Blood In, Blood Out
The Emergence of California Prison Gangs in the 1960s
HEATHER MCCARTY
Prisons are sites of state power. Whether their stated purpose is rehabilitation or retribution, carceral systems are intended to help restore law and order while at the same time rendering invisible not only people but inequities like poverty and racial disparities that are often associated with crime. Although prisons are physically isolated from society, outside influences penetrate their walls and affect prisoner culture and social organization. Starting in the 1960s, social movements seeking to address issues of migration and dislocation as well as discrimination in education, housing, employment, and policing influenced prisoner culture and social organization inside California’s prison. Prisoners blended the culture of outside social movements from which they came with the particulars of the prison.
While outside politics radicalized a segment of the prisoner population and inspired them to protest and challenge the prison system, they also heightened racial tensions inside. Edward Bunker, an ex-con who spent his youth and much of his early adult life inside California’s prison system, depicted the racial polarization of the prisons during the 1960s:
The racial turmoil of the streets was magnified in San Quentin’s sardine can world. The polarization within can be illustrated by two events. In 1963 when John Kennedy was assassinated, it was lunchtime in the Big Yard. Everyone fell into a stunned silence. Eyes that hadn’t cried since early childhood filled with tears, including those of the toughest black convicts. Five years later, when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head, the response was different. Black convicts called out, “Right on!” “The chickens come home to roost,” said the Black Panther newspaper. “Ten for one!” was the cry of black nationalists: kill ten whites for one black and they would win the revolution. The fiery political rhetoric was taken literally by unsophisticated men within the cage.1
The revolutionary rhetoric of this era encouraged some prisoners to transcend racial divisions and see themselves as members of a convict class, but it also encouraged others to racially segregate. Like many cities in the United States in the 1960s, prisons became hotbeds for racial unrest and political radicalism. What follows is an examination of the ways in which factors external to the prison, like civil rights, black power and brown power movements, and the “get tough” politics of the 1970s, interplay with internal prison factors, such as overcrowding, changing prisoner demographics, and shifting prison administrative response strategies, to catalyze prisoner social organization that ultimately produced the dominance of prison gangs.
Historical scholarship on prisons during the turbulent civil rights era has greatly expanded. Much of this scholarship, including my own, argues against Eric Cummins’s thesis that the struggle for prisoners’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s was restricted to a few political prisoners fetishized by the New Left and that grassroots activism among the mainline prisoner population was largely absent.2 Scholars like Heather Ann Thompson, Robert Chase, Dan Berger, and many others are rethinking this framework and exploring the idea that prisons and prisoner responses to repression serve as a window into the processes of racial formation and racial violence. This scholarship focuses on the experiences of the entire prisoner population and connects with recent scholarship on the civil rights and black power and brown power movements.3 New works by Mark Brilliant and Donna Murch, another contributor to this volume, focus specifically on the civil rights years in California and explore not only racial subornation and migration across regions but also the structures of racial violence.4
Geographical differences and variations in regional practices and histories shape the internal dynamics of prisons, which are structured differently from state to state.5 Recent scholarship by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann and by Keramet Reiter (also a contributor to this volume) explores the ways in which internal changes in California’s prisons combined with external shifts in approaches to prison administration, like the rise of “get tough” politics and policies, to produce ill-thought-out policy changes with profound societal impacts. These works trace the factors that ended rehabilitation efforts in prisons and spawned supermax prisons and mass incarceration trends that originated in California but spread throughout the country.6 Similarly focused on the dynamics between internal and external shifts affecting California’s prison system, this essay explores how prisoner social relations derive from a dialectic that comes from both within and without prisons and that evolve over time. Prison societies are not ahistorical, nor is prisoner organization the static world that sociologists previously presented; both are worthy of historians’ attentions.7
In the 1960s and 1970s, problems pervasive outside of California’s prisons were also prevalent within them, and prisoners responded to prison repression with the same tactics that those on the outside employed, including collective organization, protest, legal tactics, and violence. In this context, the formation of gangs in California’s prisons can be seen as one tool available to prisoners to deal with the violence and deprivation of imprisonment. The overall impact gangs have on the prison world, however, was and is destructive. Gang violence, like most prison violence, whether stemming from the violence of the institution or emerging from prison society, contributed to a destabilization that reshaped both prisoner social order and penal practices.
Prison gangs are highly secretive organizations. This presents source challenges for scholars researching them. Prison administration records ranging from internal memos to meeting minutes make clear the California Department of Corrections (CDC) perspective but largely omit the prisoner voice. Occasionally, prison and CDC records contain seized materials from prisoner cells, which offer a rare candid window into the individual prisoner perspective. Testimony from prisoners and former gang members included in investigations organized by the CDC, the state legislature, and other prison reform organizations are tainted by mixed motives and loyalties. Newspaper accounts from the time period contain information filtered through the lens of prison public relations offices. By contrast, published prisoner writings and letters reflect the agendas of individual prisoners or the organizations that collected and published them. Firsthand interviews offer insight into the prisoner and prison gang perspective but also reflect the agendas and biases of those interviewed. Overall, the sources available for prisons need to be interrogated closely.
A variety of internal and external factors shaped prisoner social relations in the 1960s and early 1970s. The first portion of this essay briefly contextualizes the changing demographics of both California and its prisoner populations. Then the next two sections of this essay examine the emergence of the prisoners’ rights movement and the rise of prison gangs, exploring how outside politics found their way inside of prisons and affected prisoner organizing in profoundly different directions. Emerging prison gangs embraced the political ideology of racial separatism, while other prisoners’ rights activists moved beyond racial separatism to expand their ideology to embrace a prisoner class identity. Eventually the rise of racially divided prison gangs and their associated violence made organizing prisoners across racial lines increasingly difficult. The last section of this essay traces administrative responses to prisoner organizing and the ways in which these responses not only failed to address increasing prison violence and racial divisions but created the very kinds of conditions that encouraged gang organization and eventually set California on its course to build the nation’s first supermax prison and to massively expand incarceration in the 1980s.
Changing Demographics
California underwent tremendous transformations in the racial makeup of the state in the second half of the twentieth century. World War II defense industry work brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans—many from Sunbelt states—to California’s cities. As rural California farm workers, especially previous Dustbowl migrants, fled the fields to the cities for more lucrative defense jobs, tens of thousands of Mexican braceros replaced them in the fields. These immigrants were joined by other Mexican and Mexican American migrants from the Sunbelt, especially Tejanos and others residing in the border regions. New arrivals quickly discovered that Jim Crow existed throughout the entire Sunbelt.8
Migrants faced racial discrimination in housing, employment, and education, which limited opportunities for them and their children. Despite discrimination, immigration and migration continued in the postwar years. By 1970, California was home to 571,000 black Southerners and 213,000 Southern-born Latinos; 12 percent of California’s population was Southern-born, including 1.6 million whites.9 As black and Chicano Southern migrants and their children sought to redress racism through the civil rights and black power and brown power movements, they found themselves increasingly incarcerated for their activism. They carried into the prison environment a distrust of police, a belief in self-defense, and a commitment to activism.10
This population influx changed not only the makeup of the state but also its prisons. While the state experienced relatively continuous population growth in the 1960s and 1970s—growing from a total population of 15.72 million in 1960 to 23.67 million in 1980—the population in California’s prisons fluctuated and created overcrowded conditions inside.11 The prisoner population on December 31, 1960, was 21,660. This was an increase of 2,361 prisoners from the preceding year, which was at that time the greatest amount of increase ever experienced in one calendar year.12 The prisoner population at the end of the decade was 27,535, which—though an increase compared with the beginning of the decade—was actually the first population reduction since 1965.13 The largest decrease to the total prisoner population in the 1960s and 1970s came in 1971, when the population decreased to 20,294 as a result of a brief increase in parole, in part implemented to reduce prison overcrowding. This was the lowest the state’s prisoner population had been in twenty years. After this decrease, the prisoner population continued to fluctuate throughout the 1970s as a roughly 70 percent parole denial rate kept overall incarceration rates high.14 The total prisoner population in December of 1979 was 22,632.15 These numbers seem minuscule when compared with the next decade, which harkened in an era of mass incarceration. Despite dropping crime rates, the state’s prisoner population experienced an increase of more than fourfold between 1980 and 1991.16
The racial makeup of the convict population changed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In December of 1960, white prisoners made up 57.5 percent of the population, and by 1969 their share of the prisoner population had slightly decreased to 53.6 percent (and their numbers continued to proportionally decline in the 1970s). The increase in the black prisoner population directly accounted for this decrease—over the same decade, blacks went from only 23.1 percent of California’s prisoner population in 1960 to 28.5 percent by 1969. The Mexican American prisoner population remained relatively stable during the 1960s, comprising between 16 and 17 percent of the population throughout the decade.17 During the 1970s, the white prisoner population continued to decrease while both black and Mexican American prisoner populations grew. By 1979, the percentage of white male felons in the prisoner population had dropped to 39.8 percent, while the Mexican American prisoner population had climbed to 23.2 percent and black prisoners continued their increasing trend, making up 35.1 percent of the male felon prisoner population.18
Even though the racial makeup of the prisoner population shifted, the overall type of prisoner sentenced to California’s prison system did not significantly change during the 1960s. In 1964, the CDC’s annual report described the “typical” prisoner as a school dropout, having only completed between the seventh- and eighth-grade level and possessing no regular job experience or skills.19 The report noted prisoners were slightly younger, more likely to have been convicted of a violent crime, and more prone to narcotic addiction than in previous decades. Most prisoners—65 percent—came from heavily populated southern California counties. Its conclusion that the “great majority” of prisoners “emerge from a background of family discord, poverty, juvenile delinquency, and emotional maladjustment” depicted most prisoners convicted in earlier decades, as well as today.20
The CDC acknowledged the culture of poverty that influenced and informed prisoner backgrounds and experiences prior to imprisonment. Its 1968 Master Plan depicted inner cities as “becoming more and more ghetto-like, with their accompanying crowding, filth, unemployment, vice and crime.”21 An earlier report, The Pattern of Dependent Poverty in California, focused on the “trap ghetto,” which the authors defined as determined by race and lack of opportunity, permitting criminal culture to thrive and affecting large numbers of blacks and Mexican Americans.22 Instead of focusing on the causes of racial discrimination that produced the ghetto and its conditions, the CDC emphasized the “vice and crime” found in ghettos and the minority makeup of these communities. The CDC maintained that these changes outside the prison would be mirrored in prisoner demographics, predicting that within the next decade “more than half of all California inmates will be from minority groups” (emphasis in original). The CDC argued that this trend would lead to “increasingly frequent racial conflicts” and create “discipline and morale problems” for staff.23 These predictions were correct, although attributing the cause solely to an increase in the minority prisoner population is debatable.
