How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

FEATURES: How Gangs Took Over Prisons

MENU

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

N A CLEAR MORNING

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 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.

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

Page 1 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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

%
&
'

343 Comments

crowd of Mexican Mafia, the mix can explode violently. So the guards
release them in a careful order.
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 menheavily 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 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.

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

Page 2 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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

NDERSTANDING HOW PRISON GANGS WORK

is difficult: they conceal

their activities and kill defectors who reveal their practices. This
past summer, however, a 32-year-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 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

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

Page 3 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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

Page 4 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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

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

Page 5 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

KARBEK TRAINED IN

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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.
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 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.

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

Page 6 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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 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.

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

Page 7 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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 maleand 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 maestros
instruct 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 shut-eye is paramount.
Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply

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

Page 8 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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.

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

Page 9 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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.

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 to 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.

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

Page 10 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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 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.
On every cellblock at Pelican Bay, the guards post plastic identity cards on
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/how-gangs-took-over-prisons/379330/

Page 11 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

the wall, to keep 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 singlevolume 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
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/how-gangs-took-over-prisons/379330/

Page 12 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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 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

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

Page 13 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

INDING KITES IS DIFFICULT,

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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 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. 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
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-andtransgender 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

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

Page 14 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

beyond what most American inmates face.

The gay-and-transgender unit is safe and gang-free

so 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.
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

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

Page 15 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

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 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.

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

'

343 Comments

Page 16 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

9/21/14 6:36 PM

Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His personal site

is gcaw.net.
ALL POSTS " Follow @gcaw

MOST POPULAR ON THE ATLANTIC

Why I Hope to Die at 75

How Gangs Took Over

Prisons

A Rare Virus Plagues

Back-to-School Season

What Happens When

We All Live to 100?

Follow The Atlantic (

Facebook

"

Twitter

LinkedIn

Google +

RSS

App Store

Play Store

E-Newsletters (
Today's Top Stories

This Week

This Month

New at In Focus

CityLab: Todays Top Stories

Email address

GO

I want to receive updates from partners and sponsors.

CityLab: This Weeks Most

Popular Stories

5 Best Columns

Todays Top News from The Wire

Top Videos of the Week

About The Atlantic (

FAQ

Store

Atlantic Media

Advertise

Site Map

Masthead

Emporium

Jobs

Advertising Guidelines

Terms and Conditions

Contact Us

Atlantic Scene

Press

Privacy

Subscribe (

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

Page 17 of 18

How Gangs Took Over Prisons - The Atlantic

Subscribe Help
Fraud Alert

9/21/14 6:36 PM

Get 10 issues a year at 65% off the cover price, plus unlimited digital access.
First Name

Last Name

Address 1

Address 2

City

State

Email

NEXT

Zip

Copyright 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

CDN powered by Edgecast Networks. Insights powered by Parsely

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

Page 18 of 18