Hardcore Hate

A major prison riot occurred in west Texas at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Smith Unit in April 2000. It was a race riot, started when a hispanic prisoner confronted a black inmate who was masturbating in front of a female corrections officer (it's a common practice called "killin' dat ho"). About 300 black and hispanic prisoners squared off, some battling with garden tools. It took 300 guards six hours to bring the conflagration under control. One inmate died from a pickax wound and 34 others were injured, including three guards.

This riot was unusual only because news of it broke into the national media. There are dozens of such riots every year in Texas but rarely do they make the news. There are also thousands of racial incidents and fights that threaten to escalate into riots.

The Texas prison system is a corrupt and dangerous place for guards and prisoners. With an inmate population 45 percent black, 29 percent white and 26 percent hispanic, the system becomes more extremist on the issue of race. Racial agitation, mindless aggression and confrontation are a way of life for prisoners. Most prisoners eventually get out and rejoin the public. They take their hatred to the streets, which turn into racial hunting and killing grounds for recidivist criminals.

There are many factors involved in this mess. Principal among them is the war on drugs, a failed social policy that has filled Texas penitentiaries. Many petty criminals are hardened by their prison experiences and go on to commit more-serious crimes. This monstrous, growing threat to public safety and security was the greatest failing of George W. Bush's governorship, but no one seems willing to talk about it.

Call me John Doe. I'm white, for folks who keep score. I've done 17 years in the Texas prison system, and currently reside in a unit in east Texas. It's not far from where John King and Lawrence Brewer did time before they paroled out, met up with Shawn Berry, and killed James Byrd Jr. outside Jasper, Texas. I have friends and acquaintances who know King and Brewer, and I knew the victim. Byrd, too, was hardcore and convicted under the Texas equivalent of the "three strikes" law as a habitual criminal.

Byrd was beaten and then chained by the ankles to the back of a pickup. The pathologist testified that Byrd was dragged down a country road, sacrificing body parts in a hopeless effort to keep his head above the pavement. The asphalt acted as coarse sandpaper. His knees, buttocks and arms were ground down until his head hit the pavement. Suddenly his head and right arm caught in a culvert and were torn off. His torso was tossed outside a black cemetery. His head and what remained of him were left in a ditch.

We actually do make license plates in prison. Last year we filled an order for vanity plates for a guy who lives in Jasper. They read: Drag Em. This occurred right before the Aryan Circle held a springtime barbecue in the town square during the murder trials. So much for the media-hyped racial healing in Jasper.

As for life in my unit, we've endured gang fights and race riots over the Byrd murder and its subsequent trials. These riots are never officially described as such by Texas prison spokesmen. For example, there was a race riot in March 1999 at the Allred prison in Iowa Park, Texas. Thirteen men were stabbed or otherwise required hospitalization. The press called it a riot, but state officials did not--not when Governor George W. Bush was planning his run for president.

We paid a lot of attention to the Byrd trials. The racial motivation for Byrd's slaying was not hard to prove against King. A Ku Klux Klan cigarette lighter with King's nickname was found on the road near Byrd's bloodstains. At one point prosecutors introduced as evidence the rusty, heavy-duty chain used to drag Byrd. Rust stains on the bed of the pickup were linked to the chain. Testimony indicated that King had long planned a "big event" to draw attention to the racial tension in Jasper so he could build a militant, pro-white group.

King is a member of the Confederate Knights of America, a North Carolina-based white supremacist group. His body is covered in tattoos of the Klan, Aryan Nations and CKA, including one of a Klansman Woody Woodpecker hanging a black man.

According to the families of King and Brewer, the two did not have racist opinions before going to prison. How can it be that someone would sink from an attitude of racial indifference to one of unswerving racial hatred? The answer is complex, but I've had to sort it out, to keep my sanity and to keep me from hunting down and carving out my own pound of flesh.

King and Brewer were friends at the Beto I Unit in Tennessee Colony, Texas. We refer to Beto I as a gladiator farm--a place full of young inmates who square off daily. King and Brewer fought back-to-back in the dayroom against blacks who tried to "hog" them for their commissary purchases (each prisoner in close custody is allowed to spend up to $60 per month). Sometimes they fought blacks for the privilege of watching TV in the dayroom, or for seats in the dayroom. Races and gangs reserve entire tables and benches, so one must fight to win a seat. If someone refuses to fight, he is "beat down" anyway and his property is taken. If that man still refuses to fight, he is "turned out," and the rest of his days in prison are hell. In this regard things are the same since I came to prison in 1983. But in many other ways things have gotten worse.

