“I discovered a very sophisticated network developed by the prison gangs, not to escape,
but rather to take advantage of their incarceration.”
By Sgt. Barry Evert
Pelican Bay Super Max, Crescent City, Calif.
Off-duty survival: Are you ready to fight?
Personal fitness, self defense, defensive tactics, covert communications, psychology: all of these sound like subject taught at a modern police or corrections academy. Unfortunately, these are also the subjects taught to new inmates coming into the system — inmates who are recruited for prison gangs.
Chances are you rarely think about this when you are trying to run your unit. Some of you may make the dangerous assumption that we already know what information the inmates are receiving.
For fun, let’s take a little test to check your knowledge, and compare it to what some gangs may already know about you:
- Do you place handcuffs keyholes up, down or varied?
- How often do you conduct security checks?
- How many belt keepers are on your belt?
- Do you consistently forget to pat down certain areas of inmates?
- How many ratchets are on your handcuffs?
- How many times do you warn an inmate before using force options?
- How many keys are on your key ring?
Sounds silly? Consider this story.
When I was an officer at a maximum-security prison in northern California, an inmate who was a mid-level prison gang member decided it was time to quit the gang. He approached me during a yard release and told me it was time for him to, as they say, “tap out.”
I took the inmate into my office. While we waited for the gang task force officer to show up to interview him, the two of us started talking. The inmate asked me if I understood how closely I was being watched by other his fellow gang members. I confidently told him that I did, and tried to change the subject to the location of weapons and drugs.
The inmate then told me this: “You always put the keyholes on your cuffs up, except on your Fridays. You do security checks on your Mondays and Tuesdays, but rarely come out extra on other days. You carry seven belt keepers, one of them with a cuff key built-in it that you carry on your back. You always forget to check the inseam of the left legs of inmates you pat down.
“There are 13 ‘clicks’ on your handcuffs, and it takes seven to make them so tight I cannot get my wrists out. You usually only cuff me five ‘clicks.’ You always warn inmates three times before you [OC] ‘spray’ them. There are seventeen keys on your ring, 3 of them Folger Adams; 14 of them open various doors in the building as well as the kitchen.”
I looked at him, dumbfounded.
“Oh yeah,” he added. “And your car keys are in your right bottom pocket next to your cigarettes, and you drive a black F-150 with chrome wheels.”
I did not know what to think. The inmate then handed me a “kite” — a note written to a fellow gang member — with all of these facts, plus even more information about my partners. The information contained everything about us, down to the very method by which our gunner carried his Mini-14 rifle.
Completely shell-shocked now, I asked the inmate how long he had known this stuff about me, and moreover, how he got the information. The inmate told me it was “policy” for him to know this information. The policy of his prison gang.
Sophisticated network
This got me very interested in prison gangs. This particular inmate was part of one of the largest prison gangs here in California, the Mexican Mafia. The inmate later provided valuable information to aid in the prosecution of other inmates. His awareness of my routines led me to study the gangs among us a little harder. What I found was a network far more complicated than most of us believe is out there.
There was no way for the inmate to know the majority of this information without paying very close attention to what I do and talk about. The parking lot was not visible from this particular building, so I must have talked about my new truck at some point in front of a fellow gang member without realizing it. I had always assumed that this inmate, and most others like him, were clueless and unsophisticated. How wrong I was.
Over the next couple of years, I discovered a very sophisticated network developed by the prison gangs — not to escape, but rather to take advantage of their incarceration.
To illustrate, here’s an example of the duties of a prison gang member in California. This particular inmate was part of a large crime network developed by the gang to discover weaknesses and take advantage of them. Most of this information has been translated somewhat out of a mix of Spanish and English expressly developed to confuse officers:
“It is the duty of every ‘soldier’ [the term used to describe gang member] to gather as much information about the enemy and K9 [officers] as possible. If any new information is discovered, the soldier will report it to his building contact [term used to describe a mid-level gang member in a particular unit]. The building contact will pass on the information to the leadership as soon as possible so it can be reviewed as soon as possible for its usefulness.”
It’s evident that this particular prison gang had an established information network designed to exploit any intelligence their “soldiers” come across, and that intelligence was distributed in a highly organized and defined way.
“Any time a soldier speaks to a K9, he is to complete a report on the conversation to his building contact as soon as possible.”
This illustrates that even prison gangs have a bureaucracy and a chain of command to keep their people in line.
