THE FIGHT TO SAVE CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO IS A GLOBAL ONE

Capital attacks the multitudes in so many ways and places it is sometimes hard to keep up. City College of San Francisco  (CCSF) is a fine example of the insidious  nature of the Empire and its war to remold all of us in its own image...or to just shove us aside.

Well, working and poor folks can't just let this stuff happen.  You know the tired old slogan, where there is oppression there is resistance, well that tired old slogan has become a reality to the multitudes of San Francisco.

Wait a minute you say, I don't know anything about this City College or what is going on.  Back up...

How to Save CCSF will explain for me:

Why is CCSF under threat?
CCSF is widely acknowledged to be one of the best community colleges in the country. The current "crisis" is largely the artificial creation of the accreditation commission (ACCJC), which itself acknowledged that the education and student success rate at CCSF is excellent. While funding has been cut by $50 million dollars over the past five years, CCSF has prioritized keeping classes open and preventing major layoffs. Now the ACCJC says that in order to receive accreditation CCSF must cut classes, programs, and wages, narrow the Mission Statement, end democratic decision-making (i.e. "shared governance"), lay off department chairs, hire more administrators, and put more money into the reserve. If accepted, these proposals would drastically undercut the quality and accessibility of our community college. This is an attack on tens of thousands of Bay Area residents, particularly from communities of color.

What is the ACCJC?
The ACCJC accreditation commission is an unaccountable privately-controlled and privately- financed body. Its funding comes from large foundations seeking to privatize and downsize public education for the benefit of private education providers. Its parent organization (WASC) recently received $1 million from the Lumina Foundation and $1.5 million from the Gates Foundation for this purpose. Far from being neutral, accreditation has been transformed into an undemocratic instrument to blackmail schools into accepting austerity. From 2003 to 2008, the ACCJC sanctioned 37 percent of California’s community colleges; in the same period, other community college accrediting bodies across the country sanctioned only zero to six percent. Now 25% of California Community Colleges are under sanction. This is unacceptable.

Isn't there a real budget crisis?
Yes and no. It's true that there's been a statewide budget crisis in the past years, due to the fact that the rich and corporations do not pay enough in taxes and because so much of the budget goes to prisons. But in the Fall, SF voters passed Proposition A to bring $16 million dollars each year to fund classes and programs at CCSF. They also passed Prop 30 statewide, which will bring in $376 million to the community college system. But now the new CCSF Chancellor and Special Trustee (who is paid $1000 dollars a day) are refusing to use the Prop A funds for funding classes and programs! This is illegal and immoral. In the short term, the budget issue can be resolved by using Prop A and Prop 30 funds to go directly to education as the voters intended. Any additional budget gap needs to be filled by the intervention of SF City Hall, for example by offering the school a no interest "bridge loan." The only long term solution for education is to raise more revenue by making the rich pay.

Doesn’t CCSF need accreditation?
Yes, but it's not true that the only way to stay accredited is to blindly accept all of the ACCJC's impositions. It is possible to pass accreditation and prevent any cuts to CCSF. This can be done by building a mass movement of students, faculty, staff, and community members to demand that the Prop A funds be used for education and to call on City Hall to intervene to save our school. In the process we can expose ACCJC's hidden agenda. It is the accreditation process -- not CCSF -- that needs to be overhauled. Accreditation should not be in private hands: it must become public, democratic, and transparent.

People have written letters, articles, signed pledges and taken to the streets, students, educators, concerned citizens and community residents all together.  Education is a right or it sure as hell should be.  Education should not just be reserved for the privileged and it should not exist purely for the benefit of Capital.  It should not exist purely to create the cogs the Empire's machine needs to run smoothly.  Education should be about freeing people, about uplifting them, about expanding their humanity, about wonder and joy, about creativity, about helping people, helping working people build the world of tomorrow, their world of tomorrow, today.  