Ghettos and barrios were not just centers for vice and crime as the CDC portrayed them; they were the centers of political and social activism. African American, Chicano, and other minority communities worked to challenge the causes of and conditions in the ghettos and barrios. The experiences of prisoners prior to incarceration with systemic discrimination in employment, housing, education, and policing all served to inform racial formation inside prison. This also influenced how prisoners engaged in the prisoners’ rights movement, as well as how prison gangs would view and frame the prison system and racial order inside. Just as African Americans on the outside expressed their frustration in the Watts Rebellion in 1965, prisoners inside launched their own series of protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And just as some residents in low-income, ethnic-minority neighborhoods turned to urban street gangs as an adaptive strategy to address systemic discrimination in their communities, some prisoners inside also selected this route and formed prison gangs.24 The problems that African Americans, Chicanos, and others were trying to address both outside and inside prisons were surprisingly similar: lack of employment, overcrowding, poor health care, limited access to quality education, poor community relations with police officers, and minority representation among police officers.25
The Prisoners’ Rights Movement and Convict Unity
In the 1950s, prisoner protests tended to be spontaneous events focusing on housekeeping issues, such as poor food and overcrowding, but during the 1960s and early 1970s, prisoners planned and organized demonstrations involving entire prison populations. They issued manifestos citing not only housekeeping issues but also political issues. More radical convicts called for an end to the prison system and social and economic disparity, while more moderate prisoners sought a voice in prison operations in order to reform the system, not eradicate it.
Events inside and outside the prison spurred some prisoners to become more politicized and to organize large-scale protests of the 1960s and early 1970s. The civil rights movement, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the anti-Vietnam movement, and other events of the era all served to agitate and incite minorities both inside and outside of prison. Prisoners followed the social upheaval taking place outside of prison on the radio, television, and in the newspapers. They spent the 1960s following civil rights marches and sit-ins, anti-war protests, and rioting in inner cities, and they even observed armed Black Panthers’ march onto California’s Capitol floor. Some prisoners even directly participated in these kinds of actions prior to incarceration.
More radical activists from outside social movements ultimately served time for participating in direct actions, and they brought their message of protest and their skills as organizers to the prison environment. The civil rights struggles in California were much more complex than the typical black–white paradigm typical of the South or northern cities. Without a clear majority minority in the state, the various ethno-racial groups worked together to articulate and achieve some similar goals. Incarcerated activists, especially those from the civil rights struggles in Los Angeles, brought this tradition of cross-racial alliances and actions with them to prison. These activists, as well as prisoners who became more politicized inside, quickly identified similarities in racial discrimination, violence, and oppression both inside and outside of prison.26
To some prisoners, it looked like the social order outside of prison was under attack and revolution was beginning. They were persuaded by the revolutionary rhetoric of the time, and they became radically politicized. Unfortunately, viewing events of the era from inside a closed institution distorted convicts’ ability to accurately assess the extent of the revolution occurring outside. African American ex-con James Carr recalled that “I came charging out [of prison] in 1970 expecting to find a Red Army ready for revolutionary war. What I found was a handful of red criminals with the same world view I’d had as a poolhall hustler, reinforced with heavy doses of ideology and drugs.”27 In the end, the revolution was not as pervasive as many prisoners came to expect.
More radical prisoners, however, continued to believe that they were among the revolutionary vanguard and sought to wage their own revolution inside. As radical convict George Jackson explained to his lawyer, Fay Stender, in a letter in 1970, “There are still some Blacks here who consider themselves criminals—but not many. Believe me, my friend, with the time and incentive that these brothers have to read, study, and think, you will find no class or category more aware, more embittered, desperate, or dedicated to the ultimate remedy—revolution.”28 This letter was published in Jackson’s book Soledad Brother in 1970 and read widely by activists both inside and outside of prison. A year later, Tom Hayden, former national president of the Students for Democratic Society, publicly called prisons the “birthplace of revolutionary leadership.”29 Even the media and prison officials reported that, in the words of San Quentin warden Nelson, California’s prisons were “schools for violent revolution.”30 Although members of the New Left and the prison officials alike offered excitable assessments of the new state of affairs, it is clear that some prisoners inside of California’s carceral system were becoming politicized in this period.
Outside racial pride movements and their corresponding ideologies served to both unite and divide the prisoner population. Emerging prison gangs embraced the political ideology of racial separatism, while other prisoners moved beyond it. Much like how racial pride movements on the outside began to expand their ideology to include other third world and minority groups, the more politicized among the prisoner population began to articulate their uniformity of experience as prisoners. They expanded on the convict code—which dictated acceptable behavior and demanded convict class loyalty in opposition to prison officers and administrators—and used it to resist the rising racial tensions that existed both inside and outside of California’s prison system in the 1960s and 1970s.31 All convicts, they argued, were victims of an unjust system, and all prisoners were members of the convict class. Some prisoners began to transcend racial divisions to work together against a common enemy—the prison system—and gave birth to the prisoners’ rights movement. They attempted to ameliorate the pains of imprisonment by seeking sentencing and parole reform, economic rights, and more say in prison governance. They relied on tried-and-true tactics borrowed from the civil rights and black power and brown power movements, utilizing strikes, protests, and legal avenues to demand these changes.
Prisoners increasingly organized protests throughout California’s prison system in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were five prisoner actions in 1967, fifteen in 1968, twenty-seven in 1970, thirty-seven in 1971, and forty-eight in 1972. Most of the strikes and protests, including the two largest—the 1968 San Quentin Unity Day Strikes and the 1970 Folsom Prison Work Stoppage—effectively used the concept of a convict class to reach out across racial lines. The Outlaw—an underground prisoner-produced newspaper—issued a call for the August 1968 San Quentin Unity Day Strike:
Some of us cons don’t seem to know what side we’re on. We’re obsessed with near-sighted disputes based on race, ideology, group identity, and so on. We expend our energies despising and distrusting each other. All of this is helping the CDC. We permit them to keep us at each others throats. A handful of us are calling for unity.… We call for 4,000 united convicts. Wake up!!! put your prejudices, biases, and class distinctions aside for the purposes of our fight with the CDC. Yes! The time has once again come to speak of UNITY.… We will lose everything if we play into the CDC’s hands and let them move us into a riot situation.… So Wake UP!!! The CDC is the enemy, NOT some other convict. Hang In!!! We are going to have our UNITY DAY in AUGUST. UNITY, BLACK, BROWN, WHITE, UNITY!!!32
This strike announcement intentionally reminded prisoners to let go of “prejudices, biases, and class distinctions” and to unite across race lines to fight their real enemy, who they thought was the CDC. The tactic worked, and San Quentin prisoners peacefully struck and shut down the entire prison in August of 1968.
Prisoners at Folsom also employed a call to transcend race in their strike manifesto when they organized the longest nonviolent work strike in the history of California’s prison system in 1970. The preamble read “WE THE IMPRISONED MEN OF FOLSOM PRISON SEEK AN END TO THE INJUSTICE SUFFERED BY ALL PRISONERS, REGARDLESS OF RACE, CREED, OR COLOR.”33 The calls to move beyond race in the Folsom and San Quentin manifestos reflect the problems with internal racial divisions that emerging prison gangs were intensifying. Prisoners’ rights organizations were not only trying to challenge the CDC; they were challenging prisoner social order. If prisoner strikes were going to work, they needed the majority of prisoners, including prison gang leaders and members, to participate. The appeal to set aside “near-sighted disputes based on race, ideology, group identity, and so on” highlights the racial and ideological divisions that were fracturing the prisoner population in this period. Prisoners at Folsom were able to set aside their differences, and their strike lasted nineteen days. Their manifesto later served as the model for a demand list produced by prisoners during the convict takeover at Attica, New York, in 1971. Prisoners’ rights organizing and the need to transcend racial divisions were not unique to California’s prisons.
