How Gangs Took Over Prisons

9/19/2014
How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic
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How Gangs Took Over Prisons
Originally formed for self-protection, prison gangs have become the unlikely custodians of
order behind barsand of crime on the streets.
By Graeme Wood
Photos by Brian L. Frank
SEPTEMBER 16, 2014
309 Comments
this past February, the inmates in the B Yard of Pelican Bay

State Prison filed out of their cellblock a few at a time and let a cool, salty breeze
blow across their bodies. Their home, the California prison systems permanent
N A CLEAR MORNING
address 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 from
the 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 Northern
Structure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the Aryan
Brotherhood, respectively). The inmates interact like volatile chemicals: if you open their
cells 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.
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Now watch what they do, says Christopher Acosta, a corrections officer with a shaved
head who worked for 15 years as a front-line prison guard and now runs public relations for
Pelican 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 men
heavily tattooed murderers, thieves, and drug dealers walking past one of five casual but
alert guards. Some inmates, chosen for a strip search, drop their prison blues into little
piles and then spin around, bare-assed, to be scrutinized. Once inspected, they dress and
walk out into the yard to fill their lungs with oxygen after a long night in the stagnant air
of the cellblock. The first Hispanic inmate to put his clothes on walks about 50 yards to a
concrete picnic table, sits down, and waits. The first black inmate goes to a small workout
area 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 becomes
obvious that they have been moving tactically: each has staked out a rallying point for his
group 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 whats
going down on the yard, Acosta says. Then they can come back to their base and say
whos going to attack who, whos selling what.
Eventually, about 50 inmates are in the yard, and the guards have stepped back and
congregated at their own rallying point, backs to the fence, with Acosta. The mens
movements around the yard are so smooth and organized, they seem coordinated by
invisible traffic lights. And thats a good thing. Theres like 30 knives out there right
now, Acosta says. Hidden up their rectums.
A corrections officer at Pelican Bay conducts a search for contraband in an inmate's cell.
is difficult: they conceal their activities and

kill defectors who reveal their practices. This past summer, however, a 32-yearNDERSTANDING HOW PRISON GANGS WORK
old academic named David Skarbek published The Social Order of the Underworld, his
first 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 California
prison system, which houses the second-largest inmate population in the countryabout
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135,600 people, slightly more than the population of Bellevue, Washington, split into
facilities of a few thousand inmates apiece. With the possible exception of North Korea, the
United 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 and
softer punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then.)
If your name is on a Bad News List, gang members attack you

on sightbut remove your name when your debts are paid.
Skarbeks primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes from
precisely what most of us would assume is the source of disorder: the major gangs, which are
responsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, including
cellphones, behind bars. Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but
effective way, he says. They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the
prisons 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 the
main powers keeping them in check.
Skarbek is a native Californian and a lecturer in political economy at Kings College
London. When I met him, on a sunny day on the Strand, in London, he was craving a taste
of home. He suggested cheeseburgers and beer, which made our lunch American not only in
topic of conversation but also in caloric consumption. Prison gangs do not exist in the
United Kingdom, at least not with anything like the sophistication or reach of those in
California or Texas, and in that respect Skarbek is like a botanist who studies desert
wildflowers at a university in Norway.
Skarbek, whose most serious criminal offense to date is a moving violation, bases his
conclusions on data crunches from prison systems (chiefly Californias, which has studied
gangs in detail) and the accounts of inmates and corrections officers themselves. He is a
treasury of horrifying anecdotes about human depravityand ingenuity. There are few
places other than a prison where mens desires are more consistently thwarted, and where
men whose desires are thwarted have so much time to think up creative ways to circumvent
their obstacles.
Because he is a gentleman, Skarbek waited until wed finished our burgers to illustrate
some of that ingenuity. How can you tell what type of cellphone an inmate uses, he
asked, based on whats in his cell? He let me think for about two seconds before cheerily
giving me the answer: you examine the bar of soap on the prisoners sink. The safest place
for an inmate to store anything is in his rectum, and to keep the orifice supple and sized for
the (contraband) phone, inmates have been known to whittle their bars of soap and tuck
them away as a placeholder while their phones are in use. So a short and stubby bar means
a durable old dumbphone; broad and flat means a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Pity the poor
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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 grip
the authorities have on their inmates. In 2013, the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation confiscated 12,151 phones. A reasonable guess might be that this
represented a tenth of all cellphones in the system, which means that almost every one of
the states 135,600 inmates had a phoneall in violation of prison regulations. Prison is
set 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 are
coming up with complicated ways to get around them. Prison officials have long known
that gangs are highly sophisticated organizations with carefully plotted strategies,
business-development plans, bureaucracies, and even human-resources departmentsall
of which, Skarbek argues, lead not to chaos in the prison system but to order.
Craig Canary, an inmate in Pelican Bays Security Housing Unit, in his solitary-confinement cell
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 by