It is in the Texas prisons that King and Brewer acquired their tattoos and affiliations with radical pro-white organizations. I say radical pro-white organizations, as opposed to "racist organizations," in order to distinguish them from pro-black and pro-Mexican prison organizations that could also be described as racist. These include hispanic groups such as Raza Unida, the Texas Syndicate, the Mexican Mafia, various Aztlan movement groups and Mexican street gangs and black outfits like the Five Percenters, the Mandingo Warriors, Black Muslims, Nation of Islam, Bloods, Crips and dozens of hometown gangs that also operate inside. White groups include the prison-derived gang Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, as well as branches of groups that do not officially align with prison gangs. These include the Aryan Circle, the Knights Templar (prisoner Freemasons!), various skinhead units, the Klan and the Aryan Nations.

A black gang leader once told me in an unguarded moment of honesty, "To us you're either a Klansman or a punk." A punk is a man who has been turned out: forced into sex with other inmates. Race in Texas prisons is a fundamental fact of existence. There is no pride in one's heritage or race in prison that is not stated in the most extreme terms. If one is to be a "stand-up" white man, it must be on the basis of allegiance to race--not by one's magnanimity (which will get you hurt), not by appeasement (always taken as cowardice), not even by Jesus (unless, of course, your Jesus is white, or black or Mexican).

I am not a punk. I am a college graduate. In my other life, many of my friends were black--including my criminal defense attorney, who was a college buddy. Today, because of my prison experiences, I cannot stand being in the presence of black men. I can't even listen to my favorite Motown music anymore. The barbarous blacks in prison have ruined it for me, as have the black guards who compose half the staff and who flaunt the dominance of black culture and give favored treatment to their brothers. They have ruined my tolerance. They have ruined my once-open mind. I have physical, mental and spiritual scars from defending myself against them, though I'm lucky that I haven't been raped or otherwise lost my manhood.

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Aside from the death penalty, one of the issues regarding crime during the presidential campaign involved then-Governor Bush's stance on the rehabilitation of prisoners. At one point, Al Gore's staff announced that Bush had cut back on Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous programs in Texas prisons. Bush's team responded by showing that funding had increased. The problem was that the funding had not translated to growth in operating programs. The actual number of AA/NA treatment programs at the various prisons had decreased. In any case, I can personally attest that even in these programs, race is a powerful factor.

A few years back, I lived in a special cell block that was heavy on discipline and long on 12-step programs. Unfortunately, it was also an Aryan Circle stronghold. The walls on the wing (continued on page 140) Hardcore Hate (continued from page 114) were covered with AA and NA slogans and literature, making a strong initial impression on visitors. Special bulletin boards were erected in the large day-room serving the cell block, where inmates posted articles and clippings of interest to them. Telltale bits often showed up on these bulletin boards, discussing, for example, how the deposed Zimbabwean leader Canaan Banana sodomized his servants and employees. White prisoners got a laugh while complaints were lodged against them by offended black prisoners.

The Aryan Circle's presence on the cell block was revealed when second-shift guards staged a surprise shakedown of the cell block on a Saturday night. On a dayroom table occupied that evening by several Aryan Circle members, a hit list was discovered. It contained the names of several guards--including the black supervisor of the second-shift guards. Many black guards are perceived as taking pride in their reputations, not merely among white gang members but all prisoners, for harassing and threatening whites. There is little doubt their names made the Aryan Circle hit list.

The entire prison was locked down for the remainder of the weekend and all visiting privileges were suspended. Visitors who had made reservations with the warden's office were not contacted, and arrived only to be turned away by prison officials. Throughout Saturday night an investigation was conducted, and many prisoners from the substance abuse program and elsewhere were placed in temporary or permanent administrative segregation.

Blacks and Mexicans on the cell block had long complained about the situation to prison administrators, but their complaints were largely ignored because they were in such a minority. Few prisoners wanted to participate in the disciplined 12-step programs then associated with the cell block. Participation in those programs was mandatory for the now-disbanded wing. Obviously, Aryan Circle members made a concerted commitment for the opportunity to gain control of their own section of the prison.