The San Quentin Unity Day Strikes and the Folsom Prison Work Stoppage, as well as other large strikes of the period, not only brought much of the convict population of each prison together across racial and political lines; they even managed to gain support of convicts at other California prisons. Folsom prisoners held sympathy strikes during the San Quentin Unity Day Strikes, and San Quentin prisoners held sympathy strikes during the Folsom Prison Work Stoppage. The larger strikes also received support from outside activists on the left; they garnered media publicity and held protests outside of prison gates complete with musical entertainment from the Grateful Dead to support the striking prisoners. The size and duration of the strikes revealed a new level of organization among prisoners and contributed to the administrations’ belief that prisons had become “schools for violent revolution.”34
Prisoners throughout California’s penal system continued to stage strikes and protests against the prison administration throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but they became harder to organize as emerging prison gangs frayed political organizing with interracial rivalries and violence. Typically a minority of politicized prisoners organized protests, and then the mainline prisoner population supported actions when the breadth of demands reflected issues relevant to them, such as housekeeping, economic, or parole and sentencing issues. The strikes revealed that prisoners identified with shared problems—indeterminate sentencing and the parole board—and with shared oppressors: the CDC and its employees. It was prisoners versus the prison officers, “screws” or “bulls” in prison parlance. Although prisoner discord was a reality in California’s prison system, the success of the strikes showed that prisoners could and did put their differences aside for the purpose of collective action. The strikes also revealed that prisoners employed the same kinds of organizational techniques and tactics utilized by the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the black power and brown power movements. Unfortunately for the prisoners’ rights movement, as prison gangs expanded, their growth diminished the opportunities for prisoners’ rights organizing.
The Rise of Prison Gangs
The unified strikes and protests organized during the 1960s and 1970s by politicized prisoners only temporarily halted emerging violent racial divisiveness. Prisoners came together for strikes, but convict unity deteriorated quickly once they were over. Prison officials even used racial tensions to break some strike efforts. The very experiences with discrimination on the outside that inspired some prisoners to establish a prisoners’ rights movement encouraged others to self-segregate.
Prisoner activism and prison violence both ebbed and flowed in the 1960s and early 1970s. Changes in prisoner demographics and the influence of outside politics helped to both mobilize and polarize the prison population and contributed to an increase in convict violence. Prisoner stabbings of fellow convicts increased 100 percent from 1960 to 1969 and grew 219 percent between 1969 and 1973.35 Violence often occurred along racial lines, and although only a minority of the prisoner population directly engaged in racial confrontations, the interracial violence increased tensions throughout the prison system. Convicts increasingly viewed themselves and acted as members of racial groups rather than a general convict class. This trend continued and intensified, especially in later decades, as California’s prisoner population exploded with mass incarceration and prisoners continued to compete over space, safety, and control of the illicit sub-rosa prison economy.36
Racial tensions frequently erupted in the prison system, and what the media and the CDC called “race riots” were commonplace. Isolated incidents could produce a violent chain reaction of retaliation. One racial group would kill members of another, then the victim group would retaliate, and the cycle would go on and on. A politicized Soledad convict during the 1960s, frustrated by the detrimental impact racial antagonism had on collective prisoner organization, recalled, “On the one hand you have the blacks, on the other the whites, and in the middle of all this you have the Mexicans and others. If one clique member of good standing is offended by a member of a clique of another race, woe be to the members of that race until the clique is satisfied.”37 Prisoners, regardless of clique or gang membership, were targets during racial conflicts. Frequently the administration had no way of identifying the involved assailants. “Typically,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle in its coverage of stabbings at San Quentin, “none of the convicts standing anywhere near the attack could provide the slightest clue as to why it happened or who might have done it.”38 Prisoners, whether fearing retaliation or honoring the convict code, selected not to snitch on fellow convicts. Prison administrators could only broadcast appeals for peace to the prisoner population and arm the prison officers with tear gas and rifles.
Prison gangs both emerged in response to violence and contributed to the violence; although representing only a small portion of the prisoner population—by most accounts around 11 percent during the 1960s and mid-1970s—they quickly came to dominate the social structure in California’s prisons. The CDC classified smaller gangs or underground organizations as “disruptive groups,” reserving the term “gang” to refer to the four largest of these groups: the Mexican Mafia, the Nuestra Familia, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Black Guerrilla Family. These four gangs originated inside of California’s prisons and differed from cliques because they were formalized groups. Gangs had a leader, their membership voted on the admission of new recruits, and members were required to take ritualistic loyalty oaths swearing their life to the gang. Membership was “blood-in-blood-out,” meaning it was supposed to be for life. These ethno-racial and geographically based organizations continued to grow as they developed and maintained links with outside communities.
Prison gangs developed for many of the same reasons that street gangs formed outside of prison and other prisoner cliques formed inside, including the need for social community, as a way to gain access to resources or illicit goods to ameliorate deprivation and prison conditions, as the means to provide extralegal governance, and for physical protection.39 As the prisoner population progressively polarized and prisoner violence rose, convicts increasingly turned to gangs for protection. They were the largest and strongest groups available to convicts seeking alliances, although their overall membership numbers remained small during the 1960s and early 1970s. The total prisoner population in 1974 was 24,741, and conservatively low estimates of by CDC officials held that roughly 11.5 percent of the total prisoner population participated in or supported gang activity.40 Although only a minority of California’s prisoner population participated in prison gangs, gang actions affected the entire prisoner population.
Most prisoners tried to do their own time and stay out of trouble, but this became more and more difficult as the threat of violence grew. “I think that the majority of not only the white prisoners,” recalled an anonymous ex-prison gang member testifying before a Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder and Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, “but the blacks and Mexican prisoners don’t belong to any group. I think a lot of them are pressured into identifying with either one group or the other.”41 Prisoners joined gangs for protection and for extralegal governance. Even the CDC and prison officials recognized that prison officials had limited means to protect or control the prisoner population. “It is our experience that a prison administration is able to provide only superficial control,” reported investigators into the prison gang situation, “and that the inmate population has a great deal to say in how effective any controls can be.” The investigators concluded, “It is no coincidence that one of the most frequently cited reasons for the initial formation of the prison gangs was for protection against physical assault.”42 Outbreaks of racial violence affected all prisoners—those with and without gang affiliations. It was becoming increasingly difficult to “do your own time” in the California prison system.
Gangs served not only as a protective unit but as a social one as well. Gangs provided a sense of community from the isolation of prison. According to the underground prisoner-produced newspaper The Outlaw, “in such desperate economic and social conditions as are found in the prison environment, a convict is under tremendous pressure to enhance his survival chances by forming alliances with human beings similar to himself.”43 Gangs provided acceptance, identity, security, and community in the prison world and established group values, which were generally adaptations of the convict code, tweaked to justify or support the gang’s actions.
Gangs helped their members gain access to illicit goods, such as homosexual liaisons, gambling, or other forms of vice. Prisoners turned to vice to alleviate the pains of imprisonment and pass the time. “There is always a card game (illegal), a crap game (illegal), a sports pool (illegal), a domino game (illegal), a fight (illegal), or two men committing sodomy (illegal), a killing (illegal), and the continuous vigilent [sic] make up of each man (some are so geared up until paranoia is inevitable), the frame of mind has one intrinsic thought: Stay Alive,” wrote Soledad prisoner John Spain to his lawyer, Eve Pell, in 1971.44 Prison gangs eventually controlled much of the illegal activities prisoners engaged in.
