Lockdown status is confirmed when kitchen workers arrived to deliver meals, escorted by an officer who opens the main door just enough for us to file past one at a time and receive an off-brand Styrofoam tray.

Cell phones come out. We learn the reason—another fight between rival gangs.

No one is surprised. Since he first took office in 2019, Governor Brian Kemp (R) has launched the state’s first “gang prosecution unit” and implemented five-year mandatory minimums for all gang-related convictions. Prisoners tagged by GDC as gang-affiliated have rather dim prospects with the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, the members of which all have law enforcement backgrounds.

At any given GDC facility more than half the officer posts might be empty, so a minor brawl can produce more armed combatants than there are staff members in the entire prison. Coordinated use of pepper spray and Tasers can still disperse a crowd, but it leaves administrators shaken and results in a lockdown of that facility until the relevant cameras and gang leaders can be reviewed for assessment. That could be done in an hour. Or, if the fight is on a Thursday, it could take until Monday.

No visitation, no religious services, no behavioral improvement groups that are mandatory for the parole-eligible. No library access, including the law library. No yard call. No ball games in the gym. Commissary cut by half. Group counseling, education and vocational tech classes—all cancelled.

Industry workers may still sent out though, under escort, to their unpaid full-time chemical or textile factory jobs. Georgia Correctional Industries is going to get theirs unless the plant burns down.

When multiple prisons have gang fights in the same week, it can look like a system-wide war. “Organized crime” is not that organized, though.

Lockdowns are being presented as the new normal, but the state does not have the resources to make that work, at least not in a constitutionally acceptable manner. Yet they continue.

When multiple prisons have gang fights in the same week, all of GDC goes on lockdown. It can give the appearance of a system-wide gang war. “Organized crime” is not that organized, though; it’s not as if members in different prisons are contributing to a national pot. These are just fights between the same gangs at different locations.

The next day, wardens will meet with leaders of the groups involved to check whether this was anything more than a local beef. Over time they’ve learned to call leading members of all gangs to such meetings; if any are left out, their paranoia becomes everyone’s problem. Paranoid is the norm in prison; dots connect at great distances in here.

Gang leadership tends to be those with cool heads who have learned how to talk to The Man, and say whatever’s needed to get their facility’s lockdown status reduced to “modified movement.” You might be surprised how many young hotheads will answer officers with the truth (“We want to kill all the __!”), which does not have the same effect.

Modified movement status means that at least visits and classes resume. Still no yard or gym time.

Corrections departments may tout their zero-tolerance approach to gangs, but the understaffing crisis ensures that wardens and gang leaders have never been closer. Without any experienced officers around, talking to gang leaders is the only way staff get anything to report up the food chain.

Everyone cuts their eyes toward any prisoner seen talking privately to administration, but it’s common now. Used to be that no one would even address a floor-walking guard without at least one witness in tow; if a guard is involved in a bust later that day, it is potentially unhealthy to have been the last one seen speaking to them beforehand.

Contraband cell phones aren’t the cause of gang violence.

In January, one medium-security facility had such a clash between rival gangs that it actually spilled from the walkways outside the living units into the open visitation area, filled with women and children on a Sunday. Three prisoners were killed during the fight, one of whom was days away from being released, and a fourth died later following injuries. All prisons were duly locked down while GDC began an investigation, which eventually resulted in 12 prisoners charged with murder.

Contraband cell phones aren’t the cause of gang violence. Has someone’s outside family ever been extorted through the medium of a contraband cell phone? Sure. But phones also play a huge role in violence reduction. They’re used to verify whether new arrivals are who they claim to be, which immediately shuts the door on a lot of sketchy behavior that leads to violence. They’re used to generate and transfer income. Violence breaks out because the state continuously prices edible food further and further out of reach, and people are hungry.

Violence also breaks out after crackdowns on drones. A single drone delivery can easily represent tens of thousands of dollars invested. When one gang has the drone connection, a peace treaty will allow rival gangs to handle distribution; everyone eats. But when a drone is intercepted, hunger inspires confrontation among those who want their money back. It’s telling that, alongside more traditional contraband like drugs and cell phones, drones are also bringing in food.