Benign sounding foundations, charitable organizations have secretly (or not) joined together with bankers and corporations, with finance capital targeting community colleges all over the country.  Danny Weld writing at Daily Censored says:

The smash and grab policies of the money class are transforming the community college system into a top down, hierarchical governing system that will eliminate humanities, liberal arts, music and critical thinking in favor of a school-to-work programs that favor industry and Wall Street at the expense of students, faculty and staff.  The means to the end is the “Shock Doctrine’ we see played out all over the world (http://www.isreview.org/issues/71/feat-disasterschooling.shtml); basically, creating and/or capitalizing on a crisis in funding and in the minds of the public to decimate any shared governance of the community college systems, while reducing student access through two-tiered toll booth systems of admission and class access.  The actors in this obdurate and cruel hoax are the same well heeled Wall Street minions who seek to both assure students get no opportunity to think critically about their place in the world and to gobble up the $650 billion dollar industry that is “education”.

Tucked under the logo of “progress’, reactionary forces like The Lumina Foundation have been at the forefront of eliminating both shared governance, lowering staff to student ratios, increasing ‘online earning’ in place of real life learning and peddling the idea that more graduates from college are needed to compete with the emerging Chinese Empire.  Clothed in mendacity and soaked in billions of dollars, this attempt to corporatize and privatize all learning is now in full swing, aided and abetted by ACCJC, the accrediting agency for the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, itself a private corporation with no accountability to the public it purports to serve.

I will leave you with words of one Becca Hoeksta of the Guardsman (a newspaper which reaches out to CCSF nine campuses and their surrounding communities):

...I understand why so many teachers and students are upset with the accreditation commission. The accreditation process is just another arbitrary step in the educational bureaucracy – this system propped up entirely by its own self-importance, and not its effectiveness. Shutting down a massive, edifying facility like City College is the exact opposite of effectively educating.

The accreditation commission upholds the Capitol’s standards. Twenty percent of California’s schools don’t meet them. Even if those schools are doing exactly what the needs of their community call for, if they don’t fulfill the standardized, cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all requirements assigned to them from these almighty officials, they can’t be seen as worthy.

As a community college, the community – us – our diverse population of immigrants and city natives, our labor unions, our lifetime students, and every single one of our educated minds knows how to run our school best. Far better than some private agency that would threaten to close our school with almost no prior warning.

City College represents the radical notion that everyone – every single one of us – is capable of governing themselves and collaborating for the good of all – if granted our right to education and given the means to do so.

We can save City College.

I sure hope so as the fight at CCSF is not just a local one.  It isn't even just a national one.  Like everything else today, this fight is a global one. 

The following is from the San Francisco Bay View.

Taking back City College from the corporations

 – by any means necessary

The fight to save City College comes to Bayview Hunters Point Wednesday, April 3, 6 p.m., Southeast Campus, 1800 Oakdale at Phelps, San Francisco – come learn and get involved

by Tiny, daughter of Dee, Poor News Network

A meeting of the Save City College Coalition will be held Wednesday, April 3, 6 p.m., at the City College Southeast Campus, a beloved landmark in Bayview Hunters Point. The organizers write: “We are inviting teachers, students and community to come and become part of the Coalition to Save CCSF, to keep this college’s doors open and accessible and affordable to the broadest community. Community college belongs to the community, but its existence, as you know, is being threatened, as education across the country, from K-12 to university, is being transformed in the interests of those with wealth and power at the expense of everyone else, especially low income and people of color.”

“These are our young people, our future African-American leaders, trying to fight to get an education, and this is who they are cutting services to,” said City College of San Francisco Student Body President Shanell Williams about the recent cutting of the GED van service that provided transportation from “The Point” (Hunters Point) to CCSF GED prep classes. “This was a tiny program with a minimal budget that meant so much to the community and is typical of the moves being made by the corporate-funded forces attacking our communities’ schools locally and nationally,” Shanell explained.

As a formerly houseless, very poor single mama whose life was truly saved by the affordable education, support services, free child care and so much more I received at CCSF, I have been terrified to watch the orchestrated and systematic attack on CCSF, one of the largest community colleges in the country with a student body of over 90,000 people, unfold. Like the sudden closure of 52 public schools in Chicago and more across the country, it is an act of violence against our poor and working class communities of color. To me its insidiousness and covert under-handedness feels like 21st century corporate COINTELPRO.