economic actors. In many cases, rational-choice theory has shown behaviors to be
rational that at first appear wild, irrational, or psychopathic. When people are
encouraged or forced to act against their economic interest, they find work-arounds as
surely as water blocked by a boulder in a stream finds a way to flow around it.
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In 1968, one of the founders of rational-choice theory, Gary Becker, wrote a pioneering
paper, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, premised on the idea that the
prevailing view of crime required revision. According to prior dogma, criminals were best
understood 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 that
criminals offend because they make careful calculations of the probability and likely cost of
getting caughtand then determine that the gamble is worthwhile. This insight, Skarbek
says, opened the study of crime up to economic theory.
Skarbek attended graduate school at George Mason University, a bastion of rational-choice
theory. Its faculty is also friendly to unorthodox subject matter: Robin Hanson has
published papers about using betting markets to augment democratic government, and has
proposed 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 as
controlled not just by the government but also by the black- and gray-market activities of
citizens.
Prison, Skarbek claims, is the ultimate challenge for a rational-choice theorist: a place
where control of the economic actors is nearly total, and where virtually any transaction
requires the consent of the authorities. The Soviets had far less control over their peoples
economic activity than prison wardens do over the few dollars available for prisoners
commissary purchases. Both settings have given rise to alternate currencies and hidden
markets. 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 use
postage stamps.
A scene from general-population housing
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 the
first 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 form
until the mid-1980s.
The explanation, Skarbek says, can be found in demographics, and in inmate memoirs and
interviews. Before prison gangs showed up, he says, you survived in prison by following
something called the convict code. Various recensions of the code exist, but they all
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reduce to a few short maxims that old-timers would share with first offenders soon after
they arrived. It was pretty simple, he explains. You mind your own business, you dont
rat on anyone, and you pretty much just try to avoid bothering or cheating other inmates.
If a white guy keeps everyone awake, the Aryan Brothers

