how gangs took over prisons - the atlantic

9/19/2014 How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/how-gangs-took-over-prisons/379330/ 1/25

By Graeme WoodPhotos by Brian L. Frank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

How Gangs Took Over PrisonsOriginally formed for self-protection, prison gangs have become the unlikely custodians of

order behind barsand of crime on the streets.

O N A CLEAR MORNING this past February, the inmates in the B Yard of Pelican BayState Prison filed out of their cellblock a few at a time and let a cool, salty breezeblow across their bodies. Their home, the California prison systems permanentaddress for its most hardened gangsters, is in Crescent City, on the edge of a

redwood forestabout four miles from the Pacific Ocean in one direction and 20 miles fromthe Oregon border in the other. This is their yard time.

Most of the inmates belong to one of Californias six main prison gangs: Nuestra Familia,the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the NorthernStructure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the AryanBrotherhood, respectively). The inmates interact like volatile chemicals: if you open theircells in such a way as to put, say, a lone member of Nuestra Familia in a crowd of Mexican

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Mafia, the mix can explode violently. So the guards release them in a careful order.Advertisement

Now watch what they do, says Christopher Acosta, a corrections officer with a shavedhead who worked for 15 years as a front-line prison guard and now runs public relations forPelican Bay. We are standing with our backs to a fence and can see everything.

At first, we seem to be watching a sullen but semi-random parade of terrifying menheavily tattooed murderers, thieves, and drug dealers walking past one of five casual butalert guards. Some inmates, chosen for a strip search, drop their prison blues into littlepiles and then spin around, bare-assed, to be scrutinized. Once inspected, they dress andwalk out into the yard to fill their lungs with oxygen after a long night in the stagnant airof the cellblock. The first Hispanic inmate to put his clothes on walks about 50 yards to aconcrete picnic table, sits down, and waits. The first black inmate goes to a small workoutarea and stares out at the yard intently. A white guy walks directly to a third spot, closer to



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the basketball court. Another Hispanic claims another picnic table. Slowly it becomesobvious that they have been moving tactically: each has staked out a rallying point for hisgroup and its affiliates.

Once each gang has achieved a critical massabout five menit sends off a pair of scouts.Two of the Hispanics at the original concrete picnic table begin a long, winding stroll.Theyll walk around, get within earshot of the other groups, and try to figure out whatsgoing down on the yard, Acosta says. Then they can come back to their base and saywhos going to attack who, whos selling what.

Eventually, about 50 inmates are in the yard, and the guards have stepped back andcongregated at their own rallying point, backs to the fence, with Acosta. The mensmovements around the yard are so smooth and organized, they seem coordinated byinvisible traffic lights. And thats a good thing. Theres like 30 knives out there rightnow, Acosta says. Hidden up their rectums.

NDERSTANDING HOW PRISON GANGS WORK is difficult: they conceal their activities andkill defectors who reveal their practices. This past summer, however, a 32-year-old academic named David Skarbek published The Social Order of the Underworld, hisfirst book, which is the best attempt in a long while to explain the intricate

organizational systems that make the gangs so formidable. His focus is the Californiaprison system, which houses the second-largest inmate population in the countryabout

A corrections officer at Pelican Bay conducts a search for contraband in an inmate's cell.



135,600 people, slightly more than the population of Bellevue, Washington, split intofacilities of a few thousand inmates apiece. With the possible exception of North Korea, theUnited States has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation, at one in 108 adults.(The national rate rose for 30 years before peaking, in 2008, at one in 99. Less crime andsofter punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then.)

Skarbeks primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes fromprecisely what most of us would assume is the source of disorder: the major gangs, which areresponsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, includingcellphones, behind bars. Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal buteffective way, he says. They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways theprisons run more smoothly because of them. The gangs have business out on the streets,too, but their principal activity and authority resides in prisons, where other gangs are themain powers keeping them in check.

Skarbek is a native Californian and a lecturer in political economy at Kings CollegeLondon. When I met him, on a sunny day on the Strand, in London, he was craving a tasteof home. He suggested cheeseburgers and beer, which made our lunch American not only intopic of conversation but also in caloric consumption. Prison gangs do not exist in theUnited Kingdom, at least not with anything like the sophistication or reach of those inCalifornia or Texas, and in that respect Skarbek is like a botanist who studies desertwildflowers at a university in Norway.

