Prison Radicalism and The Return of Civil Death in

California: Where are we now?

Eric Cummins

(Following is a brief report of field interviews of members of a California prison gang I call here the "Norteno tip." Interviews were conducted in 1994-95 with funding from the Spencer Foundation and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in legal humanities at Stanford University's Humanities Center. I want to thank my colleagues at the Center, and my students as well, for their insights and suggestions.)

Historical Overview of Civil Death for Prisoners in California

In 1871, following the Supreme Court case Ruffin v. Commonwealth, (1) Californian prisoners were first officially deemed civilly dead slaves of the state, though this legal opinion and the statutes that subsequently codified it in California law were little more than acknowledgments of a legal status for prisoners already long in effect in California. Over the years since that time the notion of civil death for prisoners has grown into an issue of contention in California culture. Persons sentenced to prison in the 1880's lost all legal identity (2). Even when their liberty was restored after release from prison, convicted felons at that time had no right to vote, hold office, make contracts, own property, or compose a will. Those rights, and more, remained forfeited to the state. In 1919 the Penal Code was amended to restore certain rights on parole, but only at the discretion of the Board of Prison Terms, the parole board (3). This reduced civil status of prisoners was reaffirmed in 1941 in a section of the penal code titled "Civil Death," penal code 2600-2601.4

It was against this background of law that prisoner human rights activism in California emerged in the late 1 940's, first in the aggressive jailhouse lawyering and manuscript smuggling of Caryl Chessman; in the 1950's it then blossomed in the thousands of habeas corpus petitions of San Quentin's Black Muslims. Finally, in 1968, after years of convict struggle inside and coalition building with reformers outside the walls, California Penal Code 2600 was amended to grant prisoners certain basic rights. Prisoners were given the right to inherit real estate and personal property, to correspond confidentially with members of the bar, holders of public office, arid the media, to receive most books and printed material available to the free reading public, and to own written material that they produced while imprisoned (5). In California this penal code section became known as the "Convict Bill of Rights."

The Convict Bill of Rights had two immediate effects. First, it opened a floodgate of previously censored communication between prisoners and public officials and news writers--who expressed astonishment at discovering inhumane conditions and physical abuse inside the prisons. What followed was a decade of investigation, scandal, and scrupulous court oversight of Californian prison practices. Second, the Convict Bill of Rights vastly expanded prisoner reading and writing and launched an era of convict political activism. This reached its zenith in dozens of secret 1960's convict political study groups, in conversations where the notion of California prisoner unionism was first whispered and where other forms of more radical Marxist activism were inspired--in the hearts of prisoners like George Jackson and the then-emerging prison gangs.

For a time, these various convict factions maintained links to activist groups in civil rights or revolutionary movements outside the walls and professed goals which were expressly political. In other words, exactly what might have been expected to happen did happen. Once convicts were returned the most basic civil rights of the freedom to read, speak and write, they aggressively moved to become citizen activists. And the California courts sometimes responded with reforms. After 1978 California ex-prisoners, once they finished parole, were returned the right to vote (6). From their prison yards, California convicts attempted to challenge and change, or in some cases destroy, the American state. Needless to say, prison discipline was hard to maintain during these years. Among other things, attacks on guard staff increased, as did deadly assaults between opposing factions of prisoners.

California soon found this type of convict citizenship intolerable. Consequently, as early as 1971-72, Governor Ronald Reagan called for special high-security prisons for revolutionary and other "troublemaker" convicts. Almost immediately, a broad range of prisoner activists--jailhouse lawyers, Muslims, unionists, gang members, revolutionaries--were housed on special restrictive yards (maximum security administrative segregation), where no education program was available, no treatment program or counseling was offered, and where convict reading, writing and communication rights were again severely limited. More recently, in 1989, with the opening of the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay prison, continued calls for even higher security engendered a whole new species of prison in California. Today, in the so-called "SHU" units, designed to

contain, isolate and break down trouble-makers, control technologies, electronic surveillance and sensory deprivation replace most human contact. In the SHU units, convict reading and writing are severely censored, and all contact to the outside world through TV or telephone is stringently controlled. In 1991 maximum security administrative segregation and SHU units comprised about 10% of California's prison space. In our newest prisons it represents about 25%. This seems to be the California prison space of the future.

California Prison Radicalism Today

In prisons like these what is left of the convict civil rights era, and of the aggressive movement to carve and divide power on the yard that it spawned, the move to invent the prisoner as citizen and activist? Secret political cell study goes on in California prisons. But the forms of political organization today's California prisoner activists are likely to assume are no longer modeled after civil rights reform groups or proletarian revolutionary organizations. Instead, it is more common today for prisoner power blocks to proudly model themselves after the Sicilian mafia. In form, they have evolved into complex secret societies with extensive bureaucracies interestingly mirroring the labyrinthine prison system structure itself. In some cases, they are covert cultures of writing with elaborate private literatures, libraries, and education departments.

