In case you don't remember, the author was imprisoned because he leaked
information about one of our security contractors. Of course, the legal
grounds were different from the actual reason.
Miriam
Brown writes: "There's more to prison life than just sitting around
despising the New York Times."
Inmates. (illustration: Paul Davis/The Intercept)
The Rule of Law Enforcement
By Barrett Brown, The Intercept
03 February 16
After having spent the prior six months in a fruitless cycle of retaliation
and counter-retaliation and counter-counter-retaliation with the
administration of the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Worth, where
I managed to do about half of my time in the hole before finally getting
kicked out altogether, I was delighted to arrive here at FCI Three Rivers, a
medium security prison subject to occasional outbreaks of gang warfare that
also happens to be quite a lot of fun. And though ones first few days at a
new prison are always given over largely to errands and social obligations,
I did manage to get in some much-needed reading time when someone lent me a
copy of Five Families, a history of the American mafia by the veteran New
York Times crime reporter Selwyn Raab. Ive never had much interest in
organized crime of the non-governmental sort, but ever since 2009 when I
read through the bulk of Thomas Friedmans past columns in the course of
researching a book on the subject of incompetence, Ive been fascinated by
the extent to which a fellow can be a bit of a dummy, with questionable
writing abilities and a penchant for making demonstrably erroneous attacks
on others, and still find regular employment with the nations most
prestigious newspaper (though in fairness to the Times, they did eventually
get rid of William Kristol).
Im afraid I gave up on reading Five Families straight through after about
the halfway mark, by which point it had become clear that Raab, contrary to
all decency, was going to continue using the phrase law-enforcement
thusly, with the unwarranted hyphen, something that would have been more
tolerable did the term not necessarily appear every few pages due to the
nature of the subject matter, often in the company of such other
improprieties as civil-rights, public-relations, stolen-car rings, or
loan-shark, and to such an extent that one could be forgiven for
suspecting that Raab himself, for all his tough talk on crime, is in fact
some sort of illicit hyphen smuggler.
Luckily, this is the sort of book from which one can extract the most
telling instances of Gray Lady-caliber foolishness just by skimming around.
At some point Raab seems to decide that the writers of The Sopranos must be
punished for humanizing the mafia in the course of writing a drama about
human beings who are in the mafia. And so, more in sadness than in anger,
but more in confusion than either, he set out to debunk the shows fictional
plotline by way of his own fictional journalistic expertise: Genuine capos
and wiseguys would never emulate Tonys behavior.
No top-tier mobster
would last long if he behaved like Tony Soprano, who defies basic Mafioso
caution by exposing himself as a ripe target, to be easily mowed down by
rivals. He drives without a bodyguard; sips espresso in daylight at a
sidewalk café. This comes just a few chapters after were told the
following about a real-life top-tier mobster: Shunning bodyguards and
bullet-proof limousines, the sixty-six-year-old godfather met with his Mafia
associates in restaurants and travelled about Manhattan in taxis like any
ordinary businessman.
To his credit, Raab did manage to refrain from rendering this last bit as
ordinary-businessman, which is just extraordinary, so well give him
another try: Sex and psychiatry are prominent in The Sopranos story line.
Confiding in a psychiatrist, however, would be a radioactive mistake for a
boss or capo, who can never display symptoms of weakness or mental
instability. Naturally Raab has already forgotten having written the
following about mafia boss Frank Costello: Striving for inner peace while
hovering between criminal affiliates and respected society, Costello tried
psychoanalysis.
Even had the author not been so sporting as to provide us with comically
perfect counterexamples by which to disprove his various inane objections,
one could have also pointed out that Tony Sopranos decision to see a
psychiatrist does in fact prove to be a mistake insomuch as that it
directly leads to a rupture in his organization culminating in a botched
assassination attempt in the very first season, so this objection wouldnt
have made any sense even had it gotten past that crucial
directly-contradicted-by-your-own-fucking-book hurdle that seems to be
giving Raab so much trouble. Now take a moment to reflect on the fact that
this is the guy the New York Times assigned to report on one of the nations
most complex and insidious criminal conspiracies this plodding hyphen
addict who cannot seem to follow a television show or even his own
manuscript. One supposes that there is some alternate universe in which this
might be considered a problem and where Ross Douthat manages a furniture
store and everyone knows his place.