Skarbek, whose most serious criminal offense to date is a moving violation, bases hisconclusions on data crunches from prison systems (chiefly Californias, which has studiedgangs in detail) and the accounts of inmates and corrections officers themselves. He is atreasury of horrifying anecdotes about human depravityand ingenuity. There are fewplaces other than a prison where mens desires are more consistently thwarted, and wheremen whose desires are thwarted have so much time to think up creative ways to circumventtheir obstacles.

Because he is a gentleman, Skarbek waited until wed finished our burgers to illustratesome of that ingenuity. How can you tell what type of cellphone an inmate uses, heasked, based on whats in his cell? He let me think for about two seconds before cheerilygiving me the answer: you examine the bar of soap on the prisoners sink. The safest placefor an inmate to store anything is in his rectum, and to keep the orifice supple and sized forthe (contraband) phone, inmates have been known to whittle their bars of soap and tuckthem away as a placeholder while their phones are in use. So a short and stubby bar meansa durable old dumbphone; broad and flat means a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Pity the poor

If your name is on a Bad News List, gang members attack youon sightbut remove your name when your debts are paid.



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guy whose bar of soap is the size and shape of a Samsung Galaxy Note.

The prevalence of cellphones in the California prison system reveals just how loose a gripthe authorities have on their inmates. In 2013, the California Department of Correctionsand Rehabilitation confiscated 12,151 phones. A reasonable guess might be that thisrepresented a tenth of all cellphones in the system, which means that almost every one ofthe states 135,600 inmates had a phoneall in violation of prison regulations. Prison isset up so that most of the things a person wants to do are against the rules, Skarbek says.So to understand whats really going on, you have to start by realizing that people arecoming up with complicated ways to get around them. Prison officials have long knownthat gangs are highly sophisticated organizations with carefully plotted strategies,business-development plans, bureaucracies, and even human-resources departmentsallof which, Skarbek argues, lead not to chaos in the prison system but to order.

KARBEK TRAINED IN an economic school of thought known as rational-choice theory,which aims to explain human behavior as the product of reasonable decisions byeconomic actors. In many cases, rational-choice theory has shown behaviors to berational that at first appear wild, irrational, or psychopathic. When people are

encouraged or forced to act against their economic interest, they find work-arounds assurely as water blocked by a boulder in a stream finds a way to flow around it.

Craig Canary, an inmate in Pelican Bays Security Housing Unit, in his solitary-confinement cell



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In 1968, one of the founders of rational-choice theory, Gary Becker, wrote a pioneeringpaper, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, premised on the idea that theprevailing view of crime required revision. According to prior dogma, criminals were bestunderstood as mental defectives, crazy people who couldnt control their impulses. Becker,who won a Nobel in economics in 1992 and died this past May, suggested instead thatcriminals offend because they make careful calculations of the probability and likely cost ofgetting caughtand then determine that the gamble is worthwhile. This insight, Skarbeksays, opened the study of crime up to economic theory.

Skarbek attended graduate school at George Mason University, a bastion of rational-choicetheory. Its faculty is also friendly to unorthodox subject matter: Robin Hanson haspublished papers about using betting markets to augment democratic government, and hasproposed that it is rational to freeze ones head after death; Peter Leeson wrote The Invisible



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Hook, a 2009 account of the economics of piracy. Skarbeks doctoral adviser, Peter Boettke,showed how the behavior of the Soviet economy actually made sense if you viewed it ascontrolled not just by the government but also by the black- and gray-market activities ofcitizens.

Prison, Skarbek claims, is the ultimate challenge for a rational-choice theorist: a placewhere control of the economic actors is nearly total, and where virtually any transactionrequires the consent of the authorities. The Soviets had far less control over their peopleseconomic activity than prison wardens do over the few dollars available for prisonerscommissary purchases. Both settings have given rise to alternate currencies and hiddenmarkets. Most famously, cigarettes have become the medium of exchange in many prisons.But when they are banned, other currencies take their place. California inmates now usepostage stamps.

MONG THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS about prison gangsknown in California-corrections argot as Security Threat Groupsis why they arise in the first place.After all, as Skarbek notes, California had prisons for nearly a century before thefirst documented gang appeared. Some states dont have prison gangs at all. New

York has had street gangs for well over a century, but its first major prison gang didnt formuntil the mid-1980s.

The explanation, Skarbek says, can be found in demographics, and in inmate memoirs andinterviews. Before prison gangs showed up, he says, you survived in prison by followingsomething called the convict code. Various recensions of the code exist, but they all

A scene from general-population housing



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reduce to a few short maxims that old-timers would share with first offenders soon afterthey arrived. It was pretty simple, he explains. You mind your own business, you dontrat on anyone, and you pretty much just try to avoid bothering or cheating other inmates.

