The Prison Officers Vocational Branch, the union representing officers, says private jail operators would not employ enough staff to contain the sort of incident that occurred last Friday, in which a group of inmates, allegedly bikies, attacked another prisoner during morning muster, reportedly using sharpened toothbrushes.

The Department of Corrective Services has downplayed the incident. It said only seven prisoners were involved, and only one inmate, Mesbah Mirzaei, who allegedly led the attack, was a member of the bikie gang Notorious.

The gang formed in juvenile jails and now, slightly older but no less violent, members have migrated to the state prison system, where the Heartless Felons are wreaking havoc. The Felons, with other gangs stocked from Cleveland streets, have squared off several times against each other, increasing the tensions at the overcrowded state prison in Mansfield and raising concerns of another Easter riot.  Attacks in Ohio prisons have doubled since 2005, from nearly 500 then to more than 1,000 last year …

The Mansfield prison houses 2,475 inmates, though it was built for 1,536, a capacity rate of 161 percent. The prison nearly exploded March 20 when about 10 gang fights broke out.  The fights involved the Heartless Felons, the Up the Way gang and the Down the Way gang, the last two made up of inmates predominantly from Cleveland, prison officials said. In some fights, 25 gang members attacked each other. Guards and inmates suffered minor injuries …

Mansfield faces [familiar] problems of crowding and staff shortages, as the prison has 383 guards spread over four shifts. On a typical weekday afternoon shift, about 80 guards work the prison, creating a ratio as high as 30 inmates to every guard…

About 18 months ago, the prison began seeing a change when the Heartless Felons began filtering into Mansfield.

The [Heartless Felons] gang’s roots go back to the juvenile jails run by the Department of Youth Services, where the gang formed and battled for years with its rival, the Head Busters. As the Heartless Felons left the youth system and continued committing crimes, they were pushed to adult prisons … Older inmates – those in their 20s or early 30s – who tried to steer some of the gang’s 30 or so members away soon regretted it. The gang deals in intimidation, preferring six-on-one attacks, robberies and extortion. Its own bylaws indicate that its members will not fight one-on-one during attacks, guards said.

There is more detail and background in the Plain Dealer article.

The state’s proposal calls for housing hundreds of inmates who could be at risk living in the general prison population, such as sex offenders and former gang members. The new accommodations, located on the prison campus, would be equipped to provide ongoing rehabilitative services. Prison officials said converting the transition center in Lancaster into a long-term facility is critical to addressing a statewide backlog of 1,500 “sensitive needs” inmates who need appropriate housing. They said the inmates need to be living in a regular prison yard where they can go to school and attend substance-abuse programs and other rehabilitation courses.   “It’s not just something we’re doing on a whim,” said Scott Kernan, undersecretary of operations for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “There is no other facility in the entire state system that could house this population” …

But Lancaster officials argue that the Antelope Valley is already home to some of the highest per-capita concentrations of parolees, juvenile probationers and federal Section 8 housing recipients in Los Angeles County. They fear that establishing a long-term facility for “sensitive needs” inmates would encourage more transfers from other prisons and make it easier for families and associates of inmates to visit or relocate to the valley.   Once released, the ex-convicts would probably choose to remain in the area, said Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris. “It’s a tremendous risk to the community,” he said …

The Lancaster prison is currently home to 4,800 inmates, according to the state corrections department. Of these, 600 are categorized as “sensitive needs” prisoners. Roughly 2,800 prisoners living in the reception center have yet to be classified.

The study found prison “investigators are extremely understaffed and are in need of personnel dedicated specifically to (gang) intelligence and interdiction.”   That’s a result of the unprecedented state budget crunch, said Dan Pacholke, deputy director of the Department of Corrections prisons division.  “The timing couldn’t be worse,” he said Friday. “Our first priority is to maintain public safety and create an environment that reduces the likelihood that offenders will re-offend. We’re doing our best to make reductions outside of those things.”