will discipline him to avoid having blacks or Hispanics attack
one of their members.
But starting in the 1950s, things changed: The total inmate population rose steeply, and
prisons grew bigger, more ethnically and racially mixed, and more unpredictable in their
types of inmate. Prisons faced a flood of first offenders, who tended to be young and male
and therefore less receptive to the advice of grizzled jailbirds. The norms that made
prison life tolerable disappeared, and the authorities lost control. Prisoners banded
together for self-protectionand later, for profit. The result was the first California prison
gang.
That moment of gang genesis, Skarbek says, forced an arms race, in which different groups
took turns demonstrating a willingness to inflict pain on others. The arms race has barely
stopped, although the gangs have waxed and waned in relative power. (The Black Guerrilla
Family 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 from
Northern California formed Nuestra Familia to counter the influence of Hispanics from the
south. Gang elderscalled maestrosinstruct the youngsters in gang history and keep the
enmity alive.
Whats astonishing to outsiders, Skarbek says, is that many aspects of gang politics that
appear to be sources of unresolvable hatred immediately dissipate if they threaten the
stability of prison society. For example, consider the Aryan Brotherhooda notoriously
brutal organization whose members are often kept alone in cells because they tend to
murder their cell mates. You can take the Brotherhood at its word when it declares itself a
racist organization, and you can do the same with the Black Guerrilla Family, which
preaches race war and calls for the violent overthrow of the government. But Skarbek says
that at lights-out in some prisons, the leader of each gang will call out good night to his
entire cellblock. The sole purpose of this exercise is for each gang leader to guarantee that
his men will respect the nights silence. If a white guy starts yelling and keeps everyone
awake, the Aryan Brothers will discipline him to avoid having blacks or Hispanics attack
one of their members. White power is one thing, but the need to keep order and get shuteye is paramount.
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Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply street
gangs that have been locked up. The story of their origins, however, is closer to
the opposite: the Mexican Mafia, for example, was born at Deuel Vocational
Institution, 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 the
cellblock is symbiotic. The young guys on the street look to the gang members
inside as role models, says Charles Dangerfield, a former prison guard who now
heads Californias Gang Task Force, in Sacramento. Getting sentenced to prison
is like being called up to the majors.
But Skarbek says the prison gangs serve another function for street criminals. In a 2011
paper in American Political Science Review, he proposed that prison is a necessary enforcement
mechanism for drug crime on the outside. If everyone in the criminal underworld will go to
prison eventually, or has a close relationship with someone who will, and if everybody
knows that gangs control the fate of all inmates, then criminals on the street will be afraid
to cross gang members there, because at some point they, or someone they know, will have
to pay on the inside. Under this model, prison gangs are the courts and sheriffs for people
whose business is too shady to be able to count on justice from the usual sources. Using
data from federal indictments of members of the Mexican Mafia, and other legal
documents, Skarbek found that the control of prisons by gangs leads to smoother
transactions in the outside criminal world.
Gangs effect this justice on the inside in part by circulating a bad-news list, or BNL. If
your name is on a BNL, gang members are to attack you on sightperhaps because you
stole from an affiliate on the outside, or because you failed to repay a drug debt, or because
youre suspected of ratting someone out. Skarbek says one sign that the BNL is a rationally
deployed tool, rather than just a haphazard vengeance mechanism, is that gangs are
fastidious about removing names from the list when debts are paid.
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An inmate of the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay is flanked by corrections officers as he is transported from
one area of the unit to another.
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 to
O SCHOLAR WRITING
be true, even just based on my own reading. In 2005, Don Diva magazine
interviewed 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 a
refrigerator in the summer to keep milk cool. More vivid still was his description of inmate
survival tactics:
Inmates are legendary for keeping razors in their mouths. Being able to spit out
a razor is like a magic trick in jail. You could be in the mess hall, get into an
altercation with another inmate, and the next thing you know hes spit out two
razors from both sides of his mouth and your face is slashed up A nigga will
become Houdini when it comes to survival. Spitting razors became such a
problem that inmates immediately punched other inmates in the mouth as soon
as an argument began. This was so that if the other inmate did have razors in
his mouth, he would cut his own mouth up before even getting the opportunity
to spit them out.
But I found that the staff at Pelican Bay had already been thinking about prisons the way
Skarbek does. While I was there, Lieutenant Jeremy Frisk, the prisons Institutional Gang
Investigator, delivered a half-hour PowerPoint presentation focused on the managerial
ingenuity of the gang leaders. One of the last slides featured a picture of the Chrysler
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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 from
his management strategy: he never turned a wrench on a car, never assembled a door. But
because of his ideas, they could make millions of dollars. Frisk said gang leaders are the
Lee Iacoccas of the prison world: brilliant managers of violence. (Since that presentation, I
have found it impossible to look at a picture of Iacocca without imagining him stuffing his
cheeks and rectum with razor blades.)
The safest place for an inmate to hide a phone is in his