“This is their fault; they over-budgeted.” “They were sloppy with their accounting.” “They need to clean house.” One after the other, editors of small, wannabe corporate news agencies spoke a strangely similar party line in a press briefing I was invited to a couple of months back in the early stages of this corporate coup of City College, when weekly hit pieces would appear in the SF Chronicle. As these corporate media editors, albeit smaller and less influential than the Chronicle, were all saying the same thing I wondered how they were all so bought in. And then I did a little WeSearch (poor people-led, not philanthro-pimp led, research).

Like the Monsanto Protection Act, the support for all of this corporate destruction of our communities’ schools can be traced to as high up as the federal government and multi-million dollar mandates to privatize most of public education. President Obama’s 2009 American Graduation Initiative for community colleges is directly from the corporate playbook. The plan includes such privatizing measures as partnering with industries and for-profit schools, transferring loans to private lenders, and funding based on student progress.

One of the main players in the corporate coup is the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) who out of the blue gave City College an “F” and a deadline of March 15 to correct supposed defects or face closure. With Board of Trustees’ approval, a very corporate interim chancellor, being paid $1,000 a day, took a wrecking ball to CCSF – in the name of “austerity.”

Shanell Williams, third from left, a leader since high school, when she served on the influential San Francisco Youth Commission, now leads the fight to save City College as president of its student body. Here she is at a forum to save City College with Trista Barrantes, Eric Blanc, Terrilyn Williams, Tiny, young Tiburcio and Tony Robles. – Photo: Matthew Lew, Manilatown Heritage Foundation

Behind this huge corporate coup is the Illumina Foundation. It was funded by Sally Mae, the student loan and high stakes testing corporation, which, along with 21st century parachute liberal philanthro-pimps, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “donated” $1.5 million to the WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) or accreditation board so a comprehensive Karl Rove-style campaign of disinformation could be launched against the otherwise stellar and problem-free City College of San Francisco.

Why? Perhaps those 90,000 warm bodies would be generating a lot more profits in tuition and whole more student loan debt if they were enrolled in a private college like Heald, University of Phoenix, DeVry and Pepperdine and/or through the multitude of on-line universities being pushed heavily by the digital sweatshop perpetrators, the Gates Foundation.

And of course these kinds of campaigns work. Or do they? Yes, it’s true that since the disinformation campaign was launched, enrollment in CCSF has dropped from 90,000 to 85,000. People are understandably confused and scared. But the people are also mad and the people can only be lied to so much with a lie so blatantly obvious as this one against a college so large and deeply rooted in our community.

“We aren’t going anywhere,” roared the beautiful, multi-colored crowd of thousands of people who gathered on March 14 at City Hall in San Francisco.

“My ethnic studies teacher, my counselor and my women’s studies teacher all received pink slips. They are all about to lose their jobs if this push goes through,” Terrilyn Woodfin, my sister-mama, PNN poverty skolar, reporter and City College student told me. As I did more Wesearch I discovered that not only were massive layoffs being threatened, but administration staff and teachers are being told not to say anything and just go along with the flow to keep their jobs.

Thousands marched and rallied outside City Hall on March 14 to demand that the City of San Francisco ensure the intact survival of City College. – Photo: Muteado Silencio, Poor News Network

“What makes it so crazy-making is the people are being lied to in so many ways,” Shanell declared, proceeding to describe how Propositions A and 30, giving $14 million and $376 million to save City College, were passed resoundingly by San Francisco and California voters to protect City College. Yet no matter what, the corporate forces say, “It’s not enough,” and proceed with their deadly corporate wrecking ball trying to make sure that our people’s college no longer belongs to the people.

“Whose college? Our College!” The wave of thousands of people’s voices at City Hall rang in our collective ears. If we ever needed to put our bodies in the forefront of this fight, it is now.

Please show up with your bodies and souls to the Southeast Campus of City College, 1800 Oakdale at Phelps, in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco, on Wednesday, April 3, 6 p.m., to get involved and/or go on-line tosaveccsf.org.

