A 40-year-old gang leader uses his cellular phone to organize an elaborate drug ring and order hits. He commands respect. He wears gang-banger clothing and drapes himself with gold chains. This man is responsible for an entire network of gang members across the state of Illinois. He is Gino Colon, the mastermind behind the Latin Kings. When prosecutors finally caught up with him last August, Colon was indicted for running the Latin Kings' drug-dealing operation from behind prison walls--the state penitentiary in Menard.
"People in society and correctional officers need to understand that immediate control over the prison system is often an illusion at any time," says Cory Godwin, president of the gang-investigators association for the Florida Department of Corrections, or DC. "Contraband equals power."
Prison gangs are flourishing from California to Massachusetts. In 1996, the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that prison disturbances soared by about 400 percent in the early nineties, which authorities say indicated that gangs were becoming more active. In states such as Illinois, as much as 60 percent of the prison population belong to gangs, Godwin says. The Florida DC has identified 240 street gangs operating in their prisons. Street gangs, as opposed to gangs originating in prisons, are emerging as a larger problem on the East Coast.
Of the 143,000 inmates Texas houses in state pens, 5,000 have been identified as gang members and another 10,000 are under suspicion. Texas prison-gang expert Sammy Buentello says the state's prisons are not infested with gangs, but those that have set up shop are highly organized. "They have a paramilitary type structure;' he says. "A majority of the people that come in have had experience with street-gang membership and have been brought up in that environment accepting it as the norm. But some join for survival."
After James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death in Jasper last June, rumors spread throughout Texas linking two of the suspected assailants to racially charged prison gangs. While authorities and inmates dismiss these rumors, the Jasper murder occurred only weeks after a San Antonio grand jury indicted 16 members of the Mexican Mafia, one of the state's largest and most lethal prison gangs, for ordering the deaths of five people in San Antonio from within prison walls.
"As they are being released into the community on parole, these people are becoming involved in actions related to prison-gang business. Consequently, it is no longer just a corrections problem--it is also a community problem," Buentello tells Insight.
According to gang investigators, the gang leaders communicate orders through letters. Where mail is monitored they may use a code--for instance, making every 12th word of a seemingly benign letter significant. They use visits, they put messages into their artwork and in some states they use the telephone. "It is a misnomer that when you lock a gang member up they fall off to Calcutta. They continue their activity," Godwin emphasizes. "It has only been in the last five years that law enforcement has realized that what happens on the inside can affect what happens on the outside and vice versa."
Of the two kinds of gangs, prison gangs and street gangs, the prison gangs are better organized, according to gang investigators. They developed within the prison system in California, Texas and Illinois in the 1940s and are low-key, discreet--even stealthy. They monitor members and dictate how they behave and treat each other. A serious violation means death, say investigators.
The street gangs are more flagrant. "Their members are going into the prisons and realizing that one of the reasons they are in prison is that they kept such a high profile" making it easier for the police to catch them, says Buentello. "So, they are coming out more sophisticated and more dangerous because they aren't as easily detected. They also network and keep track of who is out and so forth."
According to gang investigators and prisoners, the prison gangs were formed for protection against predatory inmates, but racketeering, black markets and racism became factors.
Godwin says Texas should never have outlawed smoking in the prisons, adding cigarettes as trade-goods contraband to the prohibited list. "If you go back to the Civil War era, to Andersonville prison," Godwin says of the prisoner-of-war facility for Union soldiers, "you will see that the first thing that developed was a gang because someone had to control the contraband--that is power. I'm convinced that if you put three people on an island somewhere, two would clique up and become predatory against the other at some point."
But protection remains an important factor. When a new inmate enters the prison system he is challenged to a fight, according to a Texas state-pen prisoner. The outcome determines who can fight, who will be extorted for protection money and who will become a servant to other prisoners. Those who can't join a gang or afford to spend $5 a week in commissary items for protection are destined to be servants. Godwin explains: "The environment is set up so that when you put that many people with antisocial behavior and criminal history together, someone is going to be the predator and someone the prey, and that is reality."
The Texas inmate describes a system in which gangs often recruit like fraternities, targeting short-term inmates because they can help the gang--pay them back, so to speak--when they leave prison for the free world. Most of the groups thrive on lifelong membership, according to the Florida DC, with "blood in, blood out" oaths extending leadership and membership beyond the prison into the lucrative drug trade, extortion and pressure rackets.
Prison gangs operating in Texas and Florida include Neta, the Texas Syndicate, the Aztecs, the Mexican Mafia, the New Black Panthers, the Black Guerrilla Family, Mandingo Warriors, Aryan Brotherhood, La Nuestra Familia, the Aryan Circle and the White Knights. Some of these gangs have alliances, and some are mortal enemies. Many on this list originated in California over the decades, some of them (such as the Texas Syndicate) to protect members from the other gangs. In addition, street gangs such as the Crips and Bloods and traditional racial-hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan also operate in the prisons.
What prisoners may not realize is that because the gangs are monitored by prison authorities the law-enforcement community is becoming very sophisticated about the gangs. "Sixty percent of what we learn about what is going on in the city streets of Florida" is garnered in prison and not from observing the streets, says Godwin.
Prison officials say they concentrate on inmate behavior to identify gang members. They do not single out gang leaders to strike any deals because acknowledging the gang as anything other than a "security-threat group" gives them too much credibility. This has been a particular problem in Puerto Rico with the native and political Neta gang. Recognizing groups during the 1970s, in a system in which prisoners have the right to vote, has led to a tendency among politicians to award clemency to some inmates.
Officials in Texas have reacted most stringently to gang members. They isolate and place them in lockdown status to discourage membership. Buentello says this approach has produced a dramatic decrease in violence. In 1984, 53 inmates were killed due to gang violence. After the new policy was implemented in 1985, homicides dropped to five and then continued to decline.
Godwin says Florida uses a closed-management system that only locks up prisoners for 23 hours, with further enforcement based on inmate behavior.
"The reality is they are going to be able to get away with doing things when we have only a handful of prison staff," Godwin cautions, adding that the system needs to increase the professionalism of the staff with pay raises and training. Many employees are recruited out of the same neighborhoods as the prisoners, he explains.
Linda Washburn of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, a much smaller system than Texas or Florida, says her state handles prisoner gangs just like Florida. According to her, size doesn't matter when it comes to prison-gang problems because no one is immune to it. "This issue crosses so many lines in society and in the prisons that it requires us in law enforcement and criminal justice to unite and confront the issue together... as a team with one voice."
It isn't about bad guys killing bad guys. It's about drug dealers and racketeers profiting off the system. And Godwin warns that the direct effect on American neighborhoods is realized when the 16-year-old sent up for 25 years gets paroled and moves in next door.
COPYRIGHT 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
Bibliography for: "The gangs behind bars"
Tiffany Danitz "The gangs behind bars". Insight on the News. FindArticles.com. 10 Apr, 2012.
COPYRIGHT 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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