rectum. To keep the orifice sized and supple, inmates have
been known to tuck a bar of soap away as a placeholder.
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 always
have, like enormous holding pens, hardly optimal for supervising a population of violent
psychopaths who plot constantly to subvert the rules of the institution. Even the most
secure housing at San Quentin, says Pelican Bays acting warden, Clark Ducart, was built so
prisoners could all go from their cells to the yard together, with 50 men moving as an
ungovernable mass. The walkways were narrow, and exposed prisoners to each other in
ways that encouraged attacks. As you walked guys to the shower, he told me, theyd get
stabbed or speared. Pelican Bay, by contrast, allows much greater levels of control, and a
much more oppressive existence for anyone trying to plot a crime. The population is
sectioned into yards and blocks that might have little contact with one another, and that
allow the inmates to be managed with special attention to their gang affiliation. Upon
identifying a gang member, the prison can modulate his location, freedom, and level of
surveillance, 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
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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 roughly
correlates with probable gang affiliation: green for northern Hispanics, pink for southern
Hispanics, blue for blacks, white for whites, and yellow for others, including American
Indians, Mexican nationals, Laotians, and Eskimos. The information is crucial to the
smooth running of the institution. Maintaining balance in a cellblock, and not putting a
lone 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 knew
exactly what was happening, and they could have intervened and broken up obvious gang
activity. 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 of
Cape Fear: I dont know whether to look at him or read him.
Each interaction we observed between a correctional officer and a prisoner resembled
bargain more than diktat. Before yard time finished, the guards let me inspect cells with
them. The cells were livable, especially in comparison to the Rikers Island ones I had read
about, even if the whole block had a dank locker-room smell. When I peeked in an
inmates 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 isnt
doing anything wrong, a guard might let it pass. He said that if a guard discovered a
contraband item during an inspection, he might place it on the inmates bunk, just to show
that 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 involves
attaching an object to one end of a string, sliding it out of a cell and into the hallway, and
then using the other end of the string to yank it across the floor, this way and that, until it
slides in front of the desired cell. A shatter-toothed Aryan Brother smiled at me and said he
could send a book to an adjacent cell this way. (On his shelf: a single-volume edition of The
Chronicles of Narnia and a Teach Yourself book on German.) The fishlines work as a way to
distribute contraband, but are also used, Skarbek told me, as a sort of corporate
communications systemlike pneumatic tubes for prisoners.
The messages inmates send include extensive questionnaires for new arrivals. Nuestra
Familia is particularly sophisticated, and, in a sure sign of bureaucratization, the gang even
has 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 include
questions about your offense, your judge, and your relatives in other prisons. But it could
also ask where you lived on the outside and what resources you have that could be valuable
to the gang. The questionnaires are collated and checked. At some prisons, inmates use
their cellphones to confirm details on Facebook, and Skarbek says they have been known to
open LexisNexis accounts. Gang members are trained in micrographythe writing and
decipherment 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 reports
circulate around the prison system. Christopher Acosta showed me a kite that had been
intercepted at Corcoran State Prison, reporting on a gangs battle with a rival there.
An inmate doing push-ups in the SHUs exercise yard, a small concrete room with an overhead skylight where
inmates are allowed to spend an hour and a half a day and receive their only exposure to sunlight
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 strict
conditions that make communication almost, but not quite, impossibleno
freedom 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 first
was to break up gangs and scatter their members to distant prisons where their influence
would 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 highlevel 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. In
every direction there is little more than redwoods, marijuana farms, and seacoast. More
important, Pelican Bay has the facilities and knowledge necessary to isolate and neutralize
gang members. In Sacramento, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has
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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. Most
are at Pelican Bay, probably for life, in a snowflake-shaped building called the Security
Housing Unit, or SHU (pronounced shoe).
Of course, there are ways to control inmates that American prisons have never tried on a
large scale. Skarbek points out that the gay-and-transgender unit of the Mens Central Jail
in Los Angeles County is safe and gang-freeso much so that prison officials have had to
screen out straight Angelenos who play gay just to keep away from gangs. That jail is simply
small and well administered, argues Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA professor who studied it, and
its not clear that its methods could scale up. We could easily replicate less enlightened
penal practices, too. 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. Within the bounds of
American civil rights, though, we are left with prisons whose smooth operation relies in
part on the predatory activities of gangsand with facilities like the SHU, which is
Californias effort to control the gangs by subjecting their leaders to levels of surveillance
and restriction far beyond what most American inmates face.
The gay-and-transgender unit is safe and gang-freeso

