Scenes of Prison
46. Stanton and his Gang
S tanton was an inmate in his mid-thirties who lived in an upper-tier room in our Disciplinary Segregation Unit. He was quiet, serious, and smart. He was also medium size and average physique. He was not the kind of person who would throw his head back and laugh out loud when he heard a funny story. He gave others the impression that he would be in charge if he wanted to be.
Most inmates come to Segregation for a short stay. A few, whom we believe to be an ongoing threat to the safety and security of the prison, stay for longer periods on a segregation status we called Administrative Confinement. Stanton lived in our unit. His Administrative Confinement status was routinely renewed. Stanton wasn’t going back to the general population. He was too dangerous. Stanton was a gang leader.
Gangs are not new. They’ve been in existence for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, but recently, they’ve experienced explosive growth. Welfare reform and poverty are largely to blame. The economic pressures of welfare reform on single-parent families headed by women were catastrophic, forcing millions of mothers out of their homes and into multiple jobs to make enough money to pay their bills. Their obligations to their employers didn’t make allowances for the needs of their children. It forced them largely to abandon their roles as mothers. Their employers took their best hours and their best energies. These mothers had diminished time and attention left for their children, and the boys especially were forced out onto the streets. It was there on the streets these boys found companionship, but they also found danger. The streets are not safe, and throngs of boys, who were missing parental guidance and protection, boys with absent fathers and missing their mothers, too, turned to each other in their need.
Children guiding children.
Children protecting children.
What could go wrong?
As it turned out, a lot!
Gangs provided protection, and they largely replaced the now-broken-down families from which gang members had come. Other members were “brothers.” The gangs provoked love and loyalty. Initiations demanded senseless criminal acts, and these criminal acts cemented relationships. Gang members became witnesses to each other’s crimes, accomplices, co-conspirators, receivers of stolen goods, and holders of weapons and drugs for older gang members. Gang members were forced to trust each other. They were forced together, and they stayed together. They were criminal families.
In Nebraska, we labeled gangs as criminal threat groups, and we had a wide variety of gangs with members in our prisons. Some were affiliated with national and international gangs. Some were born in specific neighborhoods of our large metropolitan areas like Omaha. Most were racially or ethnically homogeneous: Black, Hispanic, white, biker gangs, white supremacists. Some were imported from other countries, especially from Central and South America.
It was not difficult to identify gang members. Part of the intake process when inmates are sentenced to prison includes photographing every one of their tattoos. For some inmates, it can involve a lot of pictures, and the pictures tell the story.
People are proud of their tattoos, and gang members are proud of their gang affiliations, so they tattoo the names and symbols of their gangs onto their bodies. We even watch for new tattoos that appear while inmates are incarcerated with us. Crude, home-made tattoo kits made of sewing needles and ball point pen ink can deliver crude, painful tattoos for those determined enough to get them, and we photograph these new tattoos as we discover them and add them to an inmate’s file. By reviewing the tattoos, we know who belongs to gangs and which ones they belong to.
Gangs have favorite colors and sports teams. They have hand signals they “flash” at each other to identify brother gang members and to say “hi.” They have favorite styles of dress and accessories. They even have peculiar gaits and odd patterns of dress and grooming that say to onlookers, “I’m a ______. Don’t mess with me.” I even noticed that one gang favored rolling up one pant leg nearly to the knee while leaving the other pant leg hanging normally to the shoetop. To most people, this looked silly, and it provoked amusement, not the fear and admiration gang members imagined that it would.
Gang members I knew viewed their ongoing violent struggles with rival gangs as wars, and they viewed themselves as soldiers in that conflict. Innocent bystanders who were shot and sometimes killed in the crossfire of their battles were called mushrooms because they popped up unexpectedly out of nowhere. The term expressed a callous disregard for the suffering they inflicted upon innocent bystanders, and it added to an image they wanted to project of ruthlessness that should cause others to fear them and their gangs. Although they were only teenagers and young adults, they thought of themselves as battle hardened veterans.
Time passes. People grow up. Children become adults. Ruthless, battle-hardened gang members soften as family members and gang brothers die or struggle with life altering injuries. The moment eventually arrives when gang members outgrow their need for gangs, and their loyalty to their gangs begins to wane. Stanton was squarely in this camp.
One day, I challenged Stanton to consider a new idea. The energy and loyalty that gang members committed to their gangs would be the envy of most business owners. Couldn’t his gang channel all that energy and commitment into a business, like a used car dealership? Some members of his gang could become mechanics and fix up old cars. Others could clean them and detail them. Some could remove the rust and the dents with body work. Still others could sell them, and it could all happen in their own neighborhood, their home turf.
Stanton listened politely when I occasionally brought up the subject to start a conversation, but he never seriously entertained my idea. I was disappointed, but Stanton had something else in mind that he hid from us. Stanton intended to quit the gang and to move on to the next chapter of his life. He would not be leading a gang-owned used car dealership.
Quitting the gang!! That was pretty drastic, and gangs have a procedure for that. To dissuade gang members from turning their backs on their brothers and quitting the gang, all gang members, as a group, issue a warning: “There is no quitting the gang. If you quit the gang, you are a traitor, and because of what you know about the crimes other gang members have committed, you are also a threat. If you quit, we will kill you. If you quit, you’re a dead man.”
That’s a pretty stark warning, but Stanton clearly no longer fit into the youthful gang enterprise that we believed he led. Stanton had made up his mind, and he wasn’t afraid. He knew what to expect.
One day, Stanton was on the exercise yard. A few other inmates were also outside. Suddenly, they jumped him. Fists flew wildly, and Stanton protected his head and kept moving, doing everything he could to just stay on his feet. Falling to the ground would pin him in one place, and his attackers could switch from their fists to their feet. Stanton would no longer be a moving target, and they would kick Stanton with their heavy, black boots, and stomp on his head and body hoping to kill him, but Stanton didn’t fall.
He didn’t have to maintain his balance and keep moving very long. Our Emergency Response Team quickly arrived and stopped the assault. Stanton was not easy to attack, and he wasn’t seriously hurt. His attackers were removed, and his “punishment” for quitting the gang had now been delivered. It was now in his past. Finished. At least, he hoped it was.
Stanton continued to live in our Segregation Unit. But now, he considered himself a former gang member and leader, and that raised a question. Was Stanton now living in Segregation because he was a dangerous gang leader, or was he living there because he was in danger of being killed himself if we moved him back to the general population of inmates? We didn’t know for sure, but the choice to keep him in Segregation seemed to be the right one, so there he stayed.
One outcome of the attack on Stanton was a decision by our managers to build individual exercise enclosures in the exercise yard. By the time they were finished, we had six enclosures, and each one held a single inmate for his hour of exercise. They were made of chain link fencing that even stretched across the top. There would be no more attacks by groups of inmates on another inmate in our Segregation yard.
Discussion
- Describe experiences you have had with gangs.
- Do you have any theories of ways to lessen their influence, for example, legalizing drugs and/or prostitution?
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