But there's more to prison life than just sitting around despising the New
York Times. A week after arrival at Three Rivers, we new inmates were
summoned to an Admissions and Orientation seminar in which the various
department heads each speak for a few minutes about institutional policy.
Id attended one of these back at Fort Worth; usually the highlight is a
short video clip of Bureau of Prisons Director Charles Samuels, who gives a
little talk. No one knows what the talk is about, as whoevers nephew was
put in charge of producing the video has talked Samuels into pausing every
couple of sentences to shift position and look into the other camera, just
like the newscasters, something that the fellow can manage only with the
most hilarious awkwardness, and so it proves impossible to follow what hes
actually saying which is a shame, as its almost certainly something very
non-formulaic and true.
Today, however, the chief attraction was to be our warden, Norbal Vazquez, a
longtime BOP functionary from Puerto Rico who is proverbial for his deranged
monologues as well as for being regarded with great contempt by staff and
inmates alike. Here are some actual quotes from his exquisitely demented
half-hour orientation talk, during which he waddled back and forth, wagging
his finger in admonishment when appropriate and sometimes when not:
On his own qualifications for the job: I am here because I earned it!
On the assistant wardens upon whom lesser wardens depend: I do not need
them!
On his inspiring biography: I was a case manager before, and I was an
OUTSTANDING one! [wags finger]
On the status of we benighted inmates, sitting in darkness: You are all my
children!
On who controls the prison: Probably in some of your minds, is inmates! But
you are wrong!
On, er, violators: I have no mercy for violators!
On medical care: You have a bullet in your leg and you want the bureau to
heal you! Ha! Ha ha!
On the insufficiency of our meals: Dont come complain to me about your
meals. Because there are children with nothing!
On gang warfare: If you show force, I am going to show force!
On homemade alcohol: If you are drinking all that nasty thing, shame on
you! When your liver fails, I dont care!
On inmates who are placed in the SHU and transferred to violent maximum
security prisons because theyve been caught with harmless contraband like
synthetic marijuana: They cry like babies! I have no mercy!
The only disappointing thing about the presentation was that he didnt end
by exhibiting his medals and declaring himself President for Life; indeed, I
almost cried when someone told me he was retiring a few weeks hence. And
all that nasty thing is my new favorite hooch-related meme, edging out
PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT from a few columns back.
All in all, it was an informative speech in spite of itself, even aside from
the fellows suspicious insistence on his own competence and self-reliance
and entirely meritocratic ascension to the top spot. There was quite a bit
of talk, for instance, about how the gangs arent in control of the prison,
something that obviously wouldnt need so much triumphant emphasis were such
a state of affairs not at least a possibility.
In fact, the gangs really dont have control over the prison. But then
neither does the administration, if by control we mean the ability to make
uncontested decisions over what happens within a given space, in which case
control is always a matter of degree. The federal and state governments of
the United States, for instance, exercise some degree of overlapping control
over their territory, but not to such an extent that the various
law-enforcement agencies er, law enforcement agencies arrest any but a
small minority of residents who violate the law. This is just as well, since
the law requires that the tens of millions of Americans who use drugs or
gamble or involve themselves in prostitution be imprisoned and thats not
even counting federal law, which, as convincingly estimated by civil
liberties attorney Harvey Silvergate in his book Three Felonies a Day, the
average American unwittingly violates every day. And thus it is that the
U.S. can continue to exist above the level of an unprecedented gulag state
only to the extent that its laws are not actually enforced an
extraordinary and fundamental fact of American life that one might hope in
vain to see rise to the level of an election issue, but which is at least
worth keeping in mind when it comes to the debate over whether or not we
should keep granting the state ever more powerful methods of surveillance
until it becomes the All-Seeing God Against Whose Laws We All Have Sinned.
(Personally Id vote no, but then Im a felon and cant vote anyway.)
As is the case with the country at large, the rules within each federal
prison are such that a large portion of everyday activity actually violates
those rules and in both cases, 99 percent of the violations go unpunished,
while anyone who proves inconvenient to the powers that be can be singled
out for retaliation. Technically its against the rules to give anything to
another inmate, for instance, or to sell or trade or lend for that matter,
but of course this is done all day without a second thought, often in plain
view of the guards, not a single one of whom would consider objecting. There
are other rules that are almost universally disregarded but can be invoked
at whim; there is also a catch-all violation, Anything Unauthorized, on
hand as a last resort. But rabble-rousers can usually be dispensed with via
more specific regulations such as those barring the signing of petitions or
holding of demonstrations. (I myself was thrown in the hole for months due
to my supposed leadership role in one such demonstration against an abusive
guard whod just threatened an elderly man.)