much so that prison officials have had to screen out straight
Angelenos who play gay just to keep away from gangs.
Walking into the SHU feels like entering a sacred space. After the clanging of doors behind
you, a monastic silence reigns. The hallways radiate from the command center at the hub
of the SHU snowflake, and each one has chambers on either side that sprout chambers of
their own. The hallways echo with footsteps when you walk down them. There are no
prison noises: no banging of tin cups, no screaming of the angry or insane. The silence is
sepulchral, and even when you get to branches of the snowflake, where the inmates
actually live, it seems as if everyone is in suspended animation, on one of those interstellar
journeys that last multiple human lifetimes.
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In fact, many are just watching television while wearing headphones. In the company of
Christopher Acosta, I visited a cellblock where fewer than a dozen cells held men, most of
them living without cell mates. Before entering, I met a female security guard who, after
demanding that I display my identification card more prominently, showed me a board
with inmates pictures on it, each color-coded. Hispanics and whites predominated. She
showed 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 and
create 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 10
books at a time.
The other Pelican Bay inmates were enjoying time together in the main yards, but these
hard-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 had
a plexiglass roof that allowed them to see the sky above, and a small drainage hole in the
floor, through which they could sometimes communicate faintly with other inmates on
other cellblocks. Last year, gang members used the drainage pipes of their in-cell toilets to
communicate clandestinely across cellblocks and coordinate a hunger strike by inmates
statewide, to protest the conditions in the SHU.
With a buzz and a clang, the guard opened the last door, and Acosta and I entered the
cellblock. He warned me that no one would talk. We had spent much of the day discussing
the violent proclivities of the men under lockdown at Pelican Bayhow they became
experts at weapons craftsmanship, for example, and could fashion the metal post of a bunk
bed or the edge of a cell door into a spear, known as a bone crusher, that could be flung
from inside a cell and penetrate a mans neck or liver. So I expected hostile interviews, if
any at all.
One of the first men I saw turned out to be genial but squirrely. He was Hispanic, refused to
give his name, and babbled away about how prison gangs are just a thing, never quite
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articulating what that meant. The only sentence he said that made any sense was that he
was in for life for killing two people. The door that separated him from me was a steel plate
with small holes in it. After just a few seconds of his talking, I got a headache, partly from
his mad monologue and partly from the odd moir effect of looking at him through the
screen.
As I passed down the line of cells, I tried talking to everyone but got little response. One
heavily tattooed Hispanic man flicked his hand at me from behind the steel door, as if to
shoo away a flea. Most ignored me, and the few who paid any attention just stared at me
like I was prey and said nothing other than no. Finally one man with large glasses and a
thick black mustache said, Prison gangs? There aint no prison gangs here. He then
turned to a blank wall and started doing calisthenics.
When I emerged, and the door had clanged again behind me, I told the guard I hadnt
managed to talk with anyone. She was not surprised. Any conversation they attempted, she
said, might be overheard and used against them.
But there are limits to what even the most carefully designed prisons can constrain. The
guard 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.
309 Comments
Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His personal site is gcaw.net.
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A Long
2 days ago
Astounding story. So, the prison system and the US government think it is
easier to let prison gangs police themselves than to break up the gangs? Are
they afraid of retaliation by the gangs on their families? Astounding!
27
Reply Share
irene adler > A Long
2 days ago
two words: anton makarenko

16
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Shartiblartfat > irene adler
2 days ago
Every time I log in and begin reading, I get chased out to

Wikipedia to get further background. I already knew this, but I
read it so long ago my memory had to be shaken. Thank you.
3
Reply Share
blue__sun > A Long
2 days ago
What makes you think the gov has a choice?

5
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grifty > blue__sun
a day ago
Well they COULD 24/7 solitary everyone. But that just makes
them crazier.
Reply Share
Caius Keys > blue__sun
18 hours ago
The government absolutely made a choice several decades ago - these are the consequences.
3
Reply Share
Shootist > Caius Keys
14 hours ago
The people who made the choices are dead, retired or

both.
1
Reply Share
Caius Keys > Shootist
14 hours ago
So there are no such thing as long-term policy

consequences? Good to know!
Reply Share
Shootist > Caius Keys
9 hours ago
I don't see the masses running to pull the lever for small
government, do yoU?
Reply Share
Caius Keys > Shootist
8 hours ago
So the advertising ethic -- the truth is that which sells -trumps reality?
Good to know!
Reply Share
shadeseeker > Caius Keys
14 hours ago
Yes, the choice was no interest.
Reply Share
A Long > blue__sun
7 hours ago
Well, I think they have a choice but decide not to exercise it,
maybe for the reason implied in my question.
Reply Share
Bonegirl06 > A Long
2 days ago
From the article, it sounds like they tried the break-up strategy and it
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9/19/2014
only made the gangs more wide-spread. Why not let them do this if it's
the most effective strategy?
11
Reply Share
A Long > Bonegirl06
7 hours ago
Well, I personally don't believe that gang proliferation is s good

thing.
1
Reply Share
SatanicPanic > A Long
2 days ago
If it's working then why try to change it?
Reply Share
A Long > SatanicPanic
7 hours ago
I don't think gangs running prisons is a good thing.