But starting in the 1950s, things changed: The total inmate population rose steeply, andprisons grew bigger, more ethnically and racially mixed, and more unpredictable in theirtypes of inmate. Prisons faced a flood of first offenders, who tended to be young and maleand therefore less receptive to the advice of grizzled jailbirds. The norms that madeprison life tolerable disappeared, and the authorities lost control. Prisoners bandedtogether for self-protectionand later, for profit. The result was the first California prisongang.

That moment of gang genesis, Skarbek says, forced an arms race, in which different groupstook turns demonstrating a willingness to inflict pain on others. The arms race has barelystopped, although the gangs have waxed and waned in relative power. (The Black GuerrillaFamily has been weakened, prison authorities told me, because of leadership squabbles.)The Mexican Mafia was the sole Hispanic gang until 1965, when a group of inmates fromNorthern California formed Nuestra Familia to counter the influence of Hispanics from thesouth. Gang elderscalled maestrosinstruct the youngsters in gang history and keep theenmity alive.

Whats astonishing to outsiders, Skarbek says, is that many aspects of gang politics thatappear to be sources of unresolvable hatred immediately dissipate if they threaten thestability of prison society. For example, consider the Aryan Brotherhooda notoriouslybrutal organization whose members are often kept alone in cells because they tend tomurder their cell mates. You can take the Brotherhood at its word when it declares itself aracist organization, and you can do the same with the Black Guerrilla Family, whichpreaches race war and calls for the violent overthrow of the government. But Skarbek saysthat at lights-out in some prisons, the leader of each gang will call out good night to hisentire cellblock. The sole purpose of this exercise is for each gang leader to guarantee thathis men will respect the nights silence. If a white guy starts yelling and keeps everyoneawake, the Aryan Brothers will discipline him to avoid having blacks or Hispanics attackone of their members. White power is one thing, but the need to keep order and get shut-eye is paramount.

If a white guy keeps everyone awake, the Aryan Brotherswill discipline him to avoid having blacks or Hispanics attackone of their members.



Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply streetgangs that have been locked up. The story of their origins, however, is closer tothe opposite: the Mexican Mafia, for example, was born at Deuel VocationalInstitution, in Tracy, California, in 1956, and only later did that group, and others,become a presence on the streets. Today, the relation of the street to thecellblock is symbiotic. The young guys on the street look to the gang membersinside as role models, says Charles Dangerfield, a former prison guard who nowheads Californias Gang Task Force, in Sacramento. Getting sentenced to prisonis like being called up to the majors.

But Skarbek says the prison gangs serve another function for street criminals. In a 2011paper in American Political Science Review, he proposed that prison is a necessary enforcementmechanism for drug crime on the outside. If everyone in the criminal underworld will go toprison eventually, or has a close relationship with someone who will, and if everybodyknows that gangs control the fate of all inmates, then criminals on the street will be afraidto cross gang members there, because at some point they, or someone they know, will haveto pay on the inside. Under this model, prison gangs are the courts and sheriffs for peoplewhose business is too shady to be able to count on justice from the usual sources. Usingdata from federal indictments of members of the Mexican Mafia, and other legaldocuments, Skarbek found that the control of prisons by gangs leads to smoothertransactions in the outside criminal world.

Gangs effect this justice on the inside in part by circulating a bad-news list, or BNL. Ifyour name is on a BNL, gang members are to attack you on sightperhaps because youstole from an affiliate on the outside, or because you failed to repay a drug debt, or becauseyoure suspected of ratting someone out. Skarbek says one sign that the BNL is a rationallydeployed tool, rather than just a haphazard vengeance mechanism, is that gangs arefastidious about removing names from the list when debts are paid.



N O SCHOLAR WRITING in the law-abiding world, I was told by guards at Pelican Bay,can capture the reality of prison life in all its brutality. I was prepared for that tobe true, even just based on my own reading. In 2005, Don Diva magazineinterviewed a former guard at Rikers Island, who described the conditions of

prison life in vivid terms. [In each cell] you have a filthy toilet with no cover, a rusty sink,and a metal frame they call a bed, he told the magazine. Inmates use the toilet as arefrigerator in the summer to keep milk cool. More vivid still was his description of inmatesurvival tactics:

Inmates are legendary for keeping razors in their mouths. Being able to spit outa razor is like a magic trick in jail. You could be in the mess hall, get into analtercation with another inmate, and the next thing you know hes spit out tworazors from both sides of his mouth and your face is slashed up A nigga willbecome Houdini when it comes to survival. Spitting razors became such aproblem that inmates immediately punched other inmates in the mouth as soonas an argument began. This was so that if the other inmate did have razors inhis mouth, he would cut his own mouth up before even getting the opportunityto spit them out.