Tiny – or Lisa Gray-Garcia – is co-founder with her Mama Dee and co-editor with Tony Robles of POOR Magazineand its many projects and author of “Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America,” published by City Lights. She can be reached at deeandtiny@poormagazine.org. Visit www.tinygraygarcia.com andwww.racepovertymediajustice.org.

THE ARYAN BROTHERHOOD, PRISON LIFE, AND WHY YOU MIGHT GIVE A DAMN

I figured today would be a good one to take a look at the Aryan Brotherhood, well sort of.  You know why.  But I wanted a look not from some "experts," who have spent their lives "studying" groups like this, keeping track of them, writing about them (though all of that is fine by me and necessary).  I also didn't want to hear from those like me with a built in ideology and who have been involved in one way or another with anti-racist work, anti-fascist work.  I thought, let's look for people who have been inside and actually had to deal with these guys...and who aren't necessarily from the "choir."  Consequently, don't expect to agree with everything, or even anything, you read in the two posts below.  However, you might want to pay a little attention.

The second post below is the one that for me personally is the most interesting.  I was in prison but it was before the prisons were totally turned into gang city.  While the prisons I inhabited were definitely divided up by race I wasn't forced into the weird position that as a Jew I didn't have any gang to join for protection  even if I wanted to do so.  However, even though I was an anti-racist and even though I was a red even then, I realized prison life was going to be different.  I did my best to get by and survive.  I didn't engage in racist shit.  I did associate with people of color some  (mostly in the living area where you could get away with some of that, and definitely not in the eating area where you could not).  In fact, it was a black guy who took me aside on my first day inside and sort of explained things to me.  I don't know who he was, but I was glad he took the time to do it.  

I got by in El Reno (a pen for younger convicts and rated somewhere between moderate and maximum security at the time) hanging out with some young, but pretty experienced, respected cons who knew what they were doing and took me in (I think because they probably found me weird, and my crime - bombing conspiracy - interesting).  I got by at Leavenworth during the final part of my time  by hanging out with people associated, believe it or not, with organized crime.  How this happened is two fold.  First, as there were Jewish mobsters there who associated with the Italian ones and well, I was a landsman, so to speak.  Secondly, my "girlfriend" who was in law school at the time was working on an appeal case for a guy who was, shall we say, a mob soldier out of Chicago and because of her, he decided to take me under his wing.  He was about 6'6" and tough as shit, so that didn't hurt.  

But I digress into "old times."

I would most definitely not want to find myself having to deal the prison world today.  Of course, I could never (even if I wasn't a Jew) align myself or befriend the likes of a white racist group like the Brotherhood, but, boy it would be some scary shit, I presume.  I'd be pretty much on my own and being on your own inside may sound cool, but it ain't.

Better out here, then in there...

The first post below is from the Daily Beast.  The second is from the blog of robert Kelsey.  The blog is generally a promotion for his self improvement, be more confident type of book. The guy was at one time, believe it or not, a banker. However, what he has to say here is interesting, though sometimes totally off base (in my opinion).

Why I Fear the Aryan Brotherhood—and You Should, Too

by Anonymous 

Whether or not the Aryan Brotherhood killed two Texas prosecutors, their increasing emergence from prison should strike fear in all of us. I should know—I was behind bars with them.

Law enforcement officers may have a real problem on their hands. They’re being tight-lipped about it, but it’s something they should have been aware of for decades. They had to see it coming.

Patti McConville/Getty

Four people have been killed since the beginning of the year in a series of shootings that appear to be connected to the homegrown jihadists of the Aryan Brotherhood. Mike McLelland, the district attorney of Texas’s Kaufman County, and his wife, Cynthia Woodward, became the latest victims this past weekend. Before that, McLelland’s former colleague Mark Hasse was shot in January. Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements was gunned down in mid-March.

The Brotherhood, also known as The Brand, AB, and One-Two, was formed during the 1960s by a group of white convicts serving time at San Quentin. They allegedly were fed up with white prisoners being victimized by the two predominant gangs, the Black Gorilla Family (BGF) and the Mexican Mafia and decided to form a gang of their own for self-protection. While initially closely associated with Nazism ideologically, many adherents belong to the group for the identity and purpose it provides. The ironclad rule for entrée into the Brotherhood is simple: kill a black or a Hispanic prisoner. The other rule, which is just as ironclad, gave rise to their motto: “Blood In/Blood Out.”

