Powell’s face. There’s Koon’s face.”

Federal officials have not determined where Koon or Powell will be sent, or how to manage the tricky trade-offs between ensuring safety and allowing inmates to work, exercise and socialize. Those decisions probably will be made in coming weeks by regional managers. They will take into account the officers’ notoriety, sentences, medical and psychological histories. They also will review factors including the overall population balance within the government’s 71 prisons and work camps, which house 87,000 inmates, according to a federal prison spokesman in Washington.

Whether ultimately assigned to a low-security camp without fences or guard towers, or a maximum-security penitentiary fortified by high walls and razor wire, former cops are universally detested among inmates, said ex-convict Paul Allen, who has spent decades in both state and federal prisons.

“The cop is a symbol of everything the convict hates,” said Allen, 65, a bank robber recently released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix. “The convict is angry at the system and a cop is the visible target for all that. Most convicts have been dumped on by some cop at some time in their lives. In prison they have their chance to get back at them.”

Although federal officials keep no statistics on former officers in custody, Allen recalls numerous instances of ex-cops being shunned, harassed and even attacked. While serving time at San Quentin, Allen said, a former Louisiana policeman who had just arrived was waiting in a line for his prison blues when he was jumped.

“A couple guys with a pipe beat this guy pretty bad,” Allen said. “They beat him because he was a cop. That was it. Convicts just don’t like cops--especially in prison. They’re looked at as hypocrites.”

Former sheriff’s deputy Garner, 47, who was convicted of skimming $170,000 in cash seized from drug dealers, has managed to avoid confrontations. At the out-of-state federal prison where he is doing his time, no one knows his past. And at the West Coast federal detention center where he is temporarily being held, he is in solitary confinement because he was concerned that inmates might be more familiar with his case and could identify him.

While in solitary, Garner leaves his cell a few times a week for showers and exercise. Otherwise, he spends his time alone in a steel cell--waiting. Waiting until mealtime. Waiting for his court appearance. Waiting until he is transferred back to the out-of-state medium security prison where he has a few more amenities.

Prison is a lonely place, Garner said, but for an ex-cop it is more lonely.

“You don’t have the luxury of sitting and talking for hours about your case and getting your frustrations off your chest,” he said. “You’ve got to carry your load quietly--and by yourself.”

Prison is a dangerous place, but for an ex-cop everyone is a potential enemy.

“You never know when someone’s going to find out about you and go after you,” he said. “The whole situation we’re in doesn’t make a lot of sense, but prison isn’t a logical world. It isn’t logical to stab someone for turning a television station or over a pack of cigarettes.”

Prison is a place where time passes slowly, but it may pass even more slowly for ex-cops.

“A year for us seems to take longer than a year for anyone else,” Garner said. “For a cop, prison is the worst thing that can happen to you--and still be alive.”

Unlike Garner, former San Gabriel Officer Billy Joe McIlvain, who served 14 years at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad before his parole two years ago, was unable to keep his past a secret.

McIlvain, convicted of the 1977 slaying of a teen-age gang member, believes other inmates learned he was a former cop from watching TV accounts of his case or by leafing through prison files. Inmates often serve as clerks in prison offices, he said, enabling them to peruse the backgrounds of new arrivals.

On his first day in Soledad’s protective-housing unit, McIlvain said, his cell--including part of his bed--was set afire by an inmate who doused it with a flammable liquid and struck a match. Then another inmate tried to stab McIlvain with a crudely made knife affixed to the end of a broom handle, he said.

“They tried to spear me through the bars while the cell was on fire,” McIlvain said.

Although guards caught one of the instigators during a second attack, punishing him with time in the hole, the horrors went on throughout his years there, McIlvain said.

Inmates would pack together the heads of matches to make small bombs comparable to M-80s, then attach a fuse and throw them into his cell, McIlvain said. Once, an inmate tried to drop a television on him from three floors up. At less dramatic moments, McIlvain was shunned, especially during his first few years in custody.

The first time he walked into the prison chapel, all the other inmates stood and left. If he took a seat in the gym to watch the weekly movie, other prisoners would stand and move to the opposite side of the aisle, McIlvain recalled.

“It was like I had the plague,” he said. “I was a cop.”

As a resident of Soledad’s protective-housing unit, McIlvain was kept apart from the roughly 6,000 inmates that made up the prison’s general population, he said. But he lived alongside 132 other inmates who shared the unit’s showers, eating areas and concrete recreation yard.