But I found that the staff at Pelican Bay had already been thinking about prisons the waySkarbek does. While I was there, Lieutenant Jeremy Frisk, the prisons Institutional GangInvestigator, delivered a half-hour PowerPoint presentation focused on the managerialingenuity of the gang leaders. One of the last slides featured a picture of the Chrysler

An inmate of the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay is flanked by corrections officers as he is transported fromone area of the unit to another.



chairman and 1980s business icon Lee Iacocca. He was a very good manager, Frisk said,and turned Chrysler around from the brink of bankruptcy. And he could do that just fromhis management strategy: he never turned a wrench on a car, never assembled a door. Butbecause of his ideas, they could make millions of dollars. Frisk said gang leaders are theLee Iacoccas of the prison world: brilliant managers of violence. (Since that presentation, Ihave found it impossible to look at a picture of Iacocca without imagining him stuffing hischeeks and rectum with razor blades.)

Pelican Bay opened in 1989 as an upgraded version of two famous old California prisons,San Quentin and Folsom, both of which still house inmates but function, as they alwayshave, like enormous holding pens, hardly optimal for supervising a population of violentpsychopaths who plot constantly to subvert the rules of the institution. Even the mostsecure housing at San Quentin, says Pelican Bays acting warden, Clark Ducart, was built soprisoners could all go from their cells to the yard together, with 50 men moving as anungovernable mass. The walkways were narrow, and exposed prisoners to each other inways that encouraged attacks. As you walked guys to the shower, he told me, theyd getstabbed or speared. Pelican Bay, by contrast, allows much greater levels of control, and amuch more oppressive existence for anyone trying to plot a crime. The population issectioned into yards and blocks that might have little contact with one another, and thatallow the inmates to be managed with special attention to their gang affiliation. Uponidentifying a gang member, the prison can modulate his location, freedom, and level ofsurveillance, to a degree that inmates have called stifling and inhumane.

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On every cellblock at Pelican Bay, the guards post plastic identity cards on the wall, to keep

The safest place for an inmate to hide a phone is in hisrectum. To keep the orifice sized and supple, inmates havebeen known to tuck a bar of soap away as a placeholder.



track of which inmate is in which cell. These cards include each inmates name and photo.But the most-important information is conveyed by the cards color, which roughlycorrelates with probable gang affiliation: green for northern Hispanics, pink for southernHispanics, blue for blacks, white for whites, and yellow for others, including AmericanIndians, Mexican nationals, Laotians, and Eskimos. The information is crucial to thesmooth running of the institution. Maintaining balance in a cellblock, and not putting alone gang member in a situation where he might be surrounded by members of a rival gang,requires constant attention on the part of the corrections officers.

Out in the yard, when Acosta and I watched the inmates gather by gang, the guards knewexactly what was happening, and they could have intervened and broken up obvious gangactivity. And it was obvious: nearly all gang members have gang tattoos across their torsos,and some have markings on their faces too. As Robert Mitchum growled in the remake ofCape Fear: I dont know whether to look at him or read him.

Each interaction we observed between a correctional officer and a prisoner resembledbargain more than diktat. Before yard time finished, the guards let me inspect cells withthem. The cells were livable, especially in comparison to the Rikers Island ones I had readabout, even if the whole block had a dank locker-room smell. When I peeked in aninmates cell, I saw a dirty metal object in the sink. It was blunt and had a wire attached.Stinger, Acosta said. Inmates use it to boil water. Its illegal, but if the inmate isntdoing anything wrong, a guard might let it pass. He said that if a guard discovered acontraband item during an inspection, he might place it on the inmates bunk, just to showthat he knew about it and could confiscate it at any time, if the inmate didnt behave.