Quitting isn’t an option. There’s only death.

I got up close and personal with members of the Brotherhood more than 20 years ago in Nevada. Due to the relatively sparse population in northern Nevada, the feds didn’t have their own lockup in which to house pretrial detainees, or at least they didn’t back then. So they rented a “range”— a row—of 14 cells in Nevada’s maximum-security prison in Carson City to house defendants going back and forth to Federal Court in nearby Reno.

Other prisoners, like me, were being held at various city and county jails in the area, but everyone who knew they were not going anywhere soon wanted to get moved to Carson City, where there was a day room with a working color TV, a fairly well-equipped weight pile, and, by prison standards, excellent food. As I would also discover when I got there, the low-paid state prison guards assigned to the special unit were fairly easy to bribe: the occasional fifth of Jack Daniel’s or a dime bag of weed (which the guard got $100 for) found its way onto the range.

When the situation calls for it, they’re killers.

So after three months in a single cell (I’d get out once a week for a shower), when my lawyer said she could get me moved to Carson City I was very eager—until I got there. There were 13 white guys, and seven of them, I could tell by the tattoos, were members of the Brotherhood.  But by then I was a seasoned convict (having served four previous sentences, this wasn’t my first rodeo), so I’d been around prison gangs before and knew the ropes. I kept my head down, my eyes averted, and ate my meals alone at the far end of the table…at least for the first few weeks.

Then two things happened in fairly rapid succession. First, a small article about my case made it into a local paper in which the feds accused me and my crew of absconding with millions of dollars with our nefarious credit-card activities in the casinos in and around Nevada. The amount made me out to be a serious professional, worthy of respect even in the Brotherhood’s eyes, albeit only grudgingly given. The second thing that happened was the leader of the group, a huge guy with reddish hair and beard appropriately named “Big Red,” had a legal problem I helped him to solve.

The one thing I learned relatively quickly was that while the members of this tight-knit group might have been long on brawn and violence, they were short on brains. Big Red had served in the military. He wanted some documents from the military to present at his upcoming murder trial. I guess he wanted to prove how patriotic he had been while serving his country. But none of them could fill out the stack of forms, so I volunteered to help. When the documents I requested came back about a month later, I was considered a legal whiz on the order of F. Lee Bailey.

I was, to a degree, “in.” They considered me a harmless black mascot, I considered them fools to be played. As the saying goes, I was “stuck like Chuck.”

Eventually I was doing all kinds of writing, both legal and otherwise. I would pen poems for their wives, children’s and girlfriend’s birthdays, and these semi-illiterates were simply amazed. Ah, the power of the pen. My first paid writing gig paid me a grand total of three packs of cigarettes. 

All of a sudden Big Red noticed how I looked like his football hero, Earl Campbell. It’s amazing to me how gridiron prowess can overcome even the deep-seated antipathy of a dyed-in-the-wool bigot. Of course, other than having black skin, I looked nothing at all like Campbell. But I could hold my own on the iron pile, by then being able to bench press close to 250 pounds. 

And, having an ear for dialects, I’d also—quite slyly and over a period of months—developed a bit of a Texas twang. Speaking the “language” can be critical to acceptance, and I discovered how time and familiarity can overcome even the seemingly insurmountable of racial barriers.

When the guard smuggled in chewing tobacco, I packed my cheeks with the foul leaf and learned to hit our coffee-can spittoon with the best of ’em.

These were very tough men facing long sentences for serious crimes, but after a while they didn’t guard their tongues around me … they felt no need to. I’d gained their trust, and by then they knew I wasn’t facing serious charges, so I wouldn’t have the need to betray them by trading information, since my lawyer was already negotiating a relatively short sentence for me. I was privy to their conversations and after a few slips they even quit using the “N” word, but only after Big Red leveled his menacing glare at the offender.