Back in the general population, black gang members have caught on to the authorities' lip service to racial harmony and have used the system to their advantage. They write unsigned snitch notes to prison officials that name whites as gang members, almost all of whom are not. The prison members in question are strongly independent and thus have a quiet influence in the way seemingly minor things are run on the cell block, including which television programs are watched and how rude or boisterous inmates may treat others. These prisoners are getting locked up for no reason.

Administrators know about this manipulation, of course, but they cannot afford to ignore the claims because of the number of inmates who may riot or refuse to man the factories. The result is more racial agitation. Some whites escalate their response in prison. Others vow to get a little justice (as they put it) on the streets.

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Statewide numbers reveal that more--and younger--minority offenders are being sentenced to long terms, often with no hope of parole. This is the new predator generation. Prison lends itself to the creation of predators among men who were perhaps petty thieves in their free-world incarnation. But the young men coming in now who were predators on the street quickly rise to the top of the ranks.

Though they use the term a lot, the new predators have no concept of respect, which used to be sacrosanct. The predators consider your very existence as disrespectful of them--unless you are a Klansman. They respect a racial man because they know where he stands and what to expect from him. All others are punks and hos and bitches to be turned out, fucked, robbed and pimped--another way to get a seat in the dayroom.

For the new predators, prison is a rite of passage, something to be proud of. In 1999 a quarter of all black Texan males over 18 were in jail or prison or on probation or parole. (For black men between the ages of 21 and 29, the figure is 29 percent.) It won't be long before prison culture is fully identifiable in African American culture--evidence of its existence is already plentiful. Rosa Parks' bus seat has been replaced by the bench in the prison dayroom as a symbol of black progress. Even prison guards fear the predators and let them get away with all sorts of rules violations: rape, protection rackets, sodomy, indecent exposure, public masturbation, stealing and general disturbances.

Is the issue of race in Texas different from that in Texas prisons? Not if the difficult circumstances of prison reveal a man for what he really is--and not if the management of the prisons reflects public opinion and policy. At the current rate of incarceration (49,000 prisoners in 1990, 146,000 in 1999) ideology on race as practiced in prison is destined to have an impact on the world at large. During the next 10 years, about 300,000 prisoners will be released onto the streets.

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Criminal justice is a confused affair in Texas, a destructive situation with which few people are pleased. For example, most black people in Texas have traditionally and adamantly opposed the death penalty as racist. Like the execution of Gary Graham (a black man convicted of murder thanks mostly to the testimony of a single witness), high-profile death row cases have drawn the attention of anti-death-penalty organizations and Hollywood celebrities. It is safe to say that this won't happen with John King. He's not going to be the subject of a neo-Eastwood movie about a death row mistake.

Despite the national outcry over executions, most Texans endorse a tough stance on criminals--and have for decades. Treatment of convicts was so abusive in the past that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice lost control of the system to the feds in a Seventies class action suit called Ruiz vs. Estelle, commonly referred to as Ruiz. One of the issues litigated was prison overcrowding. (At one point, there was only one doctor assigned to the whole system. Prisoners even operated on one another.) The state could not defy the population limits mandated by the court. Slow to build new facilities, administrators looked to ease parole requirements. The Texas legislature passed a new law to be exercised at times of overcrowding called the Prison Management Act, allowing prisoners--many of them violent offenders--to receive a mandatory discharge after earning credit awards for good behavior. This new law meant that parole was no longer discretionary for prisoners whose good time credits earned plus time actually served equaled 100 percent of their original sentences.

Another response to the population pressures on the Texas system resulted in the current politicized science of plea bargaining. By avoiding trial and the law and the Constitution and all that extraneous stuff, a criminal can simply "go along to get along" with prosecutors, judges and prison officials working in concert. He can simply plead guilty and receive a relative slap on the wrist.

Non-plea-bargaining criminal defendants who use up the resources of the system and actually go to trial are penalized for doing so. If found guilty they receive sentences that are typically many times worse than what the plea bargainer is awarded. Moreover, most plea bargainers are guilty of multiple charges and counts of crimes, while defendants using the trial system typically have just one or two charges. The plea bargainers are usually career criminals who have simply been caught doing their multiple crimes; as they often brag to their cellmates, they are usually guilty of several other offenses for which they have not been convicted.