The Norteffo Tip At this time I want to turn to a discussion of just one of these prisoner power blocks, a group which originated at San Quentin prison in 1968 and went on to become the best-organized and most highly-structured of California's prison gangs. In some periods it has also been the prison system's most successful gang. The group to which I refer was created by northern (or Norteno) Californian Chicano convicts as a protection against the system's first major prison gang, a tip of Sureno Chicanos which emerged in the early 1960's and quickly became dominant on the yard.

When the Norteno tip originated on September 16, 1968, plotting its own debut to coincide with the celebration of Mexican Independence Day, it did so very deliberately. Today, for Norteno members, the tip occupies the place in the group life of its membership where the state has erased nationhood. There it remakes itself into a parallel micro-state complete with a patriotic birthday which replicates the national birthday of Mexico. In the Norteno tip, in other words, it is as if civil death has claimed its own parallel statehood.7 The Norteno tip emerged from one of San Quentin's treatment-era "inmate self-improvement groups" and initially took its place as one of the in-prison warrior arms of La Raza, a policing faction, in other words, of the California Chicano wing of the civil rights movement. In these earliest days, the tip to some extent saw itself as a Chicano proletarian revolutionary prisoner movement. It was very conscious of its links to the northern Californian urban Chicano working class. It agitated fiercely for equal treatment of Latino prisoners in the system. And according to some members, the Norteno tip even provided security at early marches of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers. Since that period the gang's ties have not remained close to its working class roots, however. Today, for the most part the group has evolved away from overtly political goals. It now pursues the simple goal of power and profit for its members. The organization persists in its call for equity inside, and in that limited sense it remains a group with a political goal. In any broader sense, however, the gang has lost its politics entirely. It is now a corporate-style mafia organization with power and profit for its members as its main expressed goals. From one point of view, the group looks like a failed revolutionary impulse that was turned away from political struggle; what we see today might be the remains of a failed prisoner proletarian revolt that is now very little political. This wouldn't be the first time that an essentially political impulse informing a subculture was turned aside for a capitalist, corporate model of crime. Certain of South Africa's organized crime groups, I am told, also developed out of outlaw groups with proletarian roots and Leninist organizational structure (8). Maybe when we think of the Norteno tip we should recall Horkheimer and Adorno's observation that "the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are" (9). However it has happened, Norteno members have sacrificed their early politics for an eager scramble up the ladder to corporate profit.

Has the gang been deceived by an empty myth of success? Some might be quick to point out that, in a thoroughly traditional American way, the gang may be one which has now simply come to adopt a capitalist, corporate model as the surest way to power in America. In this sense, the Norteno tip may still be seen as politically militant. Surely, the tip's criminal entrepreneurship is politics in the same way that the Sicilian mafia's is--both organizations struggle to protect the economic interests of a particular class and ethnicity. The mafia originated in the 1 860's as an urban middle class attack on the unifying Sicilian state. It remains Italian, urban and middle class.

Field Interview Findings

All those interviewed said prison gangs function inside like police forces, each with their own constituency. The extreme level of violence inside California prisons, both prisoner and guard violence, makes the threat of death the central fact of prisoner life and models the prisoner's psyche. After release, the gang member-even the originally non-violent gang member--seems to take this new personality home with him. Membership in a prison gang is for life. Members in all four major gangs take a blood oath--there is no way out of that commitment except in death. Since the late 1970's the four major Californian prison gangs have been active on the streets as well as in the prisons. Outside, each continues to represent its constituency as a de facto police force. Members of the Norteno tip generally seem to join for two basic reasons: Some of those interviewed claim that they initially joined the gang for protection on the yard. They were not gang members before prison, but they belonged culturally to that group of California Latinos who call themselves Nortenos. In prison, that put them at risk of attack from the warrior arm of Sureno Latino prisoners. Others interviewed said they had had long histories of gang involvement prior to imprisonment and saw prison gang membership as the realization of their life's aspirations, as the crowning achievement of their life. One informant compared becoming a mafioso to

becoming a lawyer or doctor. The Norteno tip thus offers its members physical protection, high status within the prison and afterwards among some parts of the underclass Latino community as well, a sense of cultural pride, and even economic security for themselves and their families. While a member prisoner is inside, the gang sees that his family is provided for. Outside, during and after parole, the gang's banks make capital raised through criminal activity available to members and their families for small business start-ups of legitimate businesses. Finally, inside and to some extent outside the prison as well, the tip delivers its members a secretly-administered education ranging from basic literacy skills training to etiquette and personal hygiene instruction, to enunciation and rhetorical skills education, to weaponry and guerrilla warfare classes. At its most advanced level, after years of training, the group offers its most elite students leadership training and classes in how to set up tip regiments and illegal operations on the streets during parole and how to use the law for the organization's benefit.