Among them, McIlvain said, were some noted killers, including Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan; serial slayer Juan Corona, and Dan White, who was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting deaths of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

In the value system of the joint, even a mass murderer and the killer of a presidential candidate were more highly regarded than an ex-officer. “Sirhan Sirhan was treated almost like a prima donna. People gathered around him, they wanted to talk to him. They wanted to eat with him. Me, I’d eat at a table by myself.”

In theory, the men in the protected unit were isolated from those who might have grudges or contracts on their lives, McIlvain said. At the same time, those in the unit felt some incentive to refrain from violence lest they be expelled to the general population, where dangers were greater.

McIlvain’s notoriety stemmed in part from the sensational circumstances of his case. The former officer, now 48, had become increasingly involved in hostilities with local gang members when, in 1977, an 18-year-old gangster named David Dominguez was shot to death in McIlvain’s home.

In wildly differing accounts, McIlvain--who still professes his innocence--contended that Dominguez had abducted him at gunpoint, firing more than 100 shots at police SWAT officers who surrounded the house. However, it was McIlvain who was convicted of abducting Dominguez, then executing him and staging the shootout.

Although the cases are very different, Powell and Koon may face some of the same problems he faced, McIlvain said, because their case is so notorious and the King beating videotape so well-known. And because they will be in prison for brutalizing a suspect, they might be even more of a target than other incarcerated cops, former prisoners say.

Largely because of the videotape, the King case became one of a very few in which officers have been sentenced on charges involving use of excessive force. Although more officers have been drawing prison terms, criminal justice experts say many of those cases have involved a wide array of crimes, from burglary to murder, money-skimming and embezzlement.

The uniqueness of the King case has left many unanswered questions about how well the prison system will be able to protect such well-known inmates.

“They’re definitely going to have it tougher than the regular cop in prison,” Allen said. “Everyone’s going to be down on them. The white inmates can identify better with a black convict than a white cop. And the minority inmates . . . well, in prison they’re not the minority. So those two cops are going to definitely be alone.”

Some federal officials said Powell’s and Koon’s notoriety could work in their favor; the federal prison system would be embarrassed if they were seriously injured or killed in custody, said an official at one West Coast federal prison, who asked not to be named.

That fear of embarrassment could cause officials to assign them to a prison camp, the type of facility with the least violent inmates and the lowest level of security, the official suggested.

“My guess is they’ll be sent to a camp in a state far from California where the publicity about the case wasn’t so intense . . . a state that doesn’t have a big minority population,” the prison official said. “They’d be too much of a target to put in a general prison population in California.”

Prison camps, which house mostly white-collar criminals, have no walls, fences, bars or gun towers. At most camps a handful of “Off Limits” signs and imaginary lines around the facilities are the only boundaries separating freedom from imprisonment.

Powell and Koon probably would be safe there, the prison official said. Other inmates would be reluctant to commit violations or assaults because they could be transferred to a higher-security institution.

The alternative to placing the two officers in a camp probably would be a medium-security federal prison, the official added. In that environment, the prison would have to provide exceptionally secure protective housing to ensure their safety, he said.

In some instances, the system has had difficulties finding safe housing for former officers with long sentences. Former Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Darnell Garcia, who was sentenced to 80 years in federal prison for money laundering and drug trafficking in 1991, has been shuttled among three institutions.

He even was housed for a time on Death Row at a state prison in Utah because federal authorities were unable to find a facility where Garcia would be safe from attacks from other prisoners, said his attorney, Mark E. Overland.

“That’s pretty rough, not being able to see the light of day (except) one hour every two days . . . (having) very, very limited contact with any other inmate,” Overland said. “To put somebody on Death Row is ridiculous.”

Overland said he was ready to file a writ of habeas corpus, challenging the legality of Garcia’s detention, when he was transferred to another state prison, the Massachusetts Correctional Institution near Boston.

Daniel Dunne, a spokesman for the federal prison system, said Garcia’s unusual incarceration stems largely from his criminal history. “This is a person with a release date of 2043 who was convicted of several crimes that total 80 years,” Dunne said. “He is a person who has high security risks. We make our determinations for housing based on the need for security, and I think that’s the case here.”

In spite of the transfers, Garcia still considers the security around him too restrictive.

“We’ve written letters . . . trying to get some semblance of better conditions for him,” Overland said. “But (the prison system’s) stock answer is, ‘We’ve got no place to put you.’ ”