The guards asked inmates to show me a technique called fishlining, which involvesattaching an object to one end of a string, sliding it out of a cell and into the hallway, andthen using the other end of the string to yank it across the floor, this way and that, until itslides in front of the desired cell. A shatter-toothed Aryan Brother smiled at me and said hecould send a book to an adjacent cell this way. (On his shelf: a single-volume edition of TheChronicles of Narnia and a Teach Yourself book on German.) The fishlines work as a way todistribute contraband, but are also used, Skarbek told me, as a sort of corporatecommunications systemlike pneumatic tubes for prisoners.

The messages inmates send include extensive questionnaires for new arrivals. NuestraFamilia is particularly sophisticated, and, in a sure sign of bureaucratization, the gang evenhas an initialism for its new-arrival questionnaire: NAQ. When you get put in your cell,and the door slams shut, you might get a fishline with a piece of paper on it, Skarbek says.And youll be expected to answer the questions in full. The survey might includequestions about your offense, your judge, and your relatives in other prisons. But it couldalso ask where you lived on the outside and what resources you have that could be valuableto the gang. The questionnaires are collated and checked. At some prisons, inmates usetheir cellphones to confirm details on Facebook, and Skarbek says they have been known toopen LexisNexis accounts. Gang members are trained in micrographythe writing anddecipherment of very tiny lettersso they can produce tightly rolled pieces of paper, called



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kites, to be transported from prison to prison in the usual orifice. These activity reportscirculate around the prison system. Christopher Acosta showed me a kite that had beenintercepted at Corcoran State Prison, reporting on a gangs battle with a rival there.

INDING KITES IS DIFFICULT, because guards cannot cavity-search every inmate every day.The only way to control known gang members is to confine them under strictconditions that make communication almost, but not quite, impossiblenofreedom of movement or circulation with the general prison population, for

example, and only rare, carefully monitored visits.

Over the years, California has tried two broad strategies for gang management. The firstwas to break up gangs and scatter their members to distant prisons where their influencewould be divided and diluted. That strategy too frequently allowed gangs to metastasize,effectively seeding the whole prison system, and even other states and the federal system,with gang activity. The current strategy, implemented in the 1990s, is to identify high-level gang members (a process called validation) and bring most of them to Pelican Bay.

Pelican Bay is far from the gangs strongholds of Los Angeles and the Central Valley. Inevery direction there is little more than redwoods, marijuana farms, and seacoast. Moreimportant, Pelican Bay has the facilities and knowledge necessary to isolate and neutralizegang members. In Sacramento, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has

An inmate doing push-ups in the SHUs exercise yard, a small concrete room with an overhead skylight whereinmates are allowed to spend an hour and a half a day and receive their only exposure to sunlight



posters on the wall showing mug shots of all the major gang leadersthe Lee Iacoccas,Steve Jobses, and Henry Fords of the underworldgrouped by the prisons they live in. Mostare at Pelican Bay, probably for life, in a snowflake-shaped building called the SecurityHousing Unit, or SHU (pronounced shoe).

Of course, there are ways to control inmates that American prisons have never tried on alarge scale. Skarbek points out that the gay-and-transgender unit of the Mens Central Jailin Los Angeles County is safe and gang-freeso much so that prison officials have had toscreen out straight Angelenos who play gay just to keep away from gangs. That jail is simplysmall and well administered, argues Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA professor who studied it, andits not clear that its methods could scale up. We could easily replicate less enlightenedpenal practices, too. In other countries, they can use corporal punishments not availableto authorities in American prisons, Skarbek saysa bullet in the back of the neck is astrong deterrent to any Chinese gang that might form behind bars. Within the bounds ofAmerican civil rights, though, we are left with prisons whose smooth operation relies inpart on the predatory activities of gangsand with facilities like the SHU, which isCalifornias effort to control the gangs by subjecting their leaders to levels of surveillanceand restriction far beyond what most American inmates face.

Walking into the SHU feels like entering a sacred space. After the clanging of doors behindyou, a monastic silence reigns. The hallways radiate from the command center at the hubof the SHU snowflake, and each one has chambers on either side that sprout chambers oftheir own. The hallways echo with footsteps when you walk down them. There are noprison noises: no banging of tin cups, no screaming of the angry or insane. The silence issepulchral, and even when you get to branches of the snowflake, where the inmatesactually live, it seems as if everyone is in suspended animation, on one of those interstellarjourneys that last multiple human lifetimes.

The gay-and-transgender unit is safe and gang-freesomuch so that prison officials have had to screen out straightAngelenos who play gay just to keep away from gangs.