Part of the justification behind those two regulations in particular is that
there exists a means by which inmates can have their grievances addressed:
the administrative remedy process. Naturally the BOP routinely conspires to
prevent inmates from completing that process; the surreal lengths to which
its gone to keep me from pursuing my own retaliation complaint, a process
Ive documented in this column over the course of the last nine months, are
actually quite commonly deployed against inmates deemed to have a good
chance of winning in court. Presumably this is why the Freedom of
Information Act request that The Intercept filed with the BOP some months
ago to obtain records of the administrative remedy process at FCI Fort Worth
was denied with no explanation, even though the documents in question are
specifically designated as being FOIA accessible. Any comprehensive
examination of those records would reveal a systematic and highly effective
effort by BOP officials to prevent inmates from bringing instances of major
policy violations and even outright criminal activity by the bureau to the
attention of the courts. The American people do not control their own
prisons.
The reality is that control is shared by way of a sort of makeshift
federalism that varies in particulars from prison to prison but in which
real power is always divided among the various gangs, the staff, and local
and regional administrators in an arrangement thats best described as a
cross between the old Swiss canton system and China during the Warring
States period, which Ill be the first to acknowledge is not especially
helpful. Suffice to say that it will take me the remainder of my sentence to
provide a real sense of this remarkable state-within-a-state and its
inimitable politics the politics of the literally disenfranchised, who
live their lives in the very guts of government without being able to rely
on its protections, and so are forced to provide their own. Really, its a
state-within-a-state-within-a-state.
Complicating matters further is the great extent to which prisons can
differ, with the most pronounced of these divisions being that between the
state and federal systems. Broadly, we federals tend to look down upon our
regional cousins as not quite our sort, old boy, although Im probably the
only one who puts it in exactly those terms. The state prisons tend to house
the small-time dealers, whereas the feds are more often home to the guys who
supplied them. The state is halfway filled with such actual criminals as
thieves, rapists, and murderers, whereas the feds are made up largely of
illegal immigrants and drug entrepreneurs people who have neither hurt
anyone nor deprived them of their property, but instead made the mistake of
taking all of this free market talk seriously. The character of the
federal prisons, then, will usually differ from those of the states. But
then theyll also differ among themselves, sometimes quite a bit, and not
just along other readily obvious divisions such as those between minimum,
low, medium, and maximum security designations, either. A few years ago the
medium at Beaumont, Texas, to which I just narrowly avoided being sent
myself, was considerably more violent than many of the maximums (also known
as pens or, more technically, USPs). Back at the FCI Fort Worth, there was a
marked degree of difference in how certain things were done even between the
several 300-man units into which inmates were divided. And since the local
administrators can disregard national policy more or less at will, as has
been documented in this column repeatedly for two years, de facto policy
will naturally vary from institution to institution as well. The result of
all of this is that each prison is its own unique snowflake, fluttering
about on gusts of cultural drift and BOP lawlessness.
The vital statistics of my stomping grounds here at Three Rivers, then, are
as follows. The prison is home to a bit more than 1,000 inmates, of whom
about 60 percent are Mexican nationals, another 20 percent are U.S.
Hispanics, 10 percent are black, 5 percent are Latin American, and 5 percent
are white (the ofay percentage of 15 percent I cited last time appears to
have been out of date). About half of the Mexicans run with (institutional
slang for are affiliated with) the Paisas, a relatively amorphous prison
gang that draws its ranks almost exclusively from Mexican nationals; a
smaller percentage of U.S. Hispanics run with Tango Blast, a more organized
gang with a much cooler name; while blacks and whites for purposes of prison
riots and dining arrangements both act mostly as race-based units.
As usual, there are all manner of qualifiers and exceptions plus a
smattering of smaller groupings: The Muslims will usually constitute their
own little umma, there are a couple of whites who run with Tango, and so on.