1
Jack T. > A Long
Reply Share
a day ago
And just how do you propose to "break up" these groups? As the article
explained, physical separation resulted only in spreading the problem
more widely.
Reply Share
A Long > Jack T.
7 hours ago
One way would be to set up these gangs in separate prisons.

grifty > A Long
Reply Share
a day ago
As a prisoner you would want to push the limits as far as you

can..without getting tortured, raped or murdered by the guards.
Imagine your gang retaliates against a guards family. In return the next
day, when you are let of of the cells, all the other people let out are from
a rival gang. The guards also don't want to antagonize the prisoners
unnecessarily either. They mentioned how the guard would leave
contraband on the bed. Thats a perfect example.
15
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A Long > grifty
7 hours ago
Yes, but is this the way we want to control gangs? This is what
happens when law enforcement gets into to bed with the gangs.
There will be no end to it.
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9/19/2014
Jesse Stallsmith > grifty
6 hours ago
Leaving contraband on the bed has nothing to do with guards

being intimidated, it has to do with the guards still being humans
that recognize which people are going to take advantage of an
11th book to make something more dangerous out of, and who's
gonna have an 11th book because they read faster than they get
to go to the library and get new books.
Do you have any reason to think you know what you're talking
about?
Reply Share
jose carbajal > A Long
a day ago
Actually they have tried breaking up prisons gangs the nuestra familia
was broke up and sent out of state a few decades ago all that did was
help them expand .... next step is solitary confinment but money talks in
any country guards sell out ....
2
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A Long > jose carbajal
7 hours ago
Sounds about right !
Reply Share
Michael DeMutis > A Long
5 hours ago
Let the people out who are in there for small drug
possession and you'll have plenty of space for the
hardcores.
Reply Share
A Long > Michael DeMutis
5 hours ago
That'd work!

Joe_F38 > A Long
Reply Share
a day ago
My 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 prison
gang problem.
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9/19/2014
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Michelle Belle Dovidio > Joe_F38
18 hours ago
Yet, 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 one
and inject him to die.
1
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Caius Keys > Michelle Belle Dovidio
18 hours ago
You hit the nail on the head with that observation -- this is
what happens in a system without capital punishment.
1
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shadeseeker > Joe_F38
14 hours ago
Great material for Hollywood movies, though. Capitalism at work!
Reply Share
A Long > Joe_F38
7 hours ago
Great point!
Reply Share
Caius Keys > A Long
18 hours ago
Two words: Democrat government.

5
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uniquename72 > Caius Keys
10 hours ago
Republicans controlled Congress, White House, and the

Supreme Court from 2000-2006. What did they do about prison
gangs? Nothing. Which is exactly the same thing they did about
abortion, legal reform, welfare reform, immigration, and every
other thing they pretend to believe in. But they did a great job of
vastly increasing the deficit, the size of the Federal government,
and the power of the Executive Branch (which Obama is now
abusing, just as Bush did).
If you think there's a difference between Dems & Repubs, you
aren't part of the problem -- you ARE the problem.
2
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Caius Keys > uniquename72
10 hours ago
What a laugh... it's the Democrat activist judges that

control the prisons, at least in California, which you would
know if you'd given a nanosecond of thought to the
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9/19/2014
problem. And those decisions occurred decades ago.

Jeff McCabe > A Long
Reply Share
18 hours ago
I knew a guy who was a guard in the Illinois prison system. Apparently
letting the gangs run the place made it safer and easier to manage. The
path of least resistance always wins, it doesn't really matter if its the
right thing to do, its the easiest.
3
Reply Share
Michelle Belle Dovidio > Jeff McCabe
17 hours ago
Law enforcement does the same thing in neighborhoods all

across our country. Turning an eye away from certain corners,
the dealers that operate them, and the users who buy is just a
way to keep that community in a "peaceful" state. Like the
guards leaving contraband out to make a statement, in the end,
they, like local police, still have the upper-hand.
2
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Baltzell > Michelle Belle Dovidio
17 hours ago
"Hamsterdam."
3
Reply Share
Sam French > Michelle Belle Dovidio
15 hours ago
can you say mike brown the gentle giant