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In fact, many are just watching television while wearing headphones. In the company ofChristopher Acosta, I visited a cellblock where fewer than a dozen cells held men, most ofthem living without cell mates. Before entering, I met a female security guard who, afterdemanding that I display my identification card more prominently, showed me a boardwith inmates pictures on it, each color-coded. Hispanics and whites predominated. Sheshowed me the slips of paper indicating that a couple of inmates wanted halal food,although she said she suspected the meal requests were a way to break monotony andcreate work for the staff, rather than as an expression of any authentic religious conviction.She said the inmates were allowed televisions with the speakers disabled, as well as 10books at a time.

The other Pelican Bay inmates were enjoying time together in the main yards, but thesehard-core gang members didnt have that option. Instead, they could go to a large,featureless concrete room at the end of the block for daily solitary exercise. The yard hada plexiglass roof that allowed them to see the sky above, and a small drainage hole in thefloor, through which they could sometimes communicate faintly with other inmates onother cellblocks. Last year, gang members used the drainage pipes of their in-cell toilets tocommunicate clandestinely across cellblocks and coordinate a hunger strike by inmatesstatewide, to protest the conditions in the SHU.

With a buzz and a clang, the guard opened the last door, and Acosta and I entered thecellblock. He warned me that no one would talk. We had spent much of the day discussingthe violent proclivities of the men under lockdown at Pelican Bayhow they becameexperts at weapons craftsmanship, for example, and could fashion the metal post of a bunkbed or the edge of a cell door into a spear, known as a bone crusher, that could be flungfrom inside a cell and penetrate a mans neck or liver. So I expected hostile interviews, ifany at all.

One of the first men I saw turned out to be genial but squirrely. He was Hispanic, refused togive his name, and babbled away about how prison gangs are just a thing, never quite



ALL POSTS Follow @gcawGraeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His personal site is gcaw.net.

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articulating what that meant. The only sentence he said that made any sense was that hewas in for life for killing two people. The door that separated him from me was a steel platewith small holes in it. After just a few seconds of his talking, I got a headache, partly fromhis mad monologue and partly from the odd moir effect of looking at him through thescreen.

As I passed down the line of cells, I tried talking to everyone but got little response. Oneheavily tattooed Hispanic man flicked his hand at me from behind the steel door, as if toshoo away a flea. Most ignored me, and the few who paid any attention just stared at melike I was prey and said nothing other than no. Finally one man with large glasses and athick black mustache said, Prison gangs? There aint no prison gangs here. He thenturned to a blank wall and started doing calisthenics.

When I emerged, and the door had clanged again behind me, I told the guard I hadntmanaged to talk with anyone. She was not surprised. Any conversation they attempted, shesaid, might be overheard and used against them.

But there are limits to what even the most carefully designed prisons can constrain. Theguard and I were talking in library voices, and no sounds came from the row of cells nearby.Its quiet, I said, lowering my voice. Can they hear what were saying?

Every word, she said. Every single word.

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A Long 2 days agoAstounding story. So, the prison system and the US government think it iseasier to let prison gangs police themselves than to break up the gangs? Arethey afraid of retaliation by the gangs on their families? Astounding!

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irene adler 2 days ago> A Longtwo words: anton makarenko

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Shartiblartfat 2 days ago> irene adlerEvery time I log in and begin reading, I get chased out toWikipedia to get further background. I already knew this, but Iread it so long ago my memory had to be shaken. Thank you.

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blue__sun 2 days ago> A LongWhat makes you think the gov has a choice?

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grifty a day ago> blue__sunWell they COULD 24/7 solitary everyone. But that just makesthem crazier.

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Caius Keys 18 hours ago> blue__sunThe government absolutely made a choice several decades ago -- these are the consequences.

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Shootist 14 hours ago> Caius KeysThe people who made the choices are dead, retired orboth.

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Caius Keys 14 hours ago> ShootistSo there are no such thing as long-term policyconsequences? Good to know!

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Shootist 9 hours ago> Caius KeysI don't see the masses running to pull the lever for smallgovernment, do yoU?

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Caius Keys 8 hours ago> ShootistSo the advertising ethic -- the truth is that which sells --trumps reality? Good to know!

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shadeseeker 14 hours ago> Caius KeysYes, the choice was no interest.

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A Long 7 hours ago> blue__sunWell, I think they have a choice but decide not to exercise it,maybe for the reason implied in my question.

Bonegirl06 2 days ago> A LongFrom the article, it sounds like they tried the break-up strategy and it

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only made the gangs more wide-spread. Why not let them do this if it'sthe most effective strategy?

