WA Prison Violence Down with Segregated Gang Members
If Washington has a school of hard knocks, its registrar’s office can be found at a prison in Shelton. Most days men come there by the busload, shuffling into the Washington Corrections Center for their introduction — or reintroduction — to the state prison system. Story from the Seattle Post Intelligencer.
The Shelton prison is largely a 1,600-man holding facility for convicts headed to the 10 other men’s prisons scattered throughout the state. Any man not headed to death row comes through on his way into the system.
Shelton is where decisions get made, where offenders with mental illnesses, behavior problems or, now, gang affiliations get noticed. And it’s where, Department of Corrections officials say, a recent reduction in prison violence has its roots.
Despite a hardening of state prison populations in recent years as the number of non-violent offenders in custody has fallen, prison violence rates have dropped to levels not seen since 2006.
Several of the state’s larger prisons have seen 20 percent decreases in the number of infractions issued for violent behavior during the past two years, according to Department of Corrections statistics. Only the state Corrections Center for Women at Purdy has seen a marked increase.
“We have less prison beds than we had two years ago,” said Dan Pacholke, acting director of prisons for the Department of Corrections. “We have less nonviolent offenders than we had two years ago. … We’re doing this at a time when the density of violent offenders is higher.”
Speaking at the Shelton prison, Pacholke credited new programs and tactics targeted at keeping staff and inmates safe.
Part of it has been soft — time with dogs and frogs, craft nights and extended visits with family. Part has been harder, including a move to segregate inmates by their gang affiliation.
Gangs and violence
Nelious Horsley knows gangs, and he knows violence. A corded scar rises from his clavicle up the left side of his neck. It traces the path cut during a Clallam Bay Corrections Center riot when another inmate shoved a 7-inch improvised knife into his right lung.Since joining a Tacoma street gang at age 11, Horsley had been shot five times before he was stabbed at Clallam Bay. He’s a certain kind of lucky. Speaking during an interview arranged by the Department of Corrections, Horsley said he believes the new anti-violence initiatives are working.
While populating cellblocks with members of the same gang may make it harder for members to get out, he said he believes inmates can break away. In his experience, he said, prison staff is willing to listen if someone says they want out of the gang life.
Horsley said it took him 24 years to decide he was done with it. By the time he is done serving his time on his current gun and drug offenses — June 2011 at the earliest — he’ll have spent more than half his life in Department of Corrections custody.
“I lost my wife, my kids,” the 38-year-old said. “I lost everything.”
Like many of the 3,200 or so gang-involved convicts, Horsley was raised in the gang. Members were like family. There was a time he didn’t expect to leave them, and felt sure he’d spend the rest of his life in prison.
The idea that he should change came slowly. There was his cousin, another inmate, telling him he needed to do something else. There was his brother’s funeral, an event he missed because prison staff didn’t think he could safely attend.
Starting his current sentence — a five-year-maximum term for drug dealing and unlawful gun possession — he said he decided he was done with the gang. Since then, Horsley has joined a group of inmates called on to greet new arrivals at the Shelton facility, where he encourages them to move away from gangs and violence.
Horsley’s test will come when he gets out. It’s one he says he’s prepared to pass. “I’ve had two years of the good life, the legal life, so I kinda know what that feels like,” he said Wednesday. “It’s like I tell my class, once you give the legal life a shot and start feeling really good, it shouldn’t be that hard to go back and get it.”
Walking the block
Pacholke, the acting prisons director for the Department of Corrections, said he is more worried about the gang violence than the gangs themselves. Gang members behaving themselves don’t hurt his officers or inmates.“I’m not as concerned about gang membership as I am about behavior in prison,” Pacholke said. “You can be a gang member, but if you’re a violent gang member then we’re going to more intensively manage you.”
When men like Horsley decide to make a change, Sgt. Alfred Smack is among the Department of Corrections employees they talk to. A 10-year veteran of the Department of Corrections and one who handles intake into the prison system at Shelton, Smack said staff has gotten better at hearing the whispers. There are no secrets in prison, he said, and staff has to know how to discretely talk to the inmates.
When inmates housed with their gang decide they want out, they’re “stepped down” into a less restrictive unit to see if they’re sincere, Smack said. If they behave, they get access to the programs and privileges that make prison more bearable.
Small concessions — a cheeseburgers or chicken nuggets for a cell block that doesn’t brawl, extra time with family for individual inmates — make a difference in prison. Smack said people who envision the movies or the HBO series “OZ” when they think of prison miss the variety.
At Shelton, there are gardens and barbed wire, GED classrooms and one-man cells with slits for windows. Mostly, though, there are bored men waiting in their cells. Some are mentally ill, some are weak and easy prey. Some are predators.
Walking through a “close custody” unit — meant to house offenders who don’t warrant solitary confinement but are judged too dangerous for medium security — Washington Corrections Center Superintendent Doug Waddington gets attention.
As he passes, stubbly faces pop into the glassless windows cut into steel doors. The men have questions for him — one man’s concerned about access to religious services, most just want to know what he’s up to. Waddington listens politely; He can spend hours in the blocks.
Elsewhere in the system, inmates raise dogs and frogs in an effort to rehabilitate them. Soon, some will be breeding butterflies. Shelton boasts more GED graduations than any other prison in the system, an achievement at a facility that keeps most inmates for about six weeks. There are also the small things like the arts and crafts night, where men are allowed to put join their children in the visiting room.
“It sounds goofy,” Waddington said. “It’s not really about building a birdhouse or something like that.”
What it is about, he said, is creating incentives for the inmates to behave. Beyond that, though, the superintendent said its about giving them a connection to life outside the prison, one that they can choose to support when — as nearly all Washington offenders do — they get out of prison.
The big prize in prison, as several offenders noted, is an extended family visit — a 21-to-45-hour stay in a one-bedroom trailer with family. Inside, inmates and their families get to cook their own food. They get to watch television. Parents get to put their kids to bed.
“It’s kind of a normal space in an abnormal setting,” Waddington said. “I think it humanizes this place.”
State prison officials have traced the genesis of a new gang to Tracy’s Deuel Vocational Institution. The Northern Riders first gained attention in 2000 when a founding member made a brazen declaration of war on a yard at Deuel. Officials today are determining if this group should hold rank among California’s established prison gangs. News from
gang) presentations, but once the presentations are over, we don’t move beyond that. The purpose of this task force is to move beyond that,” said the group’s chairman, Al Gurule, a longtime Chicano activist and owner of an East Side community corrections center.
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