The Gangs Behind Bars-Prison Gangs

Insight on the News, Sept 28, 1998 by Tiffany Danitz
Prison gangs are flourishing across the country. Organized, stealthy and deadly, they are reaching out from their cells to organize and control crime in America's streets.

A 40-year-old gang leader uses his cellular phone to organize an elaborate drug ring and order hits. He commands respect. He wears gang-banger clothing and drapes himself with gold chains. This man is responsible for an entire network of gang members across the state of Illinois. He is Gino Colon, the mastermind behind the Latin Kings. When prosecutors finally caught up with him last August, Colon was indicted for running the Latin Kings' drug-dealing operation from behind prison walls--the state penitentiary in Menard.

"People in society and correctional officers need to understand that immediate control over the prison system is often an illusion at any time," says Cory Godwin, president of the gang-investigators association for the Florida Department of Corrections, or DC. "Contraband equals power."

Prison gangs are flourishing from California to Massachusetts. In 1996, the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that prison disturbances soared by about 400 percent in the early nineties, which authorities say indicated that gangs were becoming more active. In states such as Illinois, as much as 60 percent of the prison population belong to gangs, Godwin says. The Florida DC has identified 240 street gangs operating in their prisons. Street gangs, as opposed to gangs originating in prisons, are emerging as a larger problem on the East Coast.

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Of the 143,000 inmates Texas houses in state pens, 5,000 have been identified as gang members and another 10,000 are under suspicion. Texas prison-gang expert Sammy Buentello says the state's prisons are not infested with gangs, but those that have set up shop are highly organized. "They have a paramilitary type structure;' he says. "A majority of the people that come in have had experience with street-gang membership and have been brought up in that environment accepting it as the norm. But some join for survival."

After James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death in Jasper last June, rumors spread throughout Texas linking two of the suspected assailants to racially charged prison gangs. While authorities and inmates dismiss these rumors, the Jasper murder occurred only weeks after a San Antonio grand jury indicted 16 members of the Mexican Mafia, one of the state's largest and most lethal prison gangs, for ordering the deaths of five people in San Antonio from within prison walls.

"As they are being released into the community on parole, these people are becoming involved in actions related to prison-gang business. Consequently, it is no longer just a corrections problem--it is also a community problem," Buentello tells Insight.

According to gang investigators, the gang leaders communicate orders through letters. Where mail is monitored they may use a code--for instance, making every 12th word of a seemingly benign letter significant. They use visits, they put messages into their artwork and in some states they use the telephone. "It is a misnomer that when you lock a gang member up they fall off to Calcutta. They continue their activity," Godwin emphasizes. "It has only been in the last five years that law enforcement has realized that what happens on the inside can affect what happens on the outside and vice versa."

Of the two kinds of gangs, prison gangs and street gangs, the prison gangs are better organized, according to gang investigators. They developed within the prison system in California, Texas and Illinois in the 1940s and are low-key, discreet--even stealthy. They monitor members and dictate how they behave and treat each other. A serious violation means death, say investigators.

The street gangs are more flagrant. "Their members are going into the prisons and realizing that one of the reasons they are in prison is that they kept such a high profile" making it easier for the police to catch them, says Buentello. "So, they are coming out more sophisticated and more dangerous because they aren't as easily detected. They also network and keep track of who is out and so forth."

According to gang investigators and prisoners, the prison gangs were formed for protection against predatory inmates, but racketeering, black markets and racism became factors.

Godwin says Texas should never have outlawed smoking in the prisons, adding cigarettes as trade-goods contraband to the prohibited list. "If you go back to the Civil War era, to Andersonville prison," Godwin says of the prisoner-of-war facility for Union soldiers, "you will see that the first thing that developed was a gang because someone had to control the contraband--that is power. I'm convinced that if you put three people on an island somewhere, two would clique up and become predatory against the other at some point."

But protection remains an important factor. When a new inmate enters the prison system he is challenged to a fight, according to a Texas state-pen prisoner. The outcome determines who can fight, who will be extorted for protection money and who will become a servant to other prisoners. Those who can't join a gang or afford to spend $5 a week in commissary items for protection are destined to be servants. Godwin explains: "The environment is set up so that when you put that many people with antisocial behavior and criminal history together, someone is going to be the predator and someone the prey, and that is reality."