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A Long 7 hours ago> Bonegirl06Well, I personally don't believe that gang proliferation is s goodthing.

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SatanicPanic 2 days ago> A LongIf it's working then why try to change it?

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A Long 7 hours ago> SatanicPanicI don't think gangs running prisons is a good thing.

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Jack T. a day ago> A LongAnd just how do you propose to "break up" these groups? As the articleexplained, physical separation resulted only in spreading the problemmore widely.

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A Long 7 hours ago> Jack T.One way would be to set up these gangs in separate prisons.

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grifty a day ago> A LongAs a prisoner you would want to push the limits as far as youcan..without getting tortured, raped or murdered by the guards.

Imagine your gang retaliates against a guards family. In return the nextday, when you are let of of the cells, all the other people let out are froma rival gang. The guards also don't want to antagonize the prisonersunnecessarily either. They mentioned how the guard would leavecontraband on the bed. Thats a perfect example.

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A Long 7 hours ago> griftyYes, but is this the way we want to control gangs? This is whathappens when law enforcement gets into to bed with the gangs.There will be no end to it.

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Jesse Stallsmith 6 hours ago> griftyLeaving contraband on the bed has nothing to do with guardsbeing intimidated, it has to do with the guards still being humansthat recognize which people are going to take advantage of an11th book to make something more dangerous out of, and who'sgonna have an 11th book because they read faster than they getto go to the library and get new books.

Do you have any reason to think you know what you're talkingabout?

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jose carbajal a day ago> A LongActually they have tried breaking up prisons gangs the nuestra familiawas broke up and sent out of state a few decades ago all that did washelp them expand .... next step is solitary confinment but money talks inany country guards sell out ....

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A Long 7 hours ago> jose carbajalSounds about right !

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Michael DeMutis 5 hours ago> A LongLet the people out who are in there for small drugpossession and you'll have plenty of space for thehardcores.

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A Long 5 hours ago> Michael DeMutisThat'd work!

Joe_F38 a day ago> A LongMy favorite part of the whole story is this one:

In other countries, they can use corporal punishments not available to authorities in American prisons, Skarbek saysa bullet in the back of the neck is a strong deterrent to any Chinese gang that might form behind bars."

... so there seem to be real, cheap and efficient solutions to the prisongang problem.

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Michelle Belle Dovidio 18 hours ago> Joe_F38Yet, we are a country in wide support of the death penalty. LOL!Don't whoop a prisoner with a belt...just strap him down with oneand inject him to die.

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Caius Keys 18 hours ago> Michelle Belle DovidioYou hit the nail on the head with that observation -- this iswhat happens in a system without capital punishment.

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shadeseeker 14 hours ago> Joe_F38Great material for Hollywood movies, though. Capitalism at work!

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A Long 7 hours ago> Joe_F38Great point!

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Caius Keys 18 hours ago> A LongTwo words: Democrat government.

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uniquename72 10 hours ago> Caius KeysRepublicans controlled Congress, White House, and theSupreme Court from 2000-2006. What did they do about prisongangs? Nothing. Which is exactly the same thing they did aboutabortion, legal reform, welfare reform, immigration, and everyother thing they pretend to believe in. But they did a great job ofvastly increasing the deficit, the size of the Federal government,and the power of the Executive Branch (which Obama is nowabusing, just as Bush did).

If you think there's a difference between Dems & Repubs, youaren't part of the problem -- you ARE the problem.

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Caius Keys 10 hours ago> uniquename72What a laugh... it's the Democrat activist judges thatcontrol the prisons, at least in California, which you wouldknow if you'd given a nanosecond of thought to the

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Reply problem. And those decisions occurred decades ago.

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Jeff McCabe 18 hours ago> A LongI knew a guy who was a guard in the Illinois prison system. Apparentlyletting the gangs run the place made it safer and easier to manage. Thepath of least resistance always wins, it doesn't really matter if its theright thing to do, its the easiest.

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Michelle Belle Dovidio 17 hours ago> Jeff McCabeLaw enforcement does the same thing in neighborhoods allacross our country. Turning an eye away from certain corners,the dealers that operate them, and the users who buy is just away to keep that community in a "peaceful" state. Like theguards leaving contraband out to make a statement, in the end,they, like local police, still have the upper-hand.

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Baltzell 17 hours ago> Michelle Belle Dovidio"Hamsterdam."