The most amusing of these aberrations involved the fellow with whom I shared
a cell before he transferred to a low a few weeks back. Aaron LeBaron was
born into an ultra-fundamentalist Mormon cult led by his father, who had
moved the wives and kids to Mexico after some members of his congregation
started to question whether or not all of the voices he was hearing were
actually from God. Aaron eventually inherited the family theocracy as well
as the family hit list and the family international stolen car ring. In the
end he was captured and sentenced to 45 years. Today Aaron is an agnostic
and longtime Skeptic Magazine subscriber who was very excited to learn that
Id written for that magazine as well as for Skeptical Inquirer. (Come to
think of it, he was the only person Ive ever met who found either one the
least bit impressive, and Ive been working them into introductory
conversations for years.) At any rate, having been raised in Mexico and
speaking perfect Spanish, this gangly, bespectacled, white, Mormon-looking
fellow had been accepted as one of the Paisas, with whom he sat every day to
eat and watch television. Scientists cannot measure the extent to which Im
going to dominate every dinner party conversation for the rest of my life.
For a medium, Three Rivers isnt particularly violent. The last major gang
war, between the Tangos and the Paisas, was nearly a year ago; afterward the
compound went on lockdown for about two weeks, itself a fairly typical gang
intelligence investigation/cool-down period. In the three months since Ive
arrived, Ive only had to take a knee once (inmates here are supposed to
put at least one knee to the ground when officers run by screaming Get the
fuck down! or some variation thereof as they proceed to the location of a
conflict). And weve only been locked down in the aftermath of a fight on
one occasion, for just a few hours.
This is just as well, as Im thereby able to concentrate on the trickle of
information coming in from the wicked world beyond the fence. Lately Ive
been getting garbled reports of hoverboards, as well as some sort of new
fascist movement that could conceivably take control of the White House this
year, though I find it difficult to believe that the boards actually float
like the ones from the movie.
Meanwhile, Im halfway through the newish first volume of Niall Fergusons
biography of Henry Kissinger, which we shall examine in some detail next
time. For now I will simply leave off with the following actual sentences
from Fergusons introduction: In this context, it is a strange irony of the
Kissinger literature that so many of the critiques of Kissingers mode of
operation have a subtle undertone of anti-Semitism.
This prompts the
question: might the ferocity of the criticism that Kissinger has attracted
perhaps have something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is
Jewish? This is not to imply that his critics are anti-Semites. Well, the
hyphens are all in their proper places, anyway.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Inmates. (illustration: Paul Davis/The Intercept)
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/02/barrett-brown-the-rule-of-law-enforcemen
t/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/02/barrett-brown-the-rule-of-law-enforcem
ent/
The Rule of Law Enforcement
By Barrett Brown, The Intercept
03 February 16
fter having spent the prior six months in a fruitless cycle of retaliation
and counter-retaliation and counter-counter-retaliation with the
administration of the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Worth, where
I managed to do about half of my time in the hole before finally getting
kicked out altogether, I was delighted to arrive here at FCI Three Rivers, a
medium security prison subject to occasional outbreaks of gang warfare that
also happens to be quite a lot of fun. And though ones first few days at a
new prison are always given over largely to errands and social obligations,
I did manage to get in some much-needed reading time when someone lent me a
copy of Five Families, a history of the American mafia by the veteran New
York Times crime reporter Selwyn Raab. Ive never had much interest in
organized crime of the non-governmental sort, but ever since 2009 when I
read through the bulk of Thomas Friedmans past columns in the course of
researching a book on the subject of incompetence, Ive been fascinated by
the extent to which a fellow can be a bit of a dummy, with questionable
writing abilities and a penchant for making demonstrably erroneous attacks
on others, and still find regular employment with the nations most
prestigious newspaper (though in fairness to the Times, they did eventually
get rid of William Kristol).
Im afraid I gave up on reading Five Families straight through after about
the halfway mark, by which point it had become clear that Raab, contrary to
all decency, was going to continue using the phrase law-enforcement
thusly, with the unwarranted hyphen, something that would have been more
tolerable did the term not necessarily appear every few pages due to the
nature of the subject matter, often in the company of such other
improprieties as civil-rights, public-relations, stolen-car rings, or
loan-shark, and to such an extent that one could be forgiven for
suspecting that Raab himself, for all his tough talk on crime, is in fact
some sort of illicit hyphen smuggler.
Luckily, this is the sort of book from which one can extract the most
telling instances of Gray Lady-caliber foolishness just by skimming around.