The plea bargaining and parole consideration mechanisms combined to create a revolving door in the TDCJ for career criminals. By the mid-Eighties, criminologists said fear of prison had lost its effect as a deterrent. The system still views criminals as offenders and clients, many of whom are fully expected to remain a part of the system for the rest of their lives. Trial and prison officials know that most of these criminals are recidivists. They are violent and they are stupid. A significant percentage of them have IQs less than 85. Since there is no other official remedy to their plight, they are loyal clients. These active recidivists are routed in and out of prisons, which is much like putting them on a bus on the road for a while (something Texas prisons actually have done in order to alleviate space problems during the federal court litigation). In effect, trial and prison officials have used the free world as an off-the-count prison for recidivists, the worst and most dangerous criminals of all.

As crime in the streets escalated nationwide in the Eighties, money became available for new facilities. State taxpayers recognized that the ignoring of over-crowded prisons comes with a price. Federal funds for fighting the drug war came pouring in--but they came with harsher sentences and higher rates of incarceration. The new prisons would be filled to capacity, conditions inside were more violent than ever and crime remained a problem. Still, there was money to be made.

Criminal justice in Texas has always suffered from an incestuous relationship with politics and politicians. There is no effective separation of the three branches of government in Texas--state and federal constitutional guarantees for a republican form of government notwithstanding. The Texas legislature is made up mostly of lawyers, and their brethren judges in Texas are likewise elected to office (except when unexpected vacancies are filled by the governor's personal appointees). In this way the executive, judicial and legislative branches tend to blend together, at least when it comes to administering the TDCJ. There are presently more than 100 state prison facilities holding some 146,000 prisoners in Texas, making it one of the world's largest penal systems. It has a budget in the billions, and some of the prison payrolls number in the millions. It is a kingdom for power- and money-hungry politicians, law enforcement officers and prison officials.

Even while under the supervision of federal courts for more than a generation, the TDCJ system is used as a political tool for bolstering politicians' careers and as a lucrative stopover for political friends, boosters and appointees. Former prison executive director James "Andy" Collins resigned under pressure on Dec. 31, 1995. He immediately took a $1000-a-day consulting job with VitaPro, a Canadian firm that had a contract to provide meat substitutes for prisoners. Collins, who was indicted in federal court, also used lax state law to negotiate no-bid contracts with preferred vendors for security fences. The corruption has gone on throughout the decades: sweetheart prison construction deals, use of prison dairy farms for personal profit, writing off "stolen" trucks, tractors, bulldozers, parts, construction and medical equipment--even pork and sides of beef by the truckload.

Prisoners thrown into the TDCJ system are pawns in a sprawling empire. In no way does this fact justify or rationalize the crimes of the prisoners. Punishment is due. However, the system breeds cynicism and rebellion among some prisoners and their families.

Take its approach toward the education of prisoners. Windham School District operates schools only inside the prisons. In the Nineties, State Comptroller John Sharp audited the Texas prison system. He questioned the efficacy of the Windham School District. Prison officials reportedly broke into Sharp's office and went through his trash in an effort to find out what he knew and to try to maintain damage control. The biggest joke is that most of the grown men in these Romper Room classes never complete a high school education nor are in a position to pass the general equivalency degree test, even after years spent in the program.

State and federal funds for school and other so-called rehabilitative programs continue to roll in. Texas prisons enforce attendance once a prisoner is enrolled, in order to meet the statutory requirements. That keeps the money coming in. Many prisons have ignored security threats (in order to avoid total lock-down) so they can meet the minimum requirements of prisoner attendance for winning state and federal funds.

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The problems caused by administrative malfeasance, however, are nothing compared to the hatred generated by the official manipulation of the races.

By 1983 Texas prison officials had conceded several issues to the Ruiz prisoner plaintiffs. One of these issues was the use of prisoners as building tenders who turn keys, hold certain jobs and discipline inmates. BTs were nearly all white, and you can imagine how they handled their fellow white prisoners. Building tenders were often chosen not because they were model prisoners, but because they were violent and brutal. They held keys to open doors and were armed with baseball bats and knives. There were so many abuses in the building-tender system that the federal court made Texas do away with it. When the BTs disappeared, Texas did not hire enough prison guards to take their place. This proved disastrous because an earlier ruling from another federal class-action suit called Lamar vs. Coffield had forced Texas to desegregate its system. But while other states' courts were upholding many aspects of racial separation as necessary to maintain safety and security in the prisons, Texas went far beyond federal court requirements and racially integrated all phases of prisoner life, housing and work.