Allow local and online businesses to hire prisoners and pay them a living wage. Require parole boards to base their release decisions on time served, and their denials only on disciplinary infractions. Sell vapes at commissary. Or, if that’s just too sensible, then at least turn a blind eye to the contraband tobacco market.

Image via Matthew Ansley/Unsplash

The post Lockdowns Are a Dangerous Way for Prisons to Respond to Gang Violence appeared first on Filter.

There used to be three main reasons someone would go to PC: You’d just come into the prison system and your case had gotten a lot of publicity; you’d been assigned to a facility where staff or other prisoners had personal connections to a victim in your case; or someone had physically attacked you or made a verifiable threat to do so.

But today, PC is completely different. Because of the understaffing crisis, gangs have so much control in prisons that gang-affiliated prisoners are not letting other members of the population live in their assigned cells. That’s the main reason people go to PC now.

When Joe* began his sentence about five years ago, gang-affiliated prisoners wouldn’t let him live in his assigned cell. At first he tried sleeping on the floor in another cell that already had two people. He told Filter that the first night, an officer making rounds simply shined his flashlight in, counted three people, and kept walking. Officers receive the same type of intimidation from gangs that non-affiliated prisoners do.

But soon, Joe was told he’d have to pay protection fees or he’d be hurt. His family paid over $3,000 during his first year in prison so that he could exist unharmed, but that wasn’t sustainable.

Joe contemplated suicide. But he decided if he could just hang on, maybe things would be better one day. So he checked into PC. He spent the next several years there until he was recently released into general population at South Central Correctional Facility, where I’ve been housed for the past decade or so.

When people leave PC, they’re transferred to a different facility before they rejoin general population. This isn’t enough to keep people safe, because gangs will simply put the word out to affiliated prisoners at the other facility. It helps somewhat, but Joe is traumatized and constantly looking over his shoulder. 

PC is a prison within a prison.

Back when facilities were more adequately staffed, mediations would be held for situations like Joe’s. But there is no longer any attempt at conflict resolution, due to lack of resources.

This facility used to not house anyone on PC. Now PC is an entire living unit of 128 people, and there’s a waitlist of people filling up the segregation cells until they can get a bed.

Life is more restrictive in PC. It’s a prison within a prison. Everything happens inside the unit of 128 people. They’re allowed out to their own recreation area when there’s enough staff to supervise, which is maybe once or twice a week. Anyone taking Adult Basic Education—studying for the GED—does so in their cell; there’s an instructor, but they just hand out packets. At this facility we don’t have vocational programming or things like that, but in PC people wouldn’t be able to participate even if it was available.

Food is taken to them in the unit. The quality and quantity of the food is the biggest complaint from people in PC here. Kitchen workers are very hard on them, giving them the worst food. It’s a mentality left over from the days when people who went to PC had snitched on someone. People are allowed to order commissary and make the same purchases as in general population, but most don’t have the money for that because very few people in PC have jobs. The only jobs available are cleaning the living unit, and “Inmate Helpers” who push wheelchairs and things like that. 

The second-biggest complaint is loss of laundry. Laundry has to be sent out, and it’s common for the general population workers assigned to the laundry room to take items belonging to people in PC, since there’s not much they can do. So a lot of people are washing things by hand in their cells. The cells are double-bunked, just like in general population.

Paul* corresponded with Filter from within PC, where he’s been for about six months. Like Joe, he was extorted by gangs after receiving a cell assignment he had no control over.

“You don’t have to have done anything against them,” he told Filter. “You’re just a big dollar sign.”

It’s not uncommon for gangs to send people to check into PC, to follow someone who’s sought refuge.

Paul said that even though he’s in PC, he doesn’t feel safe. It’s not uncommon for gangs to send people to check into PC, to follow someone who’s sought refuge from them. Often it looks too suspicious for someone affiliated to check into PC themselves, so gangs will pay someone not affiliated to do it. Generally someone who’s never getting out of prison, who needs money or can be threatened. Paul recalled one officer telling him that if he didn’t want to be scared, he shouldn’t have come to prison. 

