By Dane Schiller
Houston Chronicle
HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Until just a few weeks ago, Joshua hadn’t been allowed out of “the box” for more than an hour a day for nearly two years.
The heavily tattooed state prison inmate had been held in the locked, one-man cell not as a serial killer or homicidal maniac but as a soldier in a race-based predatory prison gang.
Now he’s ready to make an early escape, even if it means being marked for death for the rest of his life.
“I can take care of myself,” he said quietly, one recent morning from behind bars.
Joshua, who is serving three years for assault and asked that his full name not be used for fear of retribution, crossed a line of no return when he told authorities he wanted out of the prison gang. He knows he’ll be a marked man.
But it was the first step in entering a voluntary Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison program that officials say has slashed the number of gang members in segregated custody by 61 percent over the past decade.
Prison authorities credit the nine-month program with reducing the cost for keeping so many men under such close watch and better preparing them to be successfully released back into society. Of the 4,754 inmates who have completed the program since it began in 2000, only 19 are known to have returned to their gangs, officials said.
And as enrollment in the program has grown, the number of gang inmates in administrative segregation has declined in the past 10 years, dropping from a high of 6,620 in 2006 to 3,070 last year.
It’s part of a growing effort in Texas and across the country to find ways to replace solitary confinement with more constructive ways to get inmates out of gangs.
“You don’t just lock ‘em up and throw away the key,” said Robert Grant, a gang expert for the Texas prison system. “They are going to get out, going to be your neighbor.”
Taking a second look
Texas began locking away gang members in administrative segregation in 1985 as a way to take back control of a prison system that was among the most violent in the nation.
Letting gang members roam the prisons was seen as too dangerous for other inmates and guards because the gangs were predatory, organized and violent.
Today, inmates are still automatically transferred to administrative segregation -- also known as ad-seg, the hole or solitary confinement -- if they are identified as a member of one of seven known gangs operating in the prisons.
Prison officials won’t identify the specific gangs, but they include the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, Aryan Circle, Mexican Mafia and Texas Syndicate, sources have told the Chronicle.
In recent years, however, administrative segregation is getting a second, critical look.
A federal judge in January approved the settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of California inmates who had all spent at least 10 years in isolation. They successfully challenged the use of indefinite solitary confinement there, saying it is cruel and has a severe impact on prisoners.
Amy Fettig, senior staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, said indefinite solitary confinement does infinite harm.
“You can’t lock somebody up 22 hours a day or 24 hours a day for years on end, release them back into the community, and expect everything to be OK,” she said.
Prison system officials and politicians have joined activists and church groups in calling for change, she said. California, New York, Colorado, New Mexico and Nebraska are among the other states that have reduced the number of prisoners in solitary confinement.
“We are at a tipping point where systems themselves are realizing there is a problem,” she said. “What we are seeing is a real cultural shift.”
Cutting gang ties
The Texas prison system’s Gang Renouncement and Disassociation program developed as a way to get inmates out of the gangs and onto a better path.
It starts with an inmate asking to get out of a gang and continues with a background investigation.
Inmates who are violent, are considered a threat for escape or have been repeated discipline problems are not accepted.
Inmates first take video classes in their cells, then move into a classroom with a teacher and other inmates as they gradually acquire privileges leading to integration back into the prison’s general population. They are then monitored closely to ensure they have not slipped back into gang activities.
The Texas system also recently introduced a Segregation Diversion Program, which allows gang members returning to prison a chance to renounce their membership and be re-educated from the start.
The programs appear to be having some success. In 1984, when the Texas prison population was 37,000 and the units were wracked by warring gangs, 25 people were killed behind bars by inmates. Last year, with a prison population of 150,000, two homicides by inmates were reported, according to prison officials.
State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who is chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, has walked cell blocks and met with prisoners. He says Texas has gotten the message that its use of administrative segregation has to change.
“We are essentially doing what federal judges have told other states to do,” Whitmire said. “We don’t need the federal court telling us how to run our prisons, and we won’t, if we do things right.”
Segregation is needed for violent prisoners who are threatening others, but should not be overused, Whitmire said. He fears administrative segregation could leave departing inmates worse off than when they arrived.
“I have always said, ‘If you weren’t crazy when you went in there, it’d drive you crazy,’ ” he said. “You have to work with these people if you are going to turn them loose. Most are returning to society.”
More than 30 states across the U.S. now have programs to give inmates a way to work their way out of segregated custody, said David Pyrooz, a University of Colorado Boulder criminologist who has studied gangs and the Texas prison system.
Some programs have gained traction with inmates by no longer requiring former gang members to “snitch” on their former crime organizations as part of getting out, he said.
“At one point in time there was this long-standing view that the only way for gang members to get out of segregation was to parole, snitch or die,” he said.
It is still too early to tell, however, if the programs can have long-term success in rehabilitating inmates, he said.
“The numbers are very promising,” he said, of the Texas program. “It could be a national model for getting people out of gangs and segregated housing. ... We just don’t know enough about the movement from out of prison into the streets.”
Learning to be ‘normal’
Sitting in a classroom for the gang renouncement program at a maximum security prison recently, Joshua said that he hopes to be free of the gang life by the time he finishes serving his sentence.
He joined the gang in the early 1990s during his first hitch in prison to protect himself from being beaten, robbed or brutalized by other inmates.
“You start to gravitate towards help,” he said, of the gang’s appeal. “It is a mind twist they put on you: ‘You need us and we need you.’ When you are chewed up, they spit you out.”
Joshua said he knows the gang will want him dead for leaving, but he’ll deal with that if and when the time comes. For now, he’s learning to cut the ties.
“You don’t know how to break the chain of disastrous events in your life,” Joshua said. “Someone has to teach me how to be a normal person.”
Michael, another former gang member in the program, has been to state prison six times. Now three years into a 10-year sentence for aggravated assault, he figures time is running out to turn his life around.
He said he’s learned a lot about himself in the program and realizes he has personal issues that must be addressed. He talks not of one day walking down the street a free man or of having a job, but of being able to hug his mother.
“I know I’m better than this,” he said. “I can get more out of life than sitting inside these walls in a box.”