The first prison gang in California—the Mexican Mafia or La Eme for Spanish letter “M”—initially organized for the protection of its members, but the gang quickly moved to take control of the various “hustles” inside prison, such as gambling, sex, cigarette distribution, and canteen rations. Urban Chicanos at Deuel Vocational, a prison for younger offenders, formed La Eme in 1957, although the CDC did not take serious notice of this organization until 1966. La Eme sprang up among a group of state-raised youths who had participated in youth street gang life in East Los Angeles. Before the Mexican Mafia, Chicano prisoners would identify themselves with their outside street gang or barrios when they reunited inside prison. The Mexican Mafia joined these groups together into one gang. Originally La Eme was strictly a prison gang, and its members reaffiliated with their outside street gang when paroled. As the gang expanded to the outside, however, membership became for life.45
The Mexican Mafia membership voted in members and selected their leaders based on their criminal and leadership skills as demonstrated inside and outside the prison. New members swore a loyalty oath to the gang and agreed to protect each member of the gang. No Mexican Mafia member was permitted to attack another member. La Eme, like all prison gangs, shifted the convict code from “be loyal to your class—the cons” to be loyal to your gang. They violated the convict code by attacking other prisoners outside the gang and stealing their property or taking over their racket, or underground operation. La Eme controlled the heroin trade inside prison and controlled the loan shark business. In prison in this period, loan sharks dealt in cigarettes instead of money, and prisoners who gambled or had addiction problems would borrow cigarettes, with interest, to pay off their debts. If the prisoner could not pay the loan shark back, he was forced to do favors or make monthly installments. La Eme used these indebted prisoners to do “the messy work” that gang members could not do because of risk of exposure.46
Initially, the Mexican Mafia preyed only on black and white convicts, extorting or stealing from them, but in the mid-1960s the gang began to prey on Chicanos from rural parts of California, such as Fresno and Sacramento. The divide among the Mexican American prisoner population by the 1960s was primarily a rural and urban divide, with the urban Chicanos, largely from Los Angeles, referring derogatorily to the rural population as “farmers.” During the 1940s and 1950s, rural Chicanos raised in Texas, or Tejanos, came to California in increasing numbers. Despite the migration of Tejanos, Los Angeles Chicanos still made up the largest component of the Mexican and Mexican American prisoner population. The two groups did not like each other, and the CDC kept them apart to avoid fights.47 “Many Mexicans consider them [the Mexican Mafia] a disgrace to the race,” recalled George Myron, a prisoner at Soledad. “[La Eme was] a menace, not only to the blacks and whites, but to other Mexicans as well.… In this penal system it is the most powerful clique, and credited with many, many murders and stabbings (which oftentimes amount to the same thing).”48 Administrators attempted to break up La Eme by transferring its members to other institutions, where they went on to sign up new recruits and established the gang throughout California’s prison system.49
Nuestra Familia (NF) or La Familia—originally called the Blooming Flower and then La Familia Mexicana—formed around 1966 to protect northern and rural Mexicans against La Eme’s violent activities and extortion racket.50 Nuestra Familia was primarily made up of “valley Mexicans” from San Jose, Salinas, and Santa Barbara.51 The two gangs battled each other for power among the Chicano prisoner population and for control over drug trafficking, extortion, and prostitution. Like La Eme, Nuestra Familia had a blood-in-blood-out lifetime affiliation policy, and traitors were marked for death. New NF members allegedly swore the following oath: “If I go forward, follow me./ If I hesitate, push me./ If they kill me, avenge me./ If I am a traitor, kill me.”52 Unlike the other three major prison gangs, Nuestra Familia produced a written constitution and bylaws, as well as an operational manual, copies of which were seized during searches of prisoner cells.53
Nuestra Familia provided a covert education program for its members. “The primary purpose or goal of this organization will be for the betterment of its members and the building up of the organization on the outside into a strong and self-supporting Familia,” read Article II of the NF Constitution.54 “Basically,” recalled one ex-NF member testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, “the ideology of this group was somewhat split on nationalistic and Third World levels. Some would get into drug dealings and run the vice in the prisons just for the organization, while others were sort of on a revolutionary trip.”55 Nuestra Familia incorporated some of the revolutionary rhetoric that politicized prisoners participating in the prisoners’ rights movement engaged with and blended this with a criminal agenda. This helped to justify and legitimate their actions, as well as broaden their appeal to future prisoner recruits. They could appeal to both radical prisoners interested in politics and revolution and those interested in criminal enterprise.
Organizationally, Nuestra Familia operated as a paramilitary organization. The gang’s leader, the Nuestra General, commanded a hierarchy of captains and lieutenants, with organized squads of soldiers, or soldados, on the lowest rung. Lieutenants and captains schooled soldados on “revolutionary tactics,” “how to use people and obtain their sympathy and support,” and “different topics in order to be able to relate with classes of people.”56 New recruits had to be sponsored by a member, and the entire membership voted on admission.57 All members were to deny the existence of the organization to the administration, as stipulated in La Familia Constitution.58
While Nuestra Familia dabbled with political ideology and some of its members were on a “revolutionary trip,” it was the Black Guerilla Family that espoused the clearest revolutionary agenda. Prisoners involved in the black radical movement, in particular the Black Panther Party, eventually went on to found the Black Guerilla Family—an all-black prison gang with both political and criminal interests. The model of black rage and militancy for many of California’s imprisoned blacks as well as outside activists was George Jackson, who became the Black Panther Party’s field marshal behind the walls in 1970. Dan Berger, in his article for this volume, writes about Jackson’s legacy as historical memory and palimpsest.
Jackson spent his childhood in and out of youth facilities and graduated to adult prison in 1961 at age nineteen for a gas station holdup. He joined a black prison clique known as the Wolf Pack and earned a reputation as a “tough guy” that would serve him well over his life.59 Jackson fought fellow convicts as well as prison guards. “He was the meanest mother I ever saw, inside or out,” observed one white convict.60 In 1966, Jackson and fellow clique member W. L. Nolen allegedly formed a clandestine study group to provide political education to the members of their group. By late 1967, “Jackson started becoming political, started taking political positions for his actions,” according to fellow convict Luis Talamantez.61 Jackson actively recruited black convicts to his efforts to “transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.”62 Jackson’s influence spread throughout San Quentin, and after his transfer to Soledad in 1968, he organized and educated black prisoners there. Jackson quickly rose within the walls as a prisoner leader and enemy of prison officials and staff. Outside of prison he gained political notoriety, and with the publication of his book Soledad Brother in 1970, he became a cause célèbre of prisoner defense campaigns and prisoners’ rights activists.63 Jackson’s prison clique at San Quentin, the Wolf Pack, eventually changed its name to the Black Family.
The Wolf Pack’s initial orientation centered on nationalist ideology, with a focus on both political and physical education. Early organizing efforts by black prisoners focused on racial separatism, but as the radical nationalist ideology of the power movements on the outside began to shift to a Marxist approach embracing all oppressed peoples, the ideology of black convicts did the same. Former member James Carr discovered this change when he briefly returned to Soledad in 1969:
George [Jackson] has put together a little army there teaching them political education and doing karate for two hours a day. Their tactics had changed from the defensive racist nationalism of our Quentin days to a concerted effort of dealing death blows against the prison structure. This movement had pulled together Mexicans, whites, and blacks, and had organizers in every wing agitating against racism. Even though these were the bare beginnings of anti-racist prison organization, the Soledad administration had already realized that the situation was getting out of control, and had moved to snuff it out.64
Like the prisoners’ rights movement, Jackson’s political ideology expanded to include all prisoners, regardless of race. Jackson began to advocate convict unity against the system. He worked to bring convicts together across racial lines and even supported the 1970 Folsom Prison Work Stoppage and worked to enact a short-lived gang peace. Jackson came to believe, like the prisoners’ rights movement, that convicts should unite across racial lines to take on their real enemy, the CDC.
After prison officers shot and killed three black prisoners while breaking up a fight in the O Wing yard at Soledad in 1970, Jackson extended the retaliatory rule that dominated prisoner warfare to include prison officers. If a prison officer killed a convict, then a prison officer would be killed. Prisoners now considered prison officers one of the cliques fighting for control of the prison yard.65
Prison administrators and staff feared the interracial organizing that Jackson advocated. As prison staff worked to break up Jackson’s group and racial tensions heated up, the interracial alliances Jackson supported began to disintegrate. In 1971, after prison officers shot and killed Jackson during an alleged escape attempt, black prisoners were frustrated with the more moderate approach that black organizations on the outside had begun adopting. After prison officials released Panther leader Huey Newton in 1970, he took the Black Panther Party into electoral politics and purged the party of extreme left members. Instead of working to overthrow the system, many black power organizations like the Panthers began to work toward taking over the system, even running candidates for political offices. Black prisoners wanted a revolution and perceived themselves as the vanguard of that revolution. After Jackson’s death, the varying black separatist groups, including his own Wolf Pack/Black Family and Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Liberation Army, joined together to form a black Marxist–Leninist prison gang, the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF). Black separatism returned to popularity among gang members as racial confrontations erupted inside.66
Of the major prison gangs at this time, the BGF was the only gang with a clearly articulated revolutionary agenda. “Their main goal,” according to an ex-gang member, “is revolution, revenge and to free all political prisoners through revolutionary tactics, such as kidnaps of federal and state executives, as well as other influential figures, and hijacks. They will not hesitate to execute their victims or sacrifice their ownselves for their struggle.”67 The BGF blended revolutionary radicalism with black separatism and like the Wolf Pack held revolutionary education classes. BGF was a paramilitary organization and trained members in physical combat. The gang allegedly required new recruits to take a “death oath” to the Family:
If ever I should break my stride,
Or falter at my comrade’s side,
This oath will kill me!
If ever my word should be untrue,
Should I be slow to make a stand,
Or show fear before the hangman,
This oath will kill me!
Should I misuse the people’s trust,
Should I submit ever to greed or lust,
This oath will kill me!