He expected to be scared in prison, he told Filter. But he did not expect to fear for his life every day.

When someone checks into PC, they first go into a segregation cell for up to 10 days while staff evaluates their case and determines whether PC is warranted. But because PC is always full now, people are stuck in segregation even though their investigation is done, waiting for someone in PC to be transferred out or for their sentence to end. There are currently about 30 people here in this situation. Some have been stuck in segregation for months.

Because segregation is designed to be punitive, those cells have no electrical outlets to plug in a TV or a tablet. People aren’t able to order food from commissary, even if they can afford it; just hygiene items. There are no visits. For recreation, there are about eight cages like dog runs where people are escorted for an hour, three times a week, if there’s staff available to do so. 

Meanwhile, gang-affiliated prisoners who would once have been moved there due to violent conduct are staying in general population.

*Names have been changed to protect sources

Image (cropped) via Washington Office of the Corrections Ombuds

The post As Gang Power Expands, Protective Custody in Prisons Is Changing appeared first on Filter.

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum in mid-September to send the National Guard into the city as part of the new “Memphis Safe Task Force.” Governor Bill Lee (R) then authorized the deployment.

“The effort of this task force is crime,” Lee said at a September 26 press conference, according to Commercial Appeal. “It’s to fight violent criminals, drug traffickers, smugglers.”

Lee said that he is not declaring a state of emergency, but that the troops are necessary to provide support to local law enforcement.

“The crime crisis in Memphis has been driven by gang violence,” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R) told legislators September 17. The National Guard, she continued, would “help maintain order so that the Memphis police officers can … get these career criminals, these gang leaders off the streets.”

This is interesting to many of us incarcerated in Tennessee prisons, particularly the CoreCivic prisons where gang-related violence is rampant. It may sound like getting gang leaders off the streets is a good thing, but their power doesn’t vanish inside prison—it becomes more concentrated. Why is there not a similar push to send the National Guard to supplement the overwhelmed corrections officers? Lee’s office did not respond to Filter’s inquiry.

“Everyone in my organization realizes their work will more than likely involve prison time,” said P*, a gang leader currently incarcerated at South Central Correctional Facility, one of the four Tennessee prisons run by CoreCivic. “That means the clients are different, the work’s the same.”

Trump, Blackburn, Lee and others at the signing of the memorandum to establish the “Memphis Safe Task Force.”

Many prisons around the country, including in Tennessee, are gang-run. The balance of power shifted when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and corrections officers quit or stopped showing up to work.

For example, it used to be that when prisoners went out to the yard there’d be four officers supervising, plus another four or five during “movement” when the gates open for prisoners to go from one part of the compound to another; you’d get at least one pat-down just going from point A to point B. Now, no one supervises yard time, if we get it at all. If we do, there’ll be a single officer to open the gates, and that’s it. People go out in their pajamas.

Pre-COVID, if an officer needed help they could push a button or make a call over the radio, and within 30 seconds five more officers would arrive as backup. Now, at most maybe one shows up. Maybe no one does. The officers know that, and the gang members know that. So when the lone officer posted in a pod of 128 prisoners is told to leave a gate open, they’re not going to refuse or call for help. They’re just going to leave the gate open. 

“What am I supposed to do when I open the gate to release inmates out of the unit, and they push me out of the way and rush past me?” one officer who’s worked at South Central for about three years told Filter. “If I try to resist, I’m shown shanks. And, once, knocked out.” The officer was comfortable sharing this even though they requested anonymity—so many officers here have been knocked out at one point or another that this is not an identifying detail.

There aren’t enough officers to maintain control now. But there are more and more gang members. They continue to run their business from inside prison, and they also have free rein to rob their neighbors, collect drug debts or defy corrections officer authority.

In Tennessee prisons, gang members are mixed in with the general population prisoners who are not affiliated. Supposedly this dilutes their power, but what it actually does is establish each living unit as a substation of whichever gang emerges there as the strongest. They rule the roost.

“Moving my associates from the street to prison doesn’t change nothing,” said J*, a leader in a different gang at South Central. “We’ve got the power right now in the joints, and we’re banking while we can.”

