America Behind the Color Line (53 page)

Prisoners are out in the common areas for two or three hours in the morning and two or three hours in the evening. They have a certain time limit that they let them out and they have to be back in their cell. They’re out for breakfast and dinnertime, and they have time to play checkers, chess, watch TV. We program movies and special tapes for them. So as far as the individual prisoners are concerned, you learn daily to work and sleep and eat with others.

These men are in jail. They use the toilet in front of each other. What can you do? These are the things you give up in the street when you commit a crime. You don’t have your own room and private bathroom. This is it. If a guy’s sick, he’s just sick. He throws up. They have to clean up just like you do at home. It’s the way it is. Everybody takes care of their own, keeps it halfway clean. We don’t mix the old guys with the young guys. We keep a lot of arguments down that way. We figure the elderly can get along better with themselves and the young get along better with themselves.

I’ve been involved in altercations with prisoners a few times during the time I’ve worked here. We won’t go into numbers, but each time, if you hadn’t been able to breathe a little bit or to run a little bit, to keep your cardio up a little bit, it could be ugly. I’ll be sixty-seven years old on October 5. You have to stay in shape on this job. The sheriff requests us all to be physically able to handle ourselves in case of an emergency—to be able to run a block or two to an emergency without fainting when you get there. He has a training program that we all participate in. He put training equipment in the jail, and the officers are made to work out. We’re told to stay in shape.

The stereotype is that you go into a jail and everybody’s got guns. Nobody has a gun. I don’t know any prison that would let an officer walk around with guns with criminals. When you watch a film, everybody’s got a gun. But that’s Hollywood. Hollywood would do anything. But in real life, the consequences are too serious. You wouldn’t want to have an inmate grab a gun and go hay-wire. You can imagine if there was a fight broke out and someone grabbed a gun, what would happen in the jail.

You can’t prevent violence or keep prisoners from hurting each other. It’s the same in the street. Violence only happens when it happens. You take control then. But before it happens there is no violence. You establish rules and regulations for them to follow. Violence happens when you break the rules and regulations. As long as everybody is on the same keel with the rules and regulations, there’s no violence.

It’s like anyplace else. I step on your foot, I don’t like you, I get mad. We can’t solve it verbally, so we’ll solve it physically. That sort of thing doesn’t happen too often in the jail. We try to separate the different gangs so they won’t have confrontations on a daily basis. Where we find problems, we find gang problems.

You could say that socializing new people is done mainly by the gangs. When you first enter the jail, the gangs jump on you to recruit you. Recruit a new one as they walk in the door. They find out in the cell who do you belong to, what side of town do you live on. Are you a Latin King? Or are you a Blackstone Ranger, or a member of the P-Stone Nation or some other gang? There are so many names, they pop up all over. So when they do find out something about who you belong to or you don’t belong, if you don’t belong then they’ll recruit you. You join my gang, not that gang. You ship along with us, the gang will tell you; we are a majority in this jail, and you won’t be able to get along peaceful in this jail without our help.

And if you say no, well, they try to convince you that you should join their gang for your own health’s sake, for the sake of getting along, especially if you go into a wing where they have the majority of their gang members there. A gang member will explain, it would be easier for you to get along with me if you belong. I wouldn’t be responsible for you if you didn’t, and I’ll put up a good word for you if you do. Well of course I’m scared, first time in jail, so I want somebody to look out after me, put up a good word for me so I won’t get my food stole or my money stole, my head bashed in.

In the penitentiary, a prisoner might not see any choice. The odds are so against him there that there’s no argument. In the penitentiary I might lie and say, yeah, I’ll belong to your gang, ’cause I don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want to get beat up. But in the jail, I have a shot at getting out and maybe not going to prison with you, so I might act a different way, depending on my circumstances. I might say, I don’t want to belong to your gang, and be willing to fight you. Then the gang members might go to the inmates who are not members of a gang and just demand things, like you’ve got to give me half your toothpaste. You’ve got to give me half your lunch, or all of it.

So if I want peace in the jail, I need to belong to somebody or I’m left out on my own. I make a mistake, I get reprimanded for it. If I’m a member of a gang, my gang will protect me. To join, you just say okay, I’m a Blackstone Ranger or a Latin King or some other. You commit yourself. They have the rules and regulations what you have to do to join. Say, for instance, one of the rules in a particular gang is to take ten blows to the chest for a minute. That might be the initiation fee. You won’t be able to take it, but these are the rules and regulations when you get in. They’d probably knock you out or have you gasping for breath, or you’re on the floor by the eighth or ninth blow. And once you’re in, it’s usually a double procedure to get out. Even maybe death-threatening. Maybe it’s twenty blows to get out. Under certain circumstances, you can get out. But usually those circumstances are so dangerous you would be near death with those blows. I don’t want to be hurt, so I don’t quit. And if I quit, I’m going back with the understanding that I’m ready to take whatever you’ve got to give me so I can get out, and you do. That’s some pretty harsh treatment.

The gangs have meetings every day. Not only meetings, but promotions for people who are doing a great job in leadership and recruiting. Oh yes, you can move up in rank. You can recruit so many on the new in a short period of time that you deserve to be moved up to supervisor. You learn from the ground up and you progress just like you were on the outside. You get in the business, only you might do a few things that’s not legal in the business. Unlike Wall Street, of course. But you’re in big business. Big benefits, big commissions. You supervise twenty-five guys, and if you have any problems, you report to the captain or the lieutenant or the sergeant. The chief is only approached by his top officers—the lieutenants and the captains. It’s a military situation. You know who the head man is for each gang. Everybody knows. And you don’t override nobody either. You don’t try to go to the chief over the lieutenant. You listen to the lieutenant; you follow rules and regulations. And you get assignments. Someone will say to you, I want you to recruit at least twenty guys this week. It’s a must. Twenty guys coming in here in on the new. I want you personally to recruit twenty, and I’ll get someone else to recruit twenty. The chief and the lieutenants and the captains exist primarily to take control. And the officers of the jail, we’re here to maintain control.

The role of gangs in the prison system is to control. Control their members, their turf, their power, their influence. There are members of gangs here who have referred their members to certain lawyers so they can clear away cases better than the regular lawyers. They’ve got a referral system. You belong to certain gangs, you can get certain privileges. If I’m a member of a gang and they’re getting extra food from other inmates, and you’re a lieutenant or captain in that gang, you’ll have more food and more toothpaste and more cologne and more of everything you can get.

The gang operates day by day within the prison the same way it does outside. They get telephone calls, and they can