Should I grow lax in discipline
In time of strife, refuse my hand,
This oath will surely kill me!!!68
As in all prison gangs, membership in the BGF was for life. The BGF continued Jackson’s policy of directly attacking prison officers and was largely responsible for the majority of prison officer deaths in the 1970s.69 Along with proselytizing about and organizing for “the revolution,” the BGF participated in drug trafficking, extortion, and other aspects of the prison underground economy. Many BGF members transformed from revolutionaries to thugs as their power and control of the illicit trade increased and members focused on this sub-rosa economy.
Blacks and Chicanos were not the only prisoners participating in gang organizations. In the early 1960s, around a dozen white prisoners at San Quentin founded a neo-Fascist group called the Bluebirds. Members professed admiration for Adolf Hitler, tattooed small birds on their foreheads or temples, and occasionally adorned prison walls with graffiti swastikas. Members involved in the Bluebirds, along with some prisoners from the American Nazi Party and other white supremacist organizations, went on to found the Aryan Brotherhood (AB) in the late 1960s. The gang formed in response to the growing minority prisoner population. According to an ex-AB member, the gang was first formed at San Quentin “in order to combat growing racial attacks by the blacks on whites more or less as a defense.”70 The AB wanted to secure and protect its own turf on the yard as well as a share of the drug trafficking, extortion, and prostitution operations.
The AB was nominally white supremacist, but it was formed largely in response to the emergence of other prison gangs rather than to espouse white supremacist ideology. Former AB leader Michal Thompson noted, “The Aryan Brotherhood is not about white supremacy. It is about supremacy.”71 Some of its member were hardcore white supremacists, but others simply joined the gang because they were white and needed protection. “Is there racism? You bet there’s racism. Is it dominant? No,” explained Thompson.72 While not all AB members framed their organization in political terms, the desire to assert “supremacy” in and of itself was about reclaiming power. White prisoners were losing their majority status among the prisoner population and the associated control numerical superiority previously afforded them.
“State-raised hoodlums” comprised much of prison gang membership, and the AB was no exception.73 As ex-convict-turned-sociologist John Irwin noted, prisoners and staff alike considered the “young hoodlums” to be the most racist and most violent convicts, and their actions tended to destabilize the prisoner social relations. They carried the racial hostility and violence from California’s youth prisons and facilities, which were typically more hostile and racially segregated than adult prisons.74 While some of the AB’s membership also came from the increase in outlaw motorcycle clubs such as the Hell’s Angels, not all outlaw bikers were AB members.75 Other white organizations, like the Hell’s Angels and the American Nazi Party, maintained their autonomy from the AB.76 The American Nazi Party at San Quentin remained more committed to political ideology than other white supremacist groups. They even resisted joining up with the younger white lowrider Nazi groups. According to ex-prisoner Carr, the older San Quentin Nazis dismissed them “as punks who knew nothing about National Socialism but were rather just white-supremacists.”77
Unlike Nuestra Familia and the BGF, the AB was not a paramilitary organization. Originally, it was a loosely organized gang, although today it is a highly organized criminal syndicate. “Whoever has the most respect, whoever is the most forceful, whoever is the most looked-up-to more or less calls the shots,” reported an ex-AB member. Various members held titles such as “field marshal” and “general,” but “there is no chain of command,” he recalled.78 Members voted on the election of new recruits into their gang. Current members nominated potential new recruits, and they targeted only the most violent, proven, and useful prisoners. “There was recruiting, constant recruiting,” according to the ex-gang member.79 The “Creed of the Aryan Brotherhood” defined the commitment AB members were sworn to uphold to each other and the gang:
An Aryan Brother is without a care,
He walks where the weak and heartless won’t dare,
And if by chance he should stumble and lose control,
His brothers will be there, to help reach his goal,
For a worthy brother, no need is too great,
He need not but ask, fulfillment’s his fate.
For an Aryan brother, death holds no fear,
Vengeance will be his, through his brother still here,
For the brotherhood means just what it implies,
A brother’s a brother, till that brother dies,
And if he is loyal, and never lost faith,
In each brother’s heart, will always be a place.
So a brother am I and always will be,
Even after my life is taken from me,
I’ll lie down content, knowing I stood,
Head held high, walking proud in the brotherhood.80
As in other prison gangs, membership in the AB was for life and members were expected to help secure control of all illicit trade in the underground economy.
Battles took place among racialized gangs not only for control of drug trafficking, extortion, and prostitution but also for control of prison facilities. These battles resulted in denied parole and lengthened sentences for gang members caught engaging in illegal activities. “As a result of their [the prison administrations’] successful mental manipulation, convicts go through a lot of changes, you know uh, against each other,” former convict Warren Wells remembered, “They even go so far as making it impossible for themselves to ever get out of prison, you know, by bogging themselves down in petty tribal gang wars inside the penitentiary for egotistical purposes and status symbols.”81 When convicts served “gang-time” instead of their “own time,” their prison sentences lengthened.
While gangs fought among themselves, they also formed alliances with each other. The division between Nuestra Familia and La Eme was reflected in the larger prison gang alliances: La Familia allied with BGF, and La Eme allied with the AB. As violence increased in California’s prison system, these alliances grew in strength. “If [BGF] need arms, you know, to carry out a hit against staff or another inmate, we would provide it for them and they would do the same for us,” recalled an ex-NF member.82 “The Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia have formed an alliance based on narcotic control and the hatred for blacks,” testified Joe Moody, a special agent with U.S. Department of Justice. The Aryan Brotherhood accepted “hit” contracts from the Mexican Mafia, agreeing to murder for La Eme, in order to draw unwanted attention away from the Mexican Mafia’s activities.83
Gang violence spread from the prisons to the streets because prison gangs maintained membership both inside and outside of the prison. “The members of these cliques [prison gangs], many of them, have brothers on the outside who have been—and will be again—in prison themselves, and who are happy to settle a vendetta by killing someone out there,” Soledad prisoner George Mynor reported.84 Gangs also used their affiliations on the outside of prison to support their illegal operations inside. Gang leaders communicated with outside members and fellow gang convicts at other institutions in a variety of ways, including letters using coded language, underground newspapers, and family, friends, or lawyers.85
Some prison gang members also maintained contact with outside radical groups. Members from BGF and Vacaville’s Black Culture Association had connections with radical left groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army. The radical Venceremos Organization even attempted to effect a truce between the Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia, so that the gangs would stop fighting each other and turn their focus to attacking the “oppression of the system,” whether that was the CDC or the society’s larger power structures.86 “A basically criminally-oriented organization will use a revolutionary group to serve its own purpose,” observed CDC special agent Don Elder. “This statement can also be applied in reverse.”87 According to an ex-prison gang member, “Third World organizations” recruited “their most dangerous revolutionaries” from prisons.88 Whether or not this kind of recruitment actually occurred, the CDC believed that it did and was concerned about connections between radical left groups and prisoners.89 Prison gangs used their connections both inside and outside of prison to control the sub-rosa economy and grow their membership.
Prisoners alleged that prison staff helped to expand prison gang activity and racial violence. “The pigs [prison officers] brought the struggle inside,” recalled prisoner Alfred Hassan. “They fostered race riots—vendettas between Black, Brown and White that lasted many seasons and cost many lives and lots of ‘added time.’ ”90 William B. Thomason, a white prisoner at Soledad, was involved in a white prison gang. When he came to prison, he was “inculcated with the various propaganda of Racism and Nazism, by prison guards who maintain, sustain by feeding literature and support (even weapons) to the same [white prisoners].”91 According to Thomason, it was the prison officers that introduced and involved him in prison gang life, and when Thomason tried to leave his white supremacist gang behind, it was these same prison officers that threatened his life.