These were men steeped in strong oral traditions and past heroic acts. They were still mentally fighting the Civil War (like so many other whites) and traced their roots back to men like Confederate guerrilla William Clarke Quantrill, whose Quantrill’s Raiders sacked the pro-abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, at the beginning of the Civil War. One guy, Luke, claimed to be a direct descendant of one of the men who rode with Quantrill. He alleged that his great-grandfather was Cole Younger, the outlaw who robbed banks with Jesse James’s gang after the end of the Civil War. At age 38, Luke considered himself to be a proud third or fourth generation (he couldn’t count backwards too well) bank robber. His father, and grandfather before him, had robbed banks for a living as well.

It was from Luke that I first heard of Mountain Home, Idaho, when he said, “If I coulda just made it back to Mountain Home, I’da been OK.” The trouble he was referring to was his last bank robbery for which he was now awaiting sentencing, where he and his crew had kidnapped a bank-branch manager and strapped 10 sticks of dynamite around her chest and wired it to a remote detonator. He was not some little desperate punk-assed note passer; the crew he worked with would, after months of planning, take over the whole bank and, in his words, “take all of the goddamn money.” They felt it was unprofessional to leave one dollar bill behind.

He was the only one of the four captured and flat out told the FBI that he “didn’t know shit.” When they threatened him with a longer sentence, according to him his response was “rush it and you won’t owe it.” I believed him, since these were among the most standup dudes I’d ever encountered.

I gradually learned (from men who had no need to embellish their deeds as some armchair neo-Nazi pseudo-tough guys are prone to do) of Mountain Home and other pockets of armed resistance situated in rural areas of three or four western states where federal authorities are reluctant to enter to enforce the law.

“They know we’re up in there,” I remember Luke saying, “but it ain’t worth riskin’ getting their asses blown off to come in and try to take us out. They want to go home too, and they know we ain’t fucking around. We ain’t trying to overthrow the government or nothing. We’re just fighting to protect our wives, kids and our way of life, and them coward motherfuckers know it. All we’re asking is to be left alone.” He conveniently forgot about all the banks he’d robbed to be able to afford all of the expensive, high-end toys he once possessed. 

Unlike David Koresh and his sheeplike followers (and other sects based on religious fanaticism), these are battle-hardened and death-tested men (many of them, like Big Red, with extensive military experience) who are not set on dying for some kind of religious cause; their thing is that, when the situation calls for it, they’re killers. They’re not into dying—except to protect the honor of the Brotherhood.

And they’re also sincere in their belief that many members of law enforcement are kindred spirits, right-wingers who understand their hatreds, loss of hegemony, and rabid determination to protect whatever power the white man has left in America. And those who don’t buy into their hateful rhetoric they perceive as being weak-kneed sob sisters who will willingly mongrelize and sell out their proud white heritage. Truly, everyone who is not with them is against them.  

Their network, even back then was already so strong that when I arrived at the federal prison in Kentucky where I was to serve out my sentence, within a week of arriving a tattooed AB member came up to me in the yard and said, “We heard about what you did for Big Red out there in Nevada … if you need anything, if anybody fucks with you, just let me know.”

I never spoke to this dude again for the next 18 months, until the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in downtown Oklahoma City about a week before I was slated to exit prison for the last time. Standing in front of the TV in the day room he turned to me and said, “This ain’t shit, just wait until we get started. They done took me from my family for over 30 years because of some of punk-assed drug-conspiracy bullshit, and eventually they’re going to have to pay … We’re going to make them pay.”

If these recent killings represent the Brotherhood’s twisted form of retribution, the fact that it has taken so long to begin is all the more chilling. To me this would demonstrate a hard-nosed determination that all citizens should find frightening. We shouldn’t be whistling past the graveyard on these killings.

These are men with a huge ax to grind. While few of them would argue they deserve no time behind bars for their crimes, virtually all of them feel the amount of time handed out under federal sentencing guidelines is far, far too punitive … way out of proportion; that punishments don’t fit the crimes, and some legal scholars actually agree.

America’s harsh judicial system, coupled with a growing national affinity for utilizing complete isolation at super-max prisons as a corrections tactic of first choice, in many cases turns men into monsters. And, truth be told, there is no such thing as truly locking away the gang leaders so they can no longer call the shots on the prison yard … or even on the streets.