J and P are both from Memphis. Both said that on the streets, leadership of their respective organizations were relocating, to avoid being caught up in the government’s impending show of force.

*Names have been changed to protect sources

Top image (cropped) and inset image via the White House

The post National Guard Sent to “Fight” Gangs in Memphis—But Gangs Run Tennessee’s Prisons appeared first on Filter.

There’s a lot less research on the impact of gangs in US prisons compared to on the street. But while only a fraction of 1 percent of the US population is gang-affiliated, within prisons that figure is by some estimates around 15 percent. Because many of the same gangs have members both inside and outside prison, they typically control a facility’s contraband—tobacco and other drugs; cell phones; sex. They maintain that control through violence and extortion. A few words from a gang leader and a riot could break out and potentially claim the lives of staff as well as other prisoners, which is why gangs scare the bejesus out of many prison commissioners and wardens.

A lot of people on the outside have reason to care about prison gang violence because the people being subjected to it are their family or friends. But the rest should still care because even if you don’t know them yet, many of these traumatized prisoners will be released back into your community one day.

“The community can put us away without a second thought and get back a messed-up individual,” Perry*, incarcerated with me at South Central Correctional Facility in Tennessee, told Filter, “or use the time they put us away to show a different way. And get back someone who can be a good member of society.”

“If a gang member leaves prison and goes back into the community unchanged … he is empowered and will gravitate toward that same violence.”

Many “tough on crime” people who have not lived inside the criminal-legal system believe that prisons are supposed to be tough places. In their minds, being convicted of a felony means you forfeit the right to a dignified life, and so whatever rapes or beatings or burglaries you suffer, you brought them on yourself. This torture is considered part of your punishment and rehabilitation.

Many people who initially come to prison on short sentences for nonviolent convictions become trapped here after being forced to defend themselves from gang-affiliated prisoners. In my three decades of incarceration in the Tennessee men’s prison system, I have never known anyone who got out and left all their trauma in prison. Freedom doesn’t heal trauma. People bring it with them.

“I do know this, if a gang member leaves prison and goes back into the community unchanged during his time of incarceration, he is empowered,” Perry said. “And will gravitate toward that same violence … that kept him safe while locked up.”

Perry credits his exit from gang life 20 years ago to finding a higher power—higher than the human power held by gang leaders, for example.

Over the years as I’ve met more current and former gang members, I’ve noticed what factors reduce the harms that prison inflicts on them, and as a result reduce some of the harms they inflict on non-affiliated people they’re locked up with.

Not everyone is inclined toward spirituality, but everyone benefits from having enough food to eat. Hungry bellies mean more violence, yet unfortunately prisons have a massive unemployment crisis while commissary prices only keep going up.

“I couldn’t go to class with a guy one day and rob him the next.”

In addition to edible food, humans need purposeful ways to occupy their time—especially in prison, where there are few other sources of dignity or hope. But the trend is increasingly to warehouse us in perpetual lockdown inside our cells, without any educational or recreational programming.

“I couldn’t go to class with a guy one day and rob him the next,” Kendrick*, also incarcerated at South Central, told Filter. “It felt different.”

Kendrick had already been affiliated with a gang as a teenager in the free world, and when he was sent to prison he initially continued to carry out orders without question. This made prison life easier, and gave him a sense of belonging. Usually the orders were either giving someone a beating or robbing them of any valuable property. Then, after a couple of years, Kendrick got his GED.

“It was the first time I had accomplished something for myself,” he said. “It made me feel like I could do more than what I had been doing, and could make my own decisions about my life.”

He went to gang leaders and asked to be taken off the roll, meaning no longer be considered an active member. He knew that this process would involve taking a beating himself this time. “I was scared, I can’t lie. I had given these beat-downs before and knew how brutal it was going to be,” he said. “When it was over, and I was alive, I smiled and knew I was going to be okay—I was free.”

*Names have been changed for sources’ protection.

Image (cropped) via New York State Senate

The post Gang-Run Prisons Compound Trauma. We Know How to Reduce It. appeared first on Filter.