Even as racial division hardened, numerous prisoners were aware that prison administration and prison officers used racial tensions to control prisoners. The prisoners’ rights movement alleged that prison officials routinely used racial tensions to break strikes. They maintained that prison officers and administrators had a vested interest in maintaining racial divisions because racially divided prisoners were not organizing against the prison system or attacking prison officers. Prison gang members also alleged that prison officers intentionally enforced racial divisions and even advocated racial violence between prisoners. “I was pounced on [by the Adult Authority] for being white and affiliating myself with black inmates,” recalled one Folsom prisoner. “I was told that this is bad and was frowned upon by Correctional Authorities and would create trouble within free society.”92 When prison officials transferred this same prisoner to San Quentin, he was put in the Adjustment Center (AC)—a prison within the prison. “While in the A.C. the pig [prison officer] threw a note in a Black’s cell, calling him a nigger and saying that he had better not come out of his cell, or he would be killed,” reported the recent transfer. “The pig then came to my cell in a loud voice told me not to throw any more threatening notes in negro cells.”93 Numerous prisoners reported similar incidents of prison officers using racial tensions to divide convicts.94
It is impossible to measure the extent of prison officer support of prisoner violence. Prisoner autobiographies, other forms of prisoner writings, and my own interviews with ex-prisoners and former prison officers clearly indicate that prison officers supported not only the violence but also the illegal underground economy. Considering prison officers and prisoners had a long history of joining together in illegal ventures, such as forgery, selling off prison goods, and bringing in drugs and other contraband, it is likely that prison officer participation in the race wars was more widespread than the administration acknowledged at the time.95
Irrespective of the level of prison officer involvement in fomenting racial violence, recruiting gang members or supporting the illicit economy, gangs increasingly dominated prison life. The gangs and violence associated with them created an atmosphere of terror for much of the mainline prison population. “One could no longer serve his own time without having to answer to some violent member of an organization,” reported an ex-gang member.96 “I was sick up to here of the completely senseless violence in this prison,” recalled Soledad prisoner George Myron, “most of which was perpetrated by the same inmates, over and over, all because no one would testify against them.” Prisoners refused to testify not because of loyalty to the convict code but rather because a prisoner was “not going to endanger his own life, and that of his family on the outside, by getting his name on the Mafia’s shit-list, or on that of any other similar type of clique—all of which are worthless, and have neither political, nor moral, tenets,” concluded Myron.97 The threat of gang violence permeated the prison. “Even dining in the mess halls and walking in the exercise yards are frightening and dangerous,” reported a 1975 Department of Finance study of prison violence.98 With pressures from gang members to participate in illegal activities, it became harder and harder for prisoners to do their own time.99 “We’re not really putting him [a prisoner] in a setting where he can fulfill what we put him there to do, do his time, get out under the guidelines that we have,” acknowledged CDC Law Enforcement Liaison special agent Diaz.100
California Department of Corrections Responds
By the early 1970s, racial tensions, prison gangs, and prisoner activism collided to produce some of the most violent prison conditions in the country. The CDC created the Special Service Unit (SSU) in 1964 to gather intelligence on gangs and other disruptive groups inside prison, but they had yet to find effective tactics to combat rising violence. Prison violence spread to include attacks on prison staff as convicts retaliated for prisoner deaths, and prison gangs perpetrated the majority of this violence. Between 1972 and 1974, there were more than three hundred stabbings and over sixty fatalities, including the death of six prison staff members.101 Officials responded to the increased violence, prisoner activism, and gang formation with increased security measures as well as a decrease in rehabilitative programs, both of which ultimately failed to stop prisoner organization.
The primary ways that prison officials handled prisoners they classified as belonging to “radical, militant, or underground inmate groups,” or involved in or suspected of being involved in violent altercations, was to remove them from the mainline population and place them in the AC or isolation or transfer them to another prison.102 The aim was not only to provide “more intensive help” to prisoners, as Warden Fred Dickson informed the press, but to remove them from the main prisoner population so that “they won’t infect the general population.”103 Officials initially designed these units to provide the most troubled prisoners with increased access to treatment, but by the 1970s these units operated primarily as segregation units. Staff assigned only one prisoner to a cell, and the only times prisoners left their cells were to shower or exercise; they were moved in restraints and under close supervision. Staff permitted prisoners to exercise in the yard only in small numbers because many of the AC prisoners were in rival gangs. Prisoners spent on average twenty-three-and-a-half hours in their cells each day. They had no access to privileges or treatment programs. “There’s no self-improvement efforts there [in the AC],” reported Paul Morris, deputy superintendent at Soledad.104 The focus of the AC became entirely custodial. Gang members used this time spent in lockup to recruit and indoctrinate new members from the aggressive and assaultive types of prisoners that comprised the ACs’ populations.105
Problem prisoners not placed in the AC or isolation were transferred to other institutions. Prisoners referred to this transferring of problem prisoners as “bus therapy.” All this did was spread the prisoner activism, gang problem, or violence to other prisons. Prisoners recruited convicts wherever officials transferred them. The original prison may have transferred the gang members and other problem prisoners out of their institution, but eventually the recruits those transfers organized would be sent throughout the system and find their way to the original institution. Only this time prison officials at the original institution would not know the new recruits. They simply traded one set of problem prisoners they knew for another set they did not.106
CDC officials also tried to separate gangs by institutions to avoid gang battles. The CDC segregated northern and southern Mexican American prisoners into different prisons to cut down on violence stemming from geographical divisions among Chicano prison gangs. This move also served to aid prison gangs with recruitment. Deuel and Soledad prisons housed NF members, while San Quentin and Folsom received Mexican Mafia prisoners. The CDC only sent other non-gang prisoners to those institutions that administrators felt would get along with the gangs. “When we’d get a Chicano from, say east L.A., which is a big Mafia stronghold,” one official explained, “we’d ask him where he wanted to go. He might not be a member of any gang, but he’d think, ‘Oh shit, I can’t go to Tracy [Deuel] because the N.F.’s there and they’re going to think I’m Mafia,’ so he’d say, ‘I can get along at San Quentin,’ where the Mafia was. So we’d send him there. With the Chicano inmates it was very hard for them to stay non-affiliated.” CDC officials’ efforts to segregate gangs oftentimes only helped to enlarge gang membership.107
Officials also locked down the entire prison population at varying points, depriving all convicts of yard time, educational courses, job training, and other rehabilitative programming. In 1973, after a series of stabbings between La Eme and NF members, the CDC director Raymond Procunier—a career prison officer who worked his way up the ranks and was appointed by Ronald Reagan to head the CDC—announced that “We’ve lost control. We’ve already lost the inmates and now we’re close to losing some of the staff. From now on, we’re going to go back to running these places instead of letting some of the inmates run ’em for us.”108 Procunier introduced what the media termed the “toughest” crackdown on prison violence in twenty years. He ordered San Quentin, Soledad, Folsom, and Deuel Vocational Institution locked down in response to what he termed the “reign of terror” resulting from gang warfare between the Mexican Mafia (La Eme) and NF and rumors of planned correctional officer assassinations by the BGF.109 After the fatal stabbing of a prisoner at the medical facility at Vacaville, prison officials locked down that as well. The month-long lockdown necessitated the suspension of all rehabilitation programming, as prison staff permitted convicts to leave their cells only for carefully controlled meals. CDC spokesman Philip Guthrie elaborated: “It doesn’t do any good for a guy to go to school if he’s going to get stabbed en-route.”110 Guthrie informed the media that “inmate and staff safety will now be the first priority overriding everything else—and that’s in the face of 20 years of belief in training and education.”111 While prison officials maintained that they still favored rehabilitation, it was clear that they had adopted a get-tough stance and prioritized custodial functions.112
While Procunier predicted that convicts would accept the curtailment of vocational and educational programming in the prison and new restrictions because prisoners desired protection from violence as well, ex-convicts and prison reform activists warned that once prison authorities lifted the lockdown, tensions would explode. Prisoners had been advocating for increased rights and less restrictions. “Everything in the penitentiary is a privilege,” Willie Holder, president of the prisoners’ rights group the Prisoners Union, told the media. “You don’t have any rights. When they rip off privileges … and that’s what they’re doing by locking everybody up … you have nothing. That’s breeding more violence and he (Procunier) knows this only too well.” Alice Daniel, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, attributed the increased violence to the “frustration, rage and uncertainty” felt by prisoners because of the Adult Authority’s tightening up on paroles and argued that the lockdown and new restrictions would only worsen the violence.113
One year later, Procunier acknowledged his failure to take back the prisons as violence continued to increase throughout 1974, making it the bloodiest year to date. The return to violence after the lifting of lockdowns supported Holder’s claim that they only produced more violence. Critics of the prison system continued to warn that lockdowns did not and would not quell prisoner violence, contending instead that they served to fuel tensions between various prisoner factions. Ron Sillman, a spokesman for the Committee for Prisoner Humanity and Justice, a prisoners’ rights organization, called the lockdowns “the worst abuse” in the prison system and pointed out that they did not even prevent violence.114 On December 26, 1974, despite the tightest lockdown to date, San Quentin had its eighty-fifth stabbing of the year. Prisoners stabbed suspected AB gang member John Calfy through his left eye with a pencil and twice in the back with a homemade prison knife during San Quentin’s belated Christmas dinner.115 “It used to be,” explained a CDC official from SSU, “that you’d have an incident, say, a black killing a white, and you’d lock up the ring-leaders and when it was over, it was over. But with gangs it was never over. There’d always be 30 other guys to take up the cause.”116
Prison spokesman Guthrie acknowledged that lockdowns were the only method the department had for dealing with “the deadly warfare between rival gangs” and that they largely failed. The increased violence in 1974 led Guthrie to advocate the building of new and more secure prisons as the only means to control the prisoner violence and killings inside California’s prison system.117 Eventually this would be the approach the CDC would adopt.
This emphasis on security resulted in CDC officials prioritizing custodial functions over the rehabilitative goals of incarceration. CDC officials moved to permanently scale back and cut rehabilitative programs and limit prisoner freedoms throughout California’s penal system in an effort to take back control of the prisons. This approach also failed, like increased security measures had. Limiting prisoner freedoms worsened prison conditions and further encouraged convicts to engage in the underground economy—which prison gangs controlled—to seek relief from the increased deprivation. Circumscribing prisoner freedoms also served to frustrate the general population and make them more critical of the prison system. Security measures often heightened tensions among prisoners and between prisoners and staff and increased overall violence. In effect, CDC efforts to squash both prison gangs and prisoner activism served only to create an environment that made prisoners more susceptible to gang recruitment.
All of the CDC’s efforts to quell gang growth and violence failed: segregating gang leaders, transferring prisoners, locking down the prisons, and focusing on punitive measures instead of rehabilitation. Many efforts just exacerbated the problem. The shift to a more punitive approach produced the opposite effect inside California’s prisons than what CDC officials had hoped. Removing and limiting varying aspects of the rehabilitative programs and prisoner freedoms served to intensify prisoner deprivation and incited both prisoner activism and growth in prison gangs as prisoners responded to more restrictive conditions of imprisonment.
CDC officials failed to recognize that prisoner organization, be it prison gangs or protest groups, filled prisoner needs stemming in part from the inherent deprivation they experienced in prison. Convicts joined with others to meet social needs, and at times they adapted the models of social organization they participated in prior to incarceration. They blended their culture with the particulars of prison. The rival approaches to prisoner organization—convict unity of all prisoners promoted by the prisoners’ rights movement and gang loyalty among a few select prisoners advocated by prison gangs—all sought, at least in part, to bring convicts together to improve life inside of prison. The prisoners’ rights movement worked to alleviate the pains of imprisonment by advocating for reform of prison conditions and the parole process through strikes and legal avenues, while prison gangs pursued control of the underground economy, which provided goods and services to remedy the various forms of deprivation imposed by prison life.
As the growing prisoner population outpaced prison facilities, this overcrowding taxed limited resources and increased the pains of imprisonment, forcing prisoners to rely on the sub-rosa economy to meet their needs. Gangs emerged in part to seize control of this lucrative trade. The violence they used to take over and maintain control of this trade destabilized prisoner social order and made cross-racial alliances difficult to execute. Prisoners increasingly turned to prison gangs for protection from the very violence the latter helped to inspire.
Officials assumed that because gangs were most prevalent in higher-level prisons, where more violent prisoners served time, that much of gang organization reflected prisoner demographics. In part, prisoner demographics did encourage gang formation. But changes outside of prison in the racial and political climate of the state also served to heighten tensions among prisoners. The CDC rationalized that it was the type of prisoner, rather than the prison, that produced gangs. Higher-level prisons had more violence-prone prisoners, but higher-level prisons also had the least amount of rehabilitative programming and prisoner personal freedoms, which meant that prisoners in higher-level prisons faced more extreme deprivation than their counterparts at lower-level prisons. Thus, they had more need to organize to meet their needs.
The CDC continued its shift away from rehabilitation and toward custody throughout the 1970s. By the end of the decade, rehabilitation had been completely abandoned and security measures increased. The state ultimately built the super-maximum prisons that prison spokesman Philip Guthrie advocated as the only solution to prison violence and gangs in 1974. Keramet Reiter, in her article in this volume, explores the emergence of supermax prisons in California. Just as efforts to isolate gangs in the AC failed, supermax prisons have failed as well. Locking down and segregating prisoners only treats the symptoms of violence, rather than the conditions both inside and outside of prison that contribute to it. Prison gangs have spread from California to the rest of the nation, including the federal carceral system. Today gangs continue to control much of the prisoner social world, and prison officials’ efforts to eradicate them continue to fail.
Notes
1. Edward Bunker, Education of a Felon (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), 264–65.
2. Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
3. See Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017); Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformations in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History (December 2010): 703–34; Robert Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 102 (June 2015): 73–86; Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Daniel S. Chard, “Scar’d Times: Maine’s Prisoners’ Rights Movement, 1971–1976” (MA thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2010); Christopher Smith, “Black Muslims and the Development of Prisoners’ Rights,” Journal of Black Studies 24, no. 2 (December 1993): 131–46. The rich body of scholarship on carceral systems in the post–World War II United States is greatly expanding. See especially Franklin Zimring, Gordon Hawkins, and Sam Kamin, Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh” Punishment & Society 3 (2001): 95–133; Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the U.S.,” New Left Review 13 (2002): 41–60; Joshua Page, The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jonathan Simon, Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Robert Perkins, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Norwood Henry Andrews III, “Sunbelt Justice: Politics, the Professions, and the History of Sentencing and Corrections in Texas since 1968” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2007); Volker Janssen, “Convict Labor, Civic Welfare: Rehabilitation in California’s Prisons, 1941–1971” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2007); Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California,” Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (December 2009): 702–26; Volker Janssen, “Sunbelt Lock-Up: Where the Suburbs Met the Super-Max,” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region, ed. Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Kelly Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
4. Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
5. See Chase, “We Are Not Slaves,” 73–86.
6. Keramet Reiter, 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Julilly Kohler-Hausman, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
7. Early studies of prisoner subcultures conducted during the 1940s and 1950s by Donald Clemmer and Gresham Sykes first detailed the system of prisoner social roles and rules. See Gresham Sykes and Sheldon Messinger, “The Inmate Social System,” in Theoretical Studies in the Social Organization of the Prison, eds. Richard A. Cloward et al. (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1960), 5–19. Sykes maintained that prisoners established and adapted the convict code to the “pains of imprisonment.” He defined five pains of imprisonment as deprivation of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and personal security. See Gresham Sykes, Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 65–78. Other scholars, such as John Irwin and Donald Cressey, later argued against Sykes’s idea that prisoner culture was indigenous to the prison and instead contended that prisoner culture was rooted in criminal and other subcultures from outside of prison. See John Irwin and Donald Cressey, “Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture,” Social Problems 10 (Fall 1962): 145–47. Historians have critiqued these earlier sociological works as ahistorical. For an expanded discussion and critique of these earlier sociological works, especially in relation to prison sex, see Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 94–97, 112–13. For an economic critique of the deprivation theory and the importation theory as frameworks for understanding prison life, see David Skarbek, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4–8.
8. Brilliant, Color of America Has Changed, 4–5.
9. James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 19.
10. See Murch, Living for the City, for an excellent discussion of the interplay between Southern migration and black radicalism in California, and Oakland in particular. See Brilliant, Color of American Has Changed, for a thorough discussion of racial segregation and discrimination of Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other minority peoples.
11. U.S. Census Bureau, “Resident Population and Apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives,” https://
12. California Prisoners 1960: Summary Statistics of Felon Prisoners and Parolees (Sacramento, California: Department of Corrections, Research Division, July 1961), 1.
13. California Prisoners 1969: Summary Statistics of Felon Prisoners and Parolees (Sacramento, California: Department of Corrections, Research Division, 1970), 1.
14. California Prisoners 1970 and 1971: Summary Statistics of Felon Prisoners and Parolees (Sacramento, California: Department of Corrections, Research Division, December 1971), 1; “Proposed Revision: The California Department of Corrections Classification and Parole Staffing Formula,” October 1, 1964, 1, Department of Corrections Records, F3717:1664, California State Archive, Sacramento, California; Board of Corrections, Report to Governor Ronald Reagan on Violence in California Prisons (Sacramento: Department of Corrections, 1971), 14–19; American Friends Service Committee, Struggle for Justice (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971), 91.
15. California Prisoners 1979: Summary Statistics of Felon Prisoners and Parolees (Sacramento, California: Department of Corrections, Research Division, 1980), 1.
16. Franklin E. Zimmering and Gordon Hawkins, “The Growth of Imprisonment in California,” British Journal of Criminology 34 (1994): 83.
17. California Department of Corrections, Characteristics of Resident Population of California State Prisons by Institutions (Sacramento: Department of Corrections, 1950, 1960, and 1969).
18. California Prisoners 1979, 52.
19. Walter Dunbar, “Department of Corrections: Programs, Plans, Problems,” in Correctional Progress in California—1963, 1964, Biennial Report (Sacramento: California Office of State Printing), 7.
20. California Department of Corrections, Correctional Progress in California—1965, 1966, Biennial Report (Sacramento: California Office of State Printing), 8.
21. California Department of Corrections, California Department of Corrections Master Plan (Sacramento: Department of Corrections, August 16, 1968), 75.
22. Earl Raab and Hugh Folk, “The Pattern of Dependent Poverty in California,” report prepared for the California Welfare Study Commission, January 1963, 3, Department of Corrections Records, F3717:243–246, California State Archive, Sacramento, California.
23. California Department of Corrections, Master Plan, 75.
24. For more on the ways in which racial oppression shapes urban street gang formation within a political framework for oppressed people, see Robert J. Durán, “The Core Ideals of the Mexican American Gang: Living the Presentation of Defiance,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 34, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 99–134; Timothy Gilfoyle, Andrew Diamond, and Will Cooley, “Revisiting Gangs in the Post–World War II North American City: A Forum,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 4 (July 2012): 807–11. For more on the complicated intersection of gangs, violence, and political uprising in militant urban activism in the late 1960s, see Johanna Fernandez, “The Young Lords and the Social and Structural Roots of Late Sixties Urban Radicalism,” Diálogo 11, no. 1 (2008): 27–33.
25. Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (Sacramento: California Office of State Printing, December 2, 1965), http://
26. For a discussion of the interracial civil rights movement in Los Angeles, see Shana Bernstein, “From the Southwest to the Nation: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Los Angeles,” in Nickerson and Dochuk, Sunbelt Rising, 143. See also Brilliant, Color of American Has Changed.
27. Dan Hammer and Isaac Cronin, eds., Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr (New York: Herman Graf Associates, 1975), 202.
28. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), 31.
29. Quoted in Board of Corrections, Report to Governor Ronald Reagan, 9.
30. Stephen Cook, “A Worry: Are Prisons ‘Schools for Revolution’?” San Francisco Chronicle, May 2, 1971.
31. Sociologists have debated the origins of prisoner culture and the convict code, arguing first for the deprivation theory—that prisoners established and adapted the convict code in response to the deprivation of prison—and later advocating the importation theory, which maintains that prisoner culture was rooted in subcultures from outside of prison. See Sykes, Society of Captives, 65–78; and Irwin and Cressey, “Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture,” 145–47. More recently, historians and other academics have critiqued these earlier sociological works as ahistorical, and most accept that prisoner social order emerges from a series of both internal and external factors that vary depending on historical moment, region, and so on. See Skarbek, Social Order of the Underworld, 4–8, for an economic take on prisoner social order and his own governance theory of prisoner social order.
32. The Outlaw, San Quentin Prison, July 1, 1968, reprinted in Minton, Inside: Prison American Style, ed. Robert Minton Jr. (New York: Random House, 1971), 15–17.
33. “Folsom Prisoners Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform,” in Maximum Security, ed. Eve Pell and Members of the Prison Law Project (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 191.
34. Cook, “A Worry.”
35. California State Department of Finance, Program Evaluation Unit, Prison Violence in California: Issues and Alternative, a Staff Reference Report (Sacramento, California: Department of Finance, July 1975), v.
36. As noted earlier in this essay, the size of California’s prisoner population fluctuated frequently in the 1970s, with both increases and decreases throughout the decade, but overall there was only a small increase in the total prisoner population by the end of the decade compared with the beginning. The large increases in the prisoner population associated with mass incarceration in California began in the 1980s. The state prisoner population grew by nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000, and a massive prison construction boom accompanied this growth. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag for a detailed discussion of the growth of California’s state prison system since 1982. See also Zimmering and Hawkins, “Growth of Imprisonment in California,” for a discussion of California as a leader in the 1980s of mass incarceration framed in an international context.
37. Victor Dillon, “Inside the Prison Clique,” in Minton, Inside: Prison American Style, 33.
38. “13 Stab Wounds: Quentin Killing—4th in 12 Days,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 1961.
39. For more on urban street gang formation, see Durán, “Core Ideals of the Mexican American Gang,” 99–134; Gilfoyle, Diamond, and Cooley, “Revisiting Gangs in the Post–World War II North American City,” 807–11. See Skarbek, Social Order of the Underworld, 4–8, for his governance theory of prisoner social order.
40. Health and Welfare Agency, Department of Corrections, Policy and Planning Division, Management Information Section, California Prisoners 1974 and 1975: Summary Statistics of Felon Prisoners and Parolees (Sacramento: Department of Corrections, 1975), 1; California Senate, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, Public Hearing, March 28 1974, 23–24, 52, in possession of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Oakland, California.
41. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 41, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 3.
42. Brian Kahn and Neil Zinn, Prison Gangs in the Community: A Briefing Document for the Board of Corrections (Sacramento: California Department of Corrections, 1978), 3–4.
43. “Racial Lockup: Gangs and the Drift toward Segregated Prisons in the CDC,” Outlaw, 6, no. 4 (September–October 1977), Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
44. John Spain to Fay Stender, January 1971, in Pell, Maximum Security, 65.
45. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 4, 115, AFSC.
46. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 118–19, AFSC.
47. John Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 51.
48. George Myron to no addressee, June 1970, in Pell, Maximum Security, 46.
49. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 4–5, AFSC; Kahn and Zinn, Prison Gangs in the Community, 17–21.
50. The exact date of Nuestra Familia’s origination is unknown. Some sources report that NF formed at San Quentin in 1966, and other sources claim it formed at Soledad in 1967.
51. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 6, AFSC.
52. Kahn and Zinn, Prison Gangs in the Community, 12.
53. Kahn and Zinn, 13, 85–92.
54. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 72–73, AFSC.
55. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 56, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 4.
56. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 9, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 1.
57. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 56, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 4.
58. Kahn and Zinn, Prison Gangs in the Community, 13–15.
59. For a discussion of the Wolf Pack, see Hammer and Cronin, Bad.
60. Quoted in Cummins, Rise and Fall, 159.
61. Quoted in Cummins, Rise and Fall, 156. For an expanded discussion of George Jackson’s politicization process, including a debate regarding the validity of and motives for Jackson’s political commitment, see Cummins, Rise and Fall, 151–86.
62. George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (New York: Random House, 1972), xi.
63. Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 193. See the essays in Dan Berger, ed., The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), for more on the ways prison informed other 1970s leftist movements.
64. Hammer and Cronin, Bad, 191.
65. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 164.
66. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 6, AFSC.
67. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 8, AFSC.
68. Kahn and Zinn, Prison Gangs in the Community, 10–11.
69. The CDC maintained that black radicals were largely responsible for the increasing deaths of prison officers. Prisoner witnesses also testified to this during hearings on prison gangs and violence. See Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 11, AFSC.
70. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 34, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 3.
71. Michael Thompson in an interview with David Grann, in David Grann, “The Brand: How the Aryan Brotherhood Became the Most Murderous Prison Gang in America,” New Yorker, February 16, 2004, 164.
72. Interview with Michael Thompson in National Geographic Explorer: Aryan Brotherhood, executive produced by Kathleen Cromley (Washington, DC: National Geographic Television Production, NGHT, 2007), DVD.
73. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 53, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 3.
74. Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil, 75–76.
75. Kahn and Zinn, Prison Gangs in the Community, 8.
76. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 41, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 3.
77. Hammer and Cronin, Bad, 163.
78. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 40–41, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 3.
79. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 34, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 3.
80. Kahn and Zinn, Prison Gangs in the Community, 9.
81. “Folsom Prison, Where People Die Like Flies,” interview with Warren Wells, 1973, Pacifica Radio Archive, Los Angeles.
82. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 56, 8, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 4; similar testimony was provided by prisoner witness number 1.
83. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 113, AFSC.
84. George Myron to addressee, June 1970, in Pell, Maximum Security, 47.
85. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 10, AFSC.
86. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 14, 90, AFSC; Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 6, AFSC.
87. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 6, AFSC.
88. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 8–9, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 1.
89. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 4, AFSC; Evelle J. Younger, Terrorism in California (Sacramento: California Department of Justice, July 1974).
90. Alfred Hassan to Patti, no date, in Pell, Maximum Security, 233.
91. William Thomason to Fay Stender, October 16, 1970, in Pell, Maximum Security, 218.
92. Sherman Warner to Sister, February 1971, in Pell, Maximum Security, 117.
93. Sherman Warner to Sister, February 1971, in Pell, Maximum Security, 120.
94. See Pell, Maximum Security; Hammer and Cronin, Bad; Bunker, Education of a Felon.
95. See the CDC Records, F3717:918–1125, for numerous accounts of illegal activities involving both prison officers and prisoners.
96. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 10, AFSC. Testimony provided by anonymous prisoner witness number 1.
97. George Myron to no addressee, June 1970, in Pell, Maximum Security, 47.
98. California State Department of Finance, Prison Violence in California, 1.
99. Executive Session, Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Gang Violence in Penal Institutions, 6, AFSC.
100. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 84, AFSC.
101. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 1, AFSC.
102. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 57, AFSC.
103. Charles Randebaugh, “ ‘Prison within Prison’: Neo-Fascist Gang Cracked at Quentin,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 1961.
104. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 50, AFSC.
105. Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder, Public Hearing Regarding Gang Violence in California’s Penal Institutions, 119–120, AFSC.
106. California State Department of Finance, Prison Violence in California, 22; Bruce Porter, “California Prison Gangs: The Price of Control,” Corrections Magazine 8, no. 6 (December 1982): 11.
107. Porter, “California Prison Gangs,” 13–14.
108. Tim Findley, “Prisons Get a Hard-Line Pep Talk,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 6, 1973: 1.
109. Larry Hatfield, “Prisons Tighten up on Gangs,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, December 2, 1973: 1.
110. Hatfield, “Prisons Tighten, Up on Gangs.”
111. Tim Findley, “Prison Crackdown—It’s ‘Safety First,’ ” San Francisco Chronicle, December 4, 1973: 1.
112. Porter, “California Prison Gangs,” 12–13.
113. Findley, “Prisons Get a Hard-Line Pep Talk”; Larry Hatfield, “Inmates Claim Lockups ‘Excuse for Repression,’ ” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, December 9, 1973: 3.
114. Robert Hollis, “Can’t Stop Violence, Prison Official Says,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, December 22, 1974: 1.
115. “New Stabbing at Quentin—The 85th of the Year,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 27, 1974: 5.
116. Porter, “California Prison Gangs,” 11.
117. Hollis, “Can’t Stop Violence.”