The Norteno tip's Education Department is the gang's chief recruiting and socializing institution. It is one important means by which the gang's world view is sustained and propagated. In the mid to late-1 970's, when the gang was at its height, it functioned through an extensive secret bureaucracy within the prisons that appears to have mimicked the corrections department bureaucracy itself. It is as if the gang has studied and mastered the means by which corporate organizations maximize success by bureaucratizing to increase efficiency. Even today the tip's Education Department trains professional teachers who are under the command of each of the gang's regimental lieutenants. At the gang's zenith in the late 1970's, huge volumes of paper, written essay exams and progress reports on each student passed from student to teacher, and on to the lieutenants, and sometimes higher, and then returned to the "soldado" corrected and graded. More recently, after serious court attacks and convictions almost destroyed it in the early 1 980's, the Norteno tip and its newer offshoot has reduced its paper trail considerably. Members continue to have their in-prison lessons, though less is written down now. Documents crucial to the gang's operation, however, such as orders from command and the gang's constitution or "bonds" as they are called, continue to be written--in minuscule "mini-print"--and transported from yard to yard, tier to tier and prison to prison or to the streets in "keester stashes," that is, in balloons inserted in the rectum.

By this means, among others, gang business goes on. Much of the original tip's Education Department remains intact in the education of its newer offspring, though it has been forced to take on an even more subterranean form and a less formal organizational structure. This change is no measure of the gang's demise. After members of the gang were convicted under the Rico racketeering statute in the 1980's, leaders decided to reorganize for the group's better protection. Whereas previously the organization was divided into large departments reporting to each other in a clear command structure, now the gang is partitioned into many small, separate "cells" consisting of just a handful of soldados. Members in the "cell" receive orders rather anonymously from other "cells. In this way, if one "cell" is busted and "snitches," it can't take down the entire command structure with it. As a result of moving to this new organizational structure, the Norteno tip's education function has taken on less institutional, less formal means. But it is still there.

California as a Gang System

California prisons are the most violent in the nation. Much of the lethal violence comes from guards. The state is one of only three in the U.S. that allows its guards to wield guns inside the prisons, even in cell tiers, and to put those weapons to use. In other states guards break up convict fights with night sticks and tear gas. The threat of death from guards is thus far greater in California than in any other state in the nation. From 1984 to 1994 correctional officers shot and killed thirty-six inmates in California state prisons, three times the combined total of such deaths in other major prison systems throughout the United States (10). What this has meant is that in California more than in other places prison gangs consciously move against guard units when they feel it is necessary. Guards are included in California's struggle for power on the yard. Interviews with gang members suggest various ways in which guards participate in gang activity: Some guards openly sympathize with one gang faction or another and provide protection and favors: one gang informant tells of a guard tying a "blue rag" to his nightstick to indicate his gang affiliation; more commonly, guards make conscious use of prisoners' gang affiliation, often double-cell enemy gang members to start a fight or releasing enemy gang members to an exercise yard to set up a fight. Guards have been known in these circumstances to supply weapons to one or both prisoners before the fight. Much remains to be learned of guard gang behavior in the California prisons. One thing can be sure. For whatever reasons, the entire California law enforcement system has come to adopt a gang world view, to think like a gang itself and to compete for power as one faction in a gang system. Some observers of California culture today even see the prison gangs, with their large ethnic constituencies in the community, as possible military players in a balkanization of the U.S. 11

The New Prisoner-Citizen

That might suggest that, as political players, the prison gangs are real, subversive threats. Has the prison gang's grab for covert political power been successful? Have California prisoners, by the agency of secret gangs, truly transformed their civil death into powerful political activism? While it is true that the Norteno tip is a power discourse that opposes the dominant state discourse, and while it is even a power player on the streets, in the end I see it as simply complicitous in the construction of a complete carceral state of which its members remain victims. The gang has thrown nothing off. The Norteno tip simply imposes one more layer of prison discipline on its members--for example, in the form of its many rules and its mammoth governing bureaucracy. The gang goes even further than the prison did to inscribe its own oppressive discourse on members' lives when it marks out its own powerful claim to the prisoner's body by the brand of its gang tattoo; now the gang inscribes even the inside of members' bodies by means of the keester stash. Citizenship this is not. These are the walking dead. But the gangs have found success in another, disturbing sense. As pure power- and profit-hungry entrepreneurial American genius, California's prison gangs are the nightmare side of the capitalist dream.

Notes

1. Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. (21 Gratt.) 790, 796 (1871).

2. See Cal. Pen. Code Sec. 673, 674 (Deering), 1886

3. 1919 Cal. Stat. c.28.

4. Cal. Pen. Code Sec. 2600-2601 (Deering), 1949.

5. 1968 Cal. Sta. c. 1402.

6. Flood v. Riggs, 80 Cal. apt 3rd, 138 1978.

7. Special thanks to Stefan Helmreich for this insight.

8. Clifton Crais of Kenyon College tells me that this was especially true of South Africa's Ninevites.

9. Thanks to Lisa McLeod: from Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Englightenment (Continuum 1993) pp. 133-134.

10. A recent grand jury investigation into a period of increased prisoner yard deaths at California's Corcoran State Prison elicited allegations of a pattern of officers killing prisoners "for sport." Charges are being brought.

11. Ron Noblet of USC, for example, regularly markets California prison gang scenarios to the War College.