Texas officials pitted the two courts against each other and blindly began to implement the consent decrees in these two cases without concern for security. When the BTs disappeared and the orders came down to integrate cells, all hell broke loose. White prisoners, who had long been in the minority but had taken advantage of life under BTs, were thrown into cells with sworn enemies. With no guards around, ad hoc gangs arose to take advantage of weak or neutral prisoners. These gangs were usually based on race. Gang members protected one another from--and helped commit--unheard-of sexual violence. One man was so distraught from being repeatedly raped, he asked doctors if there was a way to sew his rectum closed. The widespread rape and gang activity continue to this day, with no sign of resolution. Most cell blocks and wings had no official (or unofficial) supervision, and a killing spree erupted in Texas prisons that lasted for two years.

At the end of each day we'd gather around the radio to listen to the body counts from various prisons. One magazine declared America's most dangerous prison to be the Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, where I once was assigned. Newsweek said the Eastham Unit in Lovelady was the most dangerous. Others included Darrington, Retrieve and Ramsey. Turning up each day to work, to shower, to mail call and to chow were mad adventures. Virtually every man had his own shank and was willing to use it. Courts were giving minimal sentences for killing other prisoners. Most cases did not go that far: an inmate might do some time in solitary, or if the attack was approved by officials, he got a job promotion.

Public pressure mounted for officials to do something about the violence they had hastened to create. They began hiring guards and prison counselors to oversee prison classification, but the ranks of counselors were reduced by the budget-conscious Governor Bush. During the first two years of desegregation following the Lamar court order, the new counselors interviewed inmates to discover racial biases and to record incidents of racially motivated violence. Based on that information, many prisoners involved in such incidents were deemed racially restricted in their housing assignments to prevent further violence and thus preserve the safety and security of the staff, prisoners and the institutions.

New staffing requirements mandated a ratio of one guard for every six prisoners. Texas has always had trouble maintaining this ratio. When the counselors were fired or moved to guard jobs, teletype orders (of which I saw a copy) came down from headquarters to Texas prisons commanding the destruction of all the early Lamar interviews and records.

Texas prison officials then began to reclassify all prisoners previously involved in racial violence. Most of the racial restrictions for same-race-only housing were removed. I know of prisoners who were told by administrators that if they wanted to keep their racially restricted status they would have to commit some act of racially motivated violence at least once every 90 days. The official presumption was that staffing was now adequate to deal with any violence.

Many of these reclassified prisoners attempted to contact their court-appointed lawyers, only to be told they had been removed from the case long ago. The prisoners filed motions charging that Texas prison officials were hell-bent on reinitiating racial violence in the prisons by forcing those with known bias histories into the same cells. After all, many men had built their lives around racial pride and racial prejudices as a matter of survival. They had joined racial cultures and marked their bodies with racial tattoos. They contacted like-minded groups and secured racial literature, and in the close confines of an integrated cell, these things can prove to be deadly liabilities. Still, the judge overseeing the case eventually issued an abrasive order in the mid-Nineties that declared he would not entertain in his court the motions of any known bigots.

Many of the prisoners who could not abide by the system and by the rulings of the federal judge who abandoned them have been administratively segregated. Special housing wings were created for the most dangerous men. But there are only so many ad seg cells, leaving the most dangerous prisoners to flow in and out of ad seg and the prisons' general population. Ad seg has become a temporary, after-the-fact buffer to punish those who are violent.

The widespread racial antagonism that is the real cause of the violence is never addressed because it is fundamental to prison life and useful to manipulative officials. Racial integration in prison simply is not like racial integration in a public school classroom. In the aftermath of the Byrd murder, I read one commentator's opinion in which he expressed disappointment that ex-cons could come out of prison with unresolved racial problems "despite the racial integration of the prisons." Despite? How about because of racial integration? Prison life is about race.

And so it goes. In February 2000 National Public Radio reported that some prison guards have resorted to paying protection to prison gangs to avoid being harmed. The corruption has extended to the point where race, gangs and violence manipulate not just the prisoners in the Texas prison kingdom but the employees, too. This latest development occurs at a time when budgets and salaries have exploded during the past few years in an effort to quell the violence and increase security. Just the opposite has occurred. It is a powder keg.

texas prisons turn violent criminals into violent racist criminals, then they release them

a black gang leader once told me, "to us you're either a klansman or a punk." a punk is a man who has been forced into sex with other inmates.