More Gang Crap

On the heels of an inmate murder, a prisoner claiming to be a gang member has threatened violence against another inmate if he doesn’t find a new room to live in. What makes this sick is the fact that the thug doesn’t even live in the same room as the inmate he’s trying to move!

Is this related to the murder? I highly doubt it. So why is a thug declaring himself a prison cell real estate agent by fiat, and is moving an inmate against his will? The answer to that is simple, but the explanation is lengthy:

Gangs hate homosexuals. There’s your answer. I’ll fill in the blanks . . .

In my housing unit, there are cells which accommodate four people. The cell in question happens to be one of these, and until recently, only two of the bunks had occupants. I know both of these guys, and one of them is really, really openly gay. Being homosexual at this prison normally isn’t a problem, but it is if your cellies are gay-bashing gangsters.

The trouble occurred when the two occupants failed to fill their empty bunks with people they knew they could get along with. Instead, they waited for the cops to randomly assign inmates to those bunks, and of course they got screwed.

There are three scenarios in which the police will randomly assign an inmate to a cell:

• First arrival here from another prison or holding facility.
• Transferring from a normal housing unit to the DAP unit when an inmate gets accepted to the drug program.
• Coming back to the compound after serving time in the hole.

The empty bunks in that four-man cell were filled with two people from the last scenario, and that’s what did them in. The two thugs that got dumped in that room had already been on the compound before, so they were well-established with the rest of the population.

Normally, the inmate with the most seniority in a cell is the shot-caller, but the first thing the thugs did was to usurp the gay man’s authority and set themselves up as the leaders of the cell. Now the poor guy finds himself getting kicked out of his own room. Things in prison can flip in an eye-blink, and often do.

So the thugs told the guy that he was being evicted from his own cell. Right now our unit is nearly full, so there are not a lot of options for moving. When the evictee told the usurpers this, they simply replied with, “Where would you like to live?” He told them of another cell he wouldn’t mind staying in, but it was full. “No problem,” the thugs said, “we’ll take care of it.”

The thugs made note of the current residents of the targeted cell. Even though this prison is mostly made up of s.o.’s, there is a pecking order for us as we discriminate against our own kind. The more heinous your crime, the lower your rank. People who can’t seem to control themselves and do things like clip children out of magazine ads are also considered to be untouchables.

Well, there is a rumor going around that one of the guys in that cell was in prison for doing something to an infant, so of course he became their mark. “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. Find somewhere else to live.” Don’cha just love how gangs use threats and violence to solve all their problems?

So now this guy is in a tight spot. Move, or else. Will the gang actually do something if he refuses to move? Maybe, maybe not. Gangs don’t really have much clout here, but wait, a guy just got murdered. This is still prison, and anything can happen.

By my estimate, this inmate has only three options. He can:

• do nothing and stay in his cell, hoping that nothing bad happens,
• bend to their will, or
• snitch to the police.

There is only one safe answer here, and unfortunately that is to move like he’s being told.

Doing nothing is a coin toss. It all depends on if the gang is willing to back up their threat. Since gang activity is so quiet and underground here, it’s hard to say who is capable of what.

If he decides to snitch, he could be taking his life into his own hands. NOBODY in prison likes a snitch. Snitches ruin inmate fun. They point cops to all the hooch, drugs and intel they can sniff out, hoping to get a pat on the head and maybe a couple of stamps. If you are found out as a snitch in prison, you make yourself an instant enemy of the rest of the population. If the inmate snitches on the thug who threatened him, he’d have to worry about reprisal from the other members of the gang, even if the cops moved the thug to another prison.

I doubt this would happen, though. I’m willing to bet that if he snitched right now, the cops would move HIM to another prison for his own safety. Since prison life for an s.o. doesn’t get much better than this, being moved to another facility is a situation that he doesn’t want to find himself in.

I hate to say it, but the inmate is in a lose/lose situation. Even if he complies with the thug’s orders, this could make the inmate look weak enough for others to start tormenting him. I’m not sure what he’s going to do. I just hope things turn out for the best, whatever he decides.