Someone has to feed these case-hardened convicts three times a day, and who might you think carries this duty out? If you’re thinking it’s the guards, you’re wrong. They’re not about to be turned into waiters for men they often view as the scum of the earth no matter what. Instead, that duty falls to other prisoners known as “trustees.” And these trustees smuggle all of the messages the guards are not bribed (or threatened) into carrying back and forth. Hey, everyone’s got families, you know. 

The true terrorist wins because of his or her willingness to die for what they believe in—history has taught us that over and over again. Many of the first men locked up when our nation embarked on a policy of for-profit mass incarceration near the end of the last century are now returning into society. And, as predicted by numerous professionals, they are sicker and more dangerous than when they went behind bars.

While the U.S. population grew 2.8 times since 1920, the U.S. prison population grew more than 20 times, and most dramatically since 1980. The fear among law enforcement is (or at least should be) is that now we have dozens upon dozens—if not hundreds (who knows, maybe even thousands)—of murderous chickens finally coming home to roost.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Life lessons from a Texan jail

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”.


I kept thinking of the above quote – from Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl in his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning – while reading Gary Mulgrew’s recent bookGang of One


The book details his time in a high-security Texan jail. Of course, I know Gary – he was my boss for nearly five years during my less-than-successful foray into banking. And I guess that’s what prompted me to read his book.


Yet it’s not what prompted me to write about it. That came from, firstly, being impressed by his writing style and candidness – two aspects of book writing I hold in high regard (for obvious reasons). But it also came from his Frankl-like observations of prison life. Here he was, an observant and articulate man at – after war – probably the sharpest end of contemporary life. Having been at the top of Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs, Mulgrew had fallen to its floor – concerned only for survival and basic needs in a hostile environment.


Certainly, it’s rare to get such insight from an educated and articulate man experiencing life in the human basement. Frankl was an Austrian psychologist so was able to opine on the psychological impact on both himself and those around him. Mulgrew was a banker, and leader of large chunk of the old NatWest Markets. He too could offer a rare insight into the impact of such privation on the human spirit.


So here’s what I noticed from my reading of Gang of One – the 10 things that Gary’s book told me about surviving the Darwinian pit.