At some point Raab seems to decide that the writers of The Sopranos must be
punished for humanizing the mafia in the course of writing a drama about
human beings who are in the mafia. And so, more in sadness than in anger,
but more in confusion than either, he set out to debunk the shows fictional
plotline by way of his own fictional journalistic expertise: Genuine capos
and wiseguys would never emulate Tonys behavior.
No top-tier mobster
would last long if he behaved like Tony Soprano, who defies basic Mafioso
caution by exposing himself as a ripe target, to be easily mowed down by
rivals. He drives without a bodyguard; sips espresso in daylight at a
sidewalk café. This comes just a few chapters after were told the
following about a real-life top-tier mobster: Shunning bodyguards and
bullet-proof limousines, the sixty-six-year-old godfather met with his Mafia
associates in restaurants and travelled about Manhattan in taxis like any
ordinary businessman.
To his credit, Raab did manage to refrain from rendering this last bit as
ordinary-businessman, which is just extraordinary, so well give him
another try: Sex and psychiatry are prominent in The Sopranos story line.
Confiding in a psychiatrist, however, would be a radioactive mistake for a
boss or capo, who can never display symptoms of weakness or mental
instability. Naturally Raab has already forgotten having written the
following about mafia boss Frank Costello: Striving for inner peace while
hovering between criminal affiliates and respected society, Costello tried
psychoanalysis.
Even had the author not been so sporting as to provide us with comically
perfect counterexamples by which to disprove his various inane objections,
one could have also pointed out that Tony Sopranos decision to see a
psychiatrist does in fact prove to be a mistake insomuch as that it
directly leads to a rupture in his organization culminating in a botched
assassination attempt in the very first season, so this objection wouldnt
have made any sense even had it gotten past that crucial
directly-contradicted-by-your-own-fucking-book hurdle that seems to be
giving Raab so much trouble. Now take a moment to reflect on the fact that
this is the guy the New York Times assigned to report on one of the nations
most complex and insidious criminal conspiracies this plodding hyphen
addict who cannot seem to follow a television show or even his own
manuscript. One supposes that there is some alternate universe in which this
might be considered a problem and where Ross Douthat manages a furniture
store and everyone knows his place.
But there's more to prison life than just sitting around despising the New
York Times. A week after arrival at Three Rivers, we new inmates were
summoned to an Admissions and Orientation seminar in which the various
department heads each speak for a few minutes about institutional policy.
Id attended one of these back at Fort Worth; usually the highlight is a
short video clip of Bureau of Prisons Director Charles Samuels, who gives a
little talk. No one knows what the talk is about, as whoevers nephew was
put in charge of producing the video has talked Samuels into pausing every
couple of sentences to shift position and look into the other camera, just
like the newscasters, something that the fellow can manage only with the
most hilarious awkwardness, and so it proves impossible to follow what hes
actually saying which is a shame, as its almost certainly something very
non-formulaic and true.
Today, however, the chief attraction was to be our warden, Norbal Vazquez, a
longtime BOP functionary from Puerto Rico who is proverbial for his deranged
monologues as well as for being regarded with great contempt by staff and
inmates alike. Here are some actual quotes from his exquisitely demented
half-hour orientation talk, during which he waddled back and forth, wagging
his finger in admonishment when appropriate and sometimes when not:
On his own qualifications for the job: I am here because I earned it!
On the assistant wardens upon whom lesser wardens depend: I do not need
them!
On his inspiring biography: I was a case manager before, and I was an
OUTSTANDING one! [wags finger]
On the status of we benighted inmates, sitting in darkness: You are all my
children!
On who controls the prison: Probably in some of your minds, is inmates! But
you are wrong!
On, er, violators: I have no mercy for violators!
On medical care: You have a bullet in your leg and you want the bureau to
heal you! Ha! Ha ha!
On the insufficiency of our meals: Dont come complain to me about your
meals. Because there are children with nothing!
On gang warfare: If you show force, I am going to show force!
On homemade alcohol: If you are drinking all that nasty thing, shame on
you! When your liver fails, I dont care!
On inmates who are placed in the SHU and transferred to violent maximum
security prisons because theyve been caught with harmless contraband like
synthetic marijuana: They cry like babies! I have no mercy!
The only disappointing thing about the presentation was that he didnt end
by exhibiting his medals and declaring himself President for Life; indeed, I
almost cried when someone told me he was retiring a few weeks hence. And
all that nasty thing is my new favorite hooch-related meme, edging out
PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT from a few columns back.