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Sam French 15 hours ago> Michelle Belle Dovidiocan you say mike brown the gentle giant

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Jesse Stallsmith 6 hours ago> Jeff McCabeSafer and easier for the guards, not for those who get preyed onby the gangs.

Americans are just too willing to let those that they so quicklyand easily write off as "bad" be subject to sub-human conditionsand the actual rule of convicted criminals, because the guardsjust want to collect a pay check and not actually get involved, inharms way, doing what they're paid to do.

Prison guards are scum, do not be mistaken. Any contradictorydescription of them is just foolish at best.

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Michael DeMutis 5 hours ago> Jesse StallsmithThey're in jail too.. .

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loopyduck 15 hours ago> A Long>Are they afraid of retaliation by the gangs on their families?

The simpler explanation is that it requires less resources.

If you stop to think about it, doesn't it work the same way outside thebars? It's not practical to have constant enforcement of the entirepopulation. Instead, it's expected that we follow the laws on our own.When we are young we are instilled with a sense of what is Right andWrong, and for the most part we obey.

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Michelle Belle Dovidio 14 hours ago> loopyduck@loopyduck Are you asking if law enforcement/prison guards areafraid of personal retaliation?

As far as the second half of your comment. Is it safe I assumeyou have never even visited someone in prison? Not that countyjail is a bed of roses but I mean prison when I ask, too.

I mean this as a full compliment when I say ..You're comment isadorably innocent!

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loopyduck 14 hours ago> Michelle Belle DovidioI was not asking anything. Do you see the little > symbolon the first line? It means the same thing it does in email:I'm repsonding to that part of A Long's comment.

In regards to the "second half of my comment" (which isreally the entirety of my comment), I fully admit that it's anoversimplification, but that's how analogies work. Thepeople officially tasked with enforcing the rules andregulations (the guards in prison; the police outside) don'thave the money or manpower to monitor every second ofeveryone's lives. Instead, self-enforcement (gangs in jail;"society" outside) take most of the load. And it is possiblefor things to get so out of control that the guards or thepolice end up at the mercy of those they are supposedlyin charge of.

I have nothing to say to you about my experiences inprison.

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Michelle Belle Dovidio 11 hours ago> loopyduck@loopyduck Whoopsie! I can see it now. My mobilescreen was not expanded wide enough to see the "Reply"was to ALong's opening comment. Loopyduck, if we were on more of a personal level, morethan likely, we would read one another's response as ifactually hearing the other's voice and tone. Honestly, Iread your comment posted a few hours ago from adifferent angle. Knowing this, I asked a couple ofquestions to help me better understand your words. Byno means was I "prying gossipy" into your life. I'm reallysorry you took it that way. Again, I could be reading yourlast responding words wrong....but I for sure felt"rrraaaaarrrrr" all throughout. My intentions were not foryou to feel invaded at all. I do apologize.

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A Long 7 hours ago> loopyduckTrue, voluntary obedience to laws is central to a free, democraticsociety. However, the more laws that we enact, the less likely thecitizenry will comply.

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gosalsk 2 days agoThe article sort of alludes to this but never says it outright: the homicide rate instate prisons has gone from 55 per 100,000 inmates in 1980 to four per 100ktoday.

It's probably better to say that prisons are potentially dangerous places sinceyou're about twelve times more likely to be murdered in Detroit than you are inprison, and that's not adjusting for demographics. For young black men itwouldn't surprise me if you were a hundred times more likely to be murderedliving in some cities than in prison.

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grifty a day ago> gosalskOk..but what about rape? Assault?

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Michelle Belle Dovidio 16 hours ago> grifty

If you're comfortable reading about the horrors of rape in prison ,

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I recommend an excellent book called F I S H: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison The author, TJ Parsells tells the story of his four year prisonsentence he spent from ages 17-21. You will have moments of cringing, but such a wretched topicParsells delivers the gruesome truth in such a way the horror isdefinitely felt by the reader but worded in such a way that it's an"unless it ever happened to you" you'll never fully know kind ofway. If that makes sense. He delves into not only the rape inprison but even how victims succumb to "just taking it" as ameans of survival and even some who form a bond with theirassailant from craving that "natural human need and want forlove."

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grifty 15 hours ago> Michelle Belle DovidioThanks for suggesting a depressing book. :) My commentwas along the lines of "measuring deaths isn'teverything". Lots of horrific things (which I'm sure I'd readabout in FISH) happen outside of murder.

Michelle Belle Dovidio 14 hours ago> grifty@grifty Lol! Why you prefer to read such topics in articleformat only!

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