1
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Jesse Stallsmith > Jeff McCabe
6 hours ago
Safer and easier for the guards, not for those who get preyed on
by the gangs.
Americans are just too willing to let those that they so quickly
and easily write off as "bad" be subject to sub-human conditions
and the actual rule of convicted criminals, because the guards
just want to collect a pay check and not actually get involved, in
harms way, doing what they're paid to do.
Prison guards are scum, do not be mistaken. Any contradictory
description of them is just foolish at best.
Reply Share
Michael DeMutis > Jesse Stallsmith
5 hours ago
They're in jail too.. .
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22/25
9/19/2014

loopyduck > A Long
Reply Share
15 hours ago
>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 the
bars? It's not practical to have constant enforcement of the entire
population. 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 and
Wrong, and for the most part we obey.
Reply Share
Michelle Belle Dovidio > loopyduck
14 hours ago
@loopyduck Are you asking if law enforcement/prison guards are

afraid of personal retaliation?
As far as the second half of your comment. Is it safe I assume
you have never even visited someone in prison? Not that county
jail 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 is
adorably innocent!
1
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loopyduck > Michelle Belle Dovidio
14 hours ago
I was not asking anything. Do you see the little > symbol
on 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 is
really the entirety of my comment), I fully admit that it's an
oversimplification, but that's how analogies work. The
people officially tasked with enforcing the rules and
regulations (the guards in prison; the police outside) don't
have the money or manpower to monitor every second of
everyone's lives. Instead, self-enforcement (gangs in jail;
"society" outside) take most of the load. And it is possible
for things to get so out of control that the guards or the
police end up at the mercy of those they are supposedly
in charge of.
I have nothing to say to you about my experiences in
prison.
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9/19/2014
Reply Share
Michelle Belle Dovidio > loopyduck
11 hours ago
@loopyduck Whoopsie! I can see it now. My mobile

screen 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, more
than likely, we would read one another's response as if
actually hearing the other's voice and tone. Honestly, I
read your comment posted a few hours ago from a
different angle. Knowing this, I asked a couple of
questions to help me better understand your words. By
no means was I "prying gossipy" into your life. I'm really
sorry you took it that way. Again, I could be reading your
last responding words wrong....but I for sure felt
"rrraaaaarrrrr" all throughout. My intentions were not for
you to feel invaded at all. I do apologize.
1
Reply Share
A Long > loopyduck
7 hours ago
True, voluntary obedience to laws is central to a free, democratic

society. However, the more laws that we enact, the less likely the
citizenry will comply.

gosalsk
Reply Share
2 days ago
The article sort of alludes to this but never says it outright: the homicide rate in
state prisons has gone from 55 per 100,000 inmates in 1980 to four per 100k
today.
It's probably better to say that prisons are potentially dangerous places since
you're about twelve times more likely to be murdered in Detroit than you are in
prison, and that's not adjusting for demographics. For young black men it
wouldn't surprise me if you were a hundred times more likely to be murdered
living in some cities than in prison.
66
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grifty > gosalsk
a day ago
Ok..but what about rape? Assault?

2
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Michelle Belle Dovidio > grifty
16 hours ago
If you're comfortable reading about the horrors of rape in prison ,

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9/19/2014
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 prison
sentence he spent from ages 17-21.
You will have moments of cringing, but such a wretched topic
Parsells delivers the gruesome truth in such a way the horror is
definitely 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 of
way. If that makes sense. He delves into not only the rape in
prison but even how victims succumb to "just taking it" as a
means of survival and even some who form a bond with their
assailant from craving that "natural human need and want for
love."
2
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grifty > Michelle Belle Dovidio
15 hours ago
Thanks for suggesting a depressing book. :) My comment

was along the lines of "measuring deaths isn't
everything". Lots of horrific things (which I'm sure I'd read
about in FISH) happen outside of murder.
Reply Share
Michelle Belle Dovidio > grifty
14 hours ago
Subscribe
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@grifty Lol! Why you prefer to read such topics in article

format only!
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9/19/2014