At the same time, researchers lauded Washington’s “Step Down” program that rewards violent and often gang-affiliated offenders with lower custody levels for positive behavior. Among other measures, the department has started housing some rival gang members in separate housing units at its intake facility, Washington Corrections Center near Shelton. The practice led to a nearly 20 percent decrease in violence at the facility in six months, officials said …

Gang-affiliated inmates comprise about 18 percent of the 18,000-inmate population. The largest prison gangs are the Crips, whose members are primarily black and from the central Puget Sound region; the Surenos, a Southern California-affiliated Hispanic gang; and white supremacists.

The article in the News-Tribune has a good deal of operational detail.

“Most of the public, they look at it like the guy has been picked up, he’s gone through the court process and now, everything is good,” said Pete Walters, who oversees the gang unit at the Utah State Prison and is president of the Utah Gang Investigators Association. “They get to make phone calls. They are all allowed to get and send letters. The majority of them have visits. … They, a lot of times, still have an influence over some of the groups in the neighborhood” … In an activity known as “fishing,” inmates can pass messages between their cells by way of make-shift delivery devices called kites, made with a piece of string, a note and a weight. Letters can contain hidden code words, symbols, or drawings to signal an attack on a rival. Phone calls could also contain hidden messages.  Corrections gang officers are trained to intercept and decode the hidden messages …

Retaliation for a gang event on the street can play out in prison or jail; or an incident that occurs in the corrections system can have ramifications in neighborhoods.  “You still have people trying to deal drugs, you still have extortion, you still have assaults,” said Jeremy Sharp, a gang officer with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office who works at the jail. “They continue to do it here” …

While Utahns might not think the state has the same gang problems as larger cities such as Los Angeles or Chicago, the corrections system faces the same challenges in containing gang activity, Walters said.  New inmates undergo mental health and physical evaluations, and checking for gang affiliations is a part of the evaluations, Walters said. Some are forthcoming about their gang ties, others deny it despite telling tattoos on their bodies, he said.  Some gang members determined to be a threat are placed in high security housing. Whether someone is housed with the general prison population or in the security threat unit often depends on the inmate’s behavior, Walters said.

The article in the Salt Lake Tribune has much more detail.

Prisons were locked down 148 times in the 2007-08 fiscal year, an 80 percent increase with 66 more lockdowns than in the previous fiscal year, Zavaras said.   Assaults by inmates on other inmates rose 19.5 percent and assaults by inmates on staff went up 11 percent, he said … “In the last eight years, the gang population increased by 85 percent while our inmate population only increased by 42 percent,” said prison spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti. More than 9,300 inmates of the total prison population of 23,000 are identified as gang members or affiliates, she said … Sanguinetti said efforts are made to keep rival gang members away from each other, but with such high levels of gang affiliation, “they are going to run into each other more frequently” …

The need for high-security cells will be addressed by a new prison in Canon City, but its completion has been delayed until fiscal year 2010-11 in a move to cut $17 million from the prison budget, Sanguinetti said.   “When the existing (maximum security) Colorado State Penitentiary opened, we had a 66 percent reduction in violence through the system,” she said. “We expect the same effect when the new one opens” …

Inmates also aren’t getting programs designed to change their behavior such as one in which staff took photos of prisoners that were printed and sent to inmates’ families.   Although it doesn’t seem like such a program would cost much, Sanguinetti pointed out “when you have 23,000 offenders, costs mount up.”   Inmate morale wasn’t improved by a cut in prisoner pay from several dollars a day to 60 cents. So-called gate release money given to inmates when they are released from prison has remained at $100 since the 1970s, Sanguinetti said.

One piece of good news:

Zavaras said, is the dramatic decrease in the number of prisoners entering the system.  About 32 inmates a month came into the system in the 2007-08 fiscal year, compared with the usual 100 a month, he said. So far this fiscal year, the number has dropped to 26 a month.   “It definitely is a hopeful trend,” Zavaras said. The overall prison population is expected to increase from 23,567 at the end of this fiscal year to 25,558 in 2021.

Robert Walker is four weeks into his housing assignment at the Washington State Penitentiary’s new gang unit, where he is serving 18 years for assault.  So far, he likes his new home, but the 21-year-old former gang member from Seattle doesn’t sense that he has any more freedom. “It’s cleaner and there’s less people,” he said. “The room is bigger, but you know…” Walker’s voice trailed off and he shrugged his shoulders at his surroundings – an open cell block offering officers an easy view of rooms from a central command post …

In an attempt to curb prison violence, largely among gang members, the prison has begun isolating problem inmates and gang members in pods to restrict their interaction with other inmates.  “Overall, because we’ve been able to manage the offenders in smaller groups – groups of 99 – we’re able to minimize the incidents,” said Steve Sinclair, prison superintendent.  Gang members make up 18 percent of Washington’s prison population of about 17,000 inmates, but they account for 43 percent of all major violent infractions inside the prisons, according to a report released last month by the state Department of Corrections.

The complete article at the Seattle PI is full of detailed information.

“Gangs have long posed a threat to public safety, but as this study shows, gang activity is no longer merely a problem for urban areas. Gang members are increasingly moving to suburban America, bringing with them the potential for increased crime and violence,” said Assistant Director Kenneth W. Kaiser, FBI Criminal Investigative Division.

Other key findings are as follows:

• Local street gangs, or neighborhood-based street gangs, remain a significant threat because they still constitute the largest number of gangs nationwide. Most engage in violence in conjunction with a variety of crimes, including retail-level drug distribution.
• According to NDTS data, 58 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies reported that criminal gangs were active in their jurisdictions in 2008 compared with 45 percent of state and local agencies.
• Gang members are migrating from urban to suburban and rural areas, expanding the gangs’ influence in most regions. They are doing so for a variety of reasons, including expanding drug distribution territories, increasing illicit revenue, recruiting new members, hiding from law enforcement, and escaping from other gangs. Many suburban and rural communities are experiencing increasing gang-related crime and violence because of expanding gang influence.
• Criminal gangs commit as much as 80 percent of the crime in many communities, according to law enforcement officials throughout the nation. Typical gang-related crimes include alien smuggling, armed robbery, assault, auto theft, drug trafficking, extortion, fraud, home invasions, identity theft, murder, and weapons trafficking.
• Gang members are the primary retail-level distributors of most illicit drugs. They also are increasingly distributing wholesale-level quantities of marijuana and cocaine in most urban and suburban communities.
• Some gangs are trafficking illicit drugs at the regional and national levels; several are capable of competing with U.S.-based Mexican drug trafficking organizations.
• U.S.-based gang members illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border for the express purpose of smuggling illicit drugs and illegal aliens from Mexico into the United States.
• Many gangs actively use the Internet to recruit new members and to communicate with members in other areas of the U.S. and in foreign countries.
• Street gangs and outlaw motorcycle gangs pose a growing threat to law enforcement along the U.S.–Canada border. They frequently associate with Canada-based gangs and criminal organizations to facilitate various criminal activities, including drug smuggling into the United States.

The agencies submitted a total of 220 names, but to Maynard’s surprise, only eight appeared on more than one list. The prisons didn’t know who the police thought were most dangerous, and the police departments weren’t sharing the information with each other, either.   “I told them that we have a gang problem in our prison, and I think it reaches into the street. It was a problem we shared,” Maynard said.  During the next few months, dozens of top state law enforcement leaders began meeting to discuss broader ways to share intelligence. Now they’re pushing for legislation in the General Assembly to define gangs, correctional training facilities have adopted uniform curricula to help track gangs, and beginning this month the prison system began using a formal system to notify a jurisdiction when an inmate with known gang connections is heading to their area.  Police will also share more information with the prison system, helping corrections officials get a leg up by receiving information that would take far longer to develop through observation. Keeping members of rival gangs apart can prevent violence …

Before the collaborative effort, prison officials had scant information about who was heading into their facilities.  “When people came into prison, we got a rap sheet that showed their conviction, but it didn’t really speak to violence, and says nothing about gang involvement,” Maynard said. “We had to learn by trial and error who the bad actors were” …

Public safety officials have said the state’s prisons house more than 2,200 “validated” gang members – inmates whose identity as gang members has been firmly established. That’s nearly 10 percent of the 23,000 inmates in Maryland. Kristen Mahoney, executive director of the Governor’s Office on Crime Control and Prevention, said gangs are “created in prison and leave prison and work out in the streets.”

The full article in the Baltimore Sun has more detailed information.