All in all, it was an informative speech in spite of itself, even aside from
the fellows suspicious insistence on his own competence and self-reliance
and entirely meritocratic ascension to the top spot. There was quite a bit
of talk, for instance, about how the gangs arent in control of the prison,
something that obviously wouldnt need so much triumphant emphasis were such
a state of affairs not at least a possibility.
In fact, the gangs really dont have control over the prison. But then
neither does the administration, if by control we mean the ability to make
uncontested decisions over what happens within a given space, in which case
control is always a matter of degree. The federal and state governments of
the United States, for instance, exercise some degree of overlapping control
over their territory, but not to such an extent that the various
law-enforcement agencies er, law enforcement agencies arrest any but a
small minority of residents who violate the law. This is just as well, since
the law requires that the tens of millions of Americans who use drugs or
gamble or involve themselves in prostitution be imprisoned and thats not
even counting federal law, which, as convincingly estimated by civil
liberties attorney Harvey Silvergate in his book Three Felonies a Day, the
average American unwittingly violates every day. And thus it is that the
U.S. can continue to exist above the level of an unprecedented gulag state
only to the extent that its laws are not actually enforced an
extraordinary and fundamental fact of American life that one might hope in
vain to see rise to the level of an election issue, but which is at least
worth keeping in mind when it comes to the debate over whether or not we
should keep granting the state ever more powerful methods of surveillance
until it becomes the All-Seeing God Against Whose Laws We All Have Sinned.
(Personally Id vote no, but then Im a felon and cant vote anyway.)
As is the case with the country at large, the rules within each federal
prison are such that a large portion of everyday activity actually violates
those rules and in both cases, 99 percent of the violations go unpunished,
while anyone who proves inconvenient to the powers that be can be singled
out for retaliation. Technically its against the rules to give anything to
another inmate, for instance, or to sell or trade or lend for that matter,
but of course this is done all day without a second thought, often in plain
view of the guards, not a single one of whom would consider objecting. There
are other rules that are almost universally disregarded but can be invoked
at whim; there is also a catch-all violation, Anything Unauthorized, on
hand as a last resort. But rabble-rousers can usually be dispensed with via
more specific regulations such as those barring the signing of petitions or
holding of demonstrations. (I myself was thrown in the hole for months due
to my supposed leadership role in one such demonstration against an abusive
guard whod just threatened an elderly man.)
Part of the justification behind those two regulations in particular is that
there exists a means by which inmates can have their grievances addressed:
the administrative remedy process. Naturally the BOP routinely conspires to
prevent inmates from completing that process; the surreal lengths to which
its gone to keep me from pursuing my own retaliation complaint, a process
Ive documented in this column over the course of the last nine months, are
actually quite commonly deployed against inmates deemed to have a good
chance of winning in court. Presumably this is why the Freedom of
Information Act request that The Intercept filed with the BOP some months
ago to obtain records of the administrative remedy process at FCI Fort Worth
was denied with no explanation, even though the documents in question are
specifically designated as being FOIA accessible. Any comprehensive
examination of those records would reveal a systematic and highly effective
effort by BOP officials to prevent inmates from bringing instances of major
policy violations and even outright criminal activity by the bureau to the
attention of the courts. The American people do not control their own
prisons.
The reality is that control is shared by way of a sort of makeshift
federalism that varies in particulars from prison to prison but in which
real power is always divided among the various gangs, the staff, and local
and regional administrators in an arrangement thats best described as a
cross between the old Swiss canton system and China during the Warring
States period, which Ill be the first to acknowledge is not especially
helpful. Suffice to say that it will take me the remainder of my sentence to
provide a real sense of this remarkable state-within-a-state and its
inimitable politics the politics of the literally disenfranchised, who
live their lives in the very guts of government without being able to rely
on its protections, and so are forced to provide their own. Really, its a
state-within-a-state-within-a-state.
Complicating matters further is the great extent to which prisons can
differ, with the most pronounced of these divisions being that between the
state and federal systems. Broadly, we federals tend to look down upon our
regional cousins as not quite our sort, old boy, although Im probably the
only one who puts it in exactly those terms. The state prisons tend to house
the small-time dealers, whereas the feds are more often home to the guys who
supplied them. The state is halfway filled with such actual criminals as
thieves, rapists, and murderers, whereas the feds are made up largely of
illegal immigrants and drug entrepreneurs people who have neither hurt
anyone nor deprived them of their property, but instead made the mistake of
taking all of this free market talk seriously. The character of the
federal prisons, then, will usually differ from those of the states. But
then theyll also differ among themselves, sometimes quite a bit, and not
just along other readily obvious divisions such as those between minimum,
low, medium, and maximum security designations, either. A few years ago the
medium at Beaumont, Texas, to which I just narrowly avoided being sent
myself, was considerably more violent than many of the maximums (also known
as pens or, more technically, USPs). Back at the FCI Fort Worth, there was a
marked degree of difference in how certain things were done even between the
several 300-man units into which inmates were divided. And since the local
administrators can disregard national policy more or less at will, as has
been documented in this column repeatedly for two years, de facto policy
will naturally vary from institution to institution as well. The result of
all of this is that each prison is its own unique snowflake, fluttering
about on gusts of cultural drift and BOP lawlessness.
The vital statistics of my stomping grounds here at Three Rivers, then, are
as follows. The prison is home to a bit more than 1,000 inmates, of whom
about 60 percent are Mexican nationals, another 20 percent are U.S.
Hispanics, 10 percent are black, 5 percent are Latin American, and 5 percent
are white (the ofay percentage of 15 percent I cited last time appears to
have been out of date). About half of the Mexicans run with (institutional
slang for are affiliated with) the Paisas, a relatively amorphous prison
gang that draws its ranks almost exclusively from Mexican nationals; a
smaller percentage of U.S. Hispanics run with Tango Blast, a more organized
gang with a much cooler name; while blacks and whites for purposes of prison
riots and dining arrangements both act mostly as race-based units.
As usual, there are all manner of qualifiers and exceptions plus a
smattering of smaller groupings: The Muslims will usually constitute their
own little umma, there are a couple of whites who run with Tango, and so on.
The most amusing of these aberrations involved the fellow with whom I shared
a cell before he transferred to a low a few weeks back. Aaron LeBaron was
born into an ultra-fundamentalist Mormon cult led by his father, who had
moved the wives and kids to Mexico after some members of his congregation
started to question whether or not all of the voices he was hearing were
actually from God. Aaron eventually inherited the family theocracy as well
as the family hit list and the family international stolen car ring. In the
end he was captured and sentenced to 45 years. Today Aaron is an agnostic
and longtime Skeptic Magazine subscriber who was very excited to learn that
Id written for that magazine as well as for Skeptical Inquirer. (Come to
think of it, he was the only person Ive ever met who found either one the
least bit impressive, and Ive been working them into introductory
conversations for years.) At any rate, having been raised in Mexico and
speaking perfect Spanish, this gangly, bespectacled, white, Mormon-looking
fellow had been accepted as one of the Paisas, with whom he sat every day to
eat and watch television. Scientists cannot measure the extent to which Im
going to dominate every dinner party conversation for the rest of my life.
For a medium, Three Rivers isnt particularly violent. The last major gang
war, between the Tangos and the Paisas, was nearly a year ago; afterward the
compound went on lockdown for about two weeks, itself a fairly typical gang
intelligence investigation/cool-down period. In the three months since Ive
arrived, Ive only had to take a knee once (inmates here are supposed to
put at least one knee to the ground when officers run by screaming Get the
fuck down! or some variation thereof as they proceed to the location of a
conflict). And weve only been locked down in the aftermath of a fight on
one occasion, for just a few hours.
This is just as well, as Im thereby able to concentrate on the trickle of
information coming in from the wicked world beyond the fence. Lately Ive
been getting garbled reports of hoverboards, as well as some sort of new
fascist movement that could conceivably take control of the White House this
year, though I find it difficult to believe that the boards actually float
like the ones from the movie.
Meanwhile, Im halfway through the newish first volume of Niall Fergusons
biography of Henry Kissinger, which we shall examine in some detail next
time. For now I will simply leave off with the following actual sentences
from Fergusons introduction: In this context, it is a strange irony of the
Kissinger literature that so many of the critiques of Kissingers mode of
operation have a subtle undertone of anti-Semitism.
This prompts the
question: might the ferocity of the criticism that Kissinger has attracted
perhaps have something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is
Jewish? This is not to imply that his critics are anti-Semites. Well, the
hyphens are all in their proper places, anyway.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