“All soldiers are to report any contact with the K9 to their building contact. Building contacts are to notify yard leadership whenever a K9 takes a vacation or takes an extra day off and who the replacement is.”
This information goes on for over ten pages of “micro-writing,” giving clear direction to all the members of the gang how to obtain and distribute information. In it, the gang members were encouraged to “compliment” officers on their fairness and level headedness if the officer chose to ignore a minor rule violation.
The gangs have figured out how to gather crucial information about us. Have we followed suit?
Ask yourself. . .
How many inmates in your particular unit use an alias — an “A.K.A.” rather than their name? Chances are the majority of inmates have an A.K.A. in order to identify themselves with a particular prison gang and to make it harder for gang task force officers to identify them.
This takes me to the second part of this story.
As the inmate spoke at length about activities in the building, the gang task force officers had a hard time identifying the inmates involved because all of the communication used A.K.As rather than real names and numbers of inmates.
One of the officers called me out of frustration, complaining that the information they were getting was largely useless because they could not identify the inmates by their A.K.As.
After about 20 minutes on the phone, we were able to identify the vast majority of the inmates through my knowledge of the inmates in my unit -- information carefully obtained (and written down) by listening to inmates in my unit talk to one another. Best yet, this information recovered weapons and drugs in the cells of the inmates known only by their A.K.As not even a half an hour prior.
This brings me to my final point.
We can no longer write these gangs off as unsophisticated groups of hoodlums. We need to recognize them as sophisticated organized crime networks whose goal is to defeat you at every turn. It will not take a gang task force officer to defeat this network. I know many of us feel powerless in this battle because we are not part of one of these teams; but the bottom line is, without the average building officer, most of the information we have would not have been ascertained.
What do you think the inmates know about you?
I worked in a very secure setting, under a gunner, in a building designed to restrict movement and information; and still inmates knew more about me than my sergeant. Imagine the information they have on officers in less secure settings. How do you battle this? We cannot reasonably spend our lives gaining intelligence on them and still run an efficient building.
Don’t get distracted
Corrections officers can spend too much of our time conducting mundane tasks, and as a result, often ignore crucial duties. I had an officer explain to me for 20 minutes why he had not conducted his cell searches for the day. The officer said the inmates in his building needed certain forms, and that the laundry for the unit had to be picked up. One of the inmates, he said, was complaining of chest pains, and because of all this he did not have time to conduct his searches.
For weeks, he said, he was too distracted to conduct full cell searches. This alarmed me.
I immediately called over a dozen officers. We searched about ten cells out of 64 in the building. We were able to recover several weapons and a lot of inmate-brewed alcohol. The inmates had succeeded in their plan to distract the officer enough with mundane tasks to stop him from searching the cells in his building. This type of distraction is very common. After we completed the search the officer realized his mistake, and turned into a cell-searching machine.
Do not ever underestimate the ability and cunningness of the gangs around you in prison. Some officers will tell you that gangs get credit for a level of sophistication they do not deserve, however, history has taught us otherwise. Understand the enormous impact a building officer can make on an a gang investigation if he simply gets to know his inmates and their associations. Months of surveillance cannot replace the keen eye of an alert “line” officer.
Trust your gut
I could write for hours on tactics and techniques used by prison gangs to both distract officers and gather intelligence, but you have to trust your gut on this. Sometimes it takes an officer to stand back and re-evaluate what his duties and responsibilities are, no matter what is going on in his building. The best thing you can do to battle these gangs is to gain intelligence, stick with your duties and work together to defeat this seed of evil in all our prisons.
On the other hand, do not think that everything is a conspiracy. Don’t be afraid to speak up and ask questions when you suspect something is amiss. The officers in the gang task force units — as well as your supervisor — can be a wealth of information used to explain unusual behavior in your area, much of which can be linked to gang activity. After all, most of the violence that occurs in America’s prisons is because of prison gangs.
About the author
Sgt. Evert started his career in 1999 at Pelican Bay Super Max in Crescent City, Calif., then transferred in late 200 to High Desert Calif. state prison where he worked until returning to Pelican Bay as a Sergeant in 2006, where he is currently. Sgt. Evert has 10 years experience in dealing with both street and prison gangs. His book, “Scars and Bars” is due out anytime, and is dedicated to helping new Officers efficiently survive their first two years on the job, both on the job and at home. To Sgt. Evert, correctional officer safety is paramount, and is the core of what he writes and teaches.