1. The need for gangs. The first and most noticeable observation is, indeed, how Darwinian life becomes. One’s very existence is under threat, and certainly basic needs such as food and water are paramount. Revealingly, the guarantee of survival in this near-primeval existence comes from an unexpected collectiveness. The rugged individual of American lore could not prosper in a high-security Texan jail, it seems – especially one located only an hour or so from the banditry of the US-Mexican border. The unit that matters is the gang. Indeed, Gary is constantly pressured to “run with” one gang or other – hence the book’s title – as only through such a pack, it seems, is the inmate afforded any form of protection from existential threats.
2. The racial divisions. A second observation has to be the power of race when it comes to the make-up of the gangs. The entire prison is segregated along strict racial lines. Such divisions are not officially sanctioned – the large rooms of bunks (known as “ranges”) are mixed. But, left to its own devices – in the food hall or TV room or exercise yard – the prison population immediately divides emphatically along racial lines. Here Gary’s dilemma is that he feels no affinity with “his race”, which is organized into the ludicrous and offensive “Aryan Brotherhood”. Indeed, he seems most at home with the Native Americans, although they are unwilling to be joined by someone from outside their ethnic pool. It’s all so primitive: groups guarantee survival and those groups divide emphatically along racial lines.
3. Tattoos. Yet it’s not just race. This close to Mexico the Hispanics are a clear majority of the prison population – especially given the war-like levels of drug-gang rivalry occurring nearby. And this leads to tattoos being the primary marker of differentiation between rival groupings. Indeed, the prison authorities recognise this demarcation, with tattoo specialists noting various markings with anthropological zeal. Of course, the wrong markings can have fatal consequences, but that’s the point: tattoos are an immovable badge of affinity – a statement that, once in the gang, that’s that (especially when the tattoo’s on your face). This was a Faustian compact at the foot of the Maslow’s hierarchy: in return for the gang’s protection the gang demands your absolute loyalty – to the point where you’ll happily disfigure your face to prove it.
4. Hierarchy is crucial. The prison authorities are noted by their absence – leaving the prison accommodation blocks to, pretty-much, run themselves. And run themselves they do, via a complex hierarchy involving “shot callers” from each gang. Such an elite co-operates to the point where regular meetings are held to settle disputes and keep the place ticking over. In fact, this set up is way too structured to be considered “informal”. It’s universally accepted, with the inmates happily deferring to the “shot callers” and the guards staying largely out of the way. Even Gary’s “which gang” dilemma is discussed at the “shot caller” level, with – amazingly – his notion of forming his own one-man gang requiring a quasi-formal approval.
5. That humans remain human. When I knew Gary, we were both investment bankers, which meant life became irritating if our business class flight was delayed by an hour or our hotel room wasn’t quite to our liking. Yet here he had to endure the heat, noise, squalor and privation of life in a prison “range” – involving scores of hardened criminals living in close quarters without respite. And yet life became tolerable. More than tolerable: something in the human soul found laughter, joy, dignity, kinship and even privacy. These are more than the rudiments of existence – they are the very human qualities that put us above the animals. And, even here (as they were in Frankl’s Auschwitz), they were sought, sourced, relished – and respected by all.
6. Kindness. One episode involves an inmate helping Gary change out of blood-soaked clothes in order to avoid his mistaken implementation in a gang beating. His aid put himself in considerable danger to help Gary, yet it was done instinctively and unquestioningly. Despite the privations – or maybe even because of them – the inmates help each other in all sorts of ways, big and small. Deeper than the layers of machismo that pervade the block’s every interaction there’s a kindness towards each other. Indeed, reading Gary’s daily tribulations reminded me of the more Golding-esque aspects of school life. Yet the prison was far from infantilised – adult civilities and even goodwill survived.
7. Ratting. That said, in one respect prison and school are exactly aligned. The greatest crime is in being a “rat” – a “grass”. Gary’s worst moments come from the concern within his prison block that his comparatively light sentence was somehow won via betraying his accomplices. It concerns both his immediate friends – such as the Native Americans – and the gang hierarchies, including a particularly menacing character ironically named Angel. No matter what, ratting is beyond the pale – as he witnessed via the beatings handed out to the “rats” that entered the open-plan range.
8. Sexual tension. Other than the rats, the lowest level of prison life is the “chomo”, or sexual offender. This group are subjected to a level of violence seemingly-sanctioned by both formal and informal authorities, although – as Gary points out – this seems more to do with finding outlets for anger and frustration than due to any sense of natural justice. That said, singling out sexual deviance was odd as a sexual tension seems to pervade prison life. Indeed, the prospect of rape was a major concern for Gary, as it would be for any self-respecting person thrown into such circumstances. He survived, although the prison’s obsession with sex answered a classic question regarding Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: does the primary physiological level include sex as a basic need? From my reading of Gary’s book, yes appears to be the answer.
9.  The Aryan Brotherhood. Gary makes a great deal of rejecting their invitations, which – if true – was a brave move in such a racially-segregated environment (there being no other white gang to join). That said, they stand out for their ridiculousness, which included the gentle addition of swastikas for those facial tattoos. Even in such an asylum, it’s the Aryan Brotherhood providing a negative benchmark for others to measure their sanity. Most laughably, was their claim for racial superiority despite the fact they were clearly the most educational deficient of all the groupings present.
10. Menace as a policy. Gary resists giving lectures – offering instead a personal and therefore unprejudiced insight into his experiences. Yet, in his final analysis, he couldn’t help questioning what seemed to be the official sanctioning – even in its passive acquiescence – of the brutality around him. Indeed, the treatment of the chomos and the rats, and even those that stepped out of line with respect to gang law – and the fact such treatment is ignored by the prison authorities (to the point that prisoner-on-prisoner brutality appears to be part of America’s deterrence towards criminality) – has to be worth questioning. As Gary rightly asks: is this a legitimate form for punishment for a civilised society? Add to that the fact 2.3 million Americans are currently in jail (more than one percent of the male population), with a further 5 million on parole, and America’s claim to be a moral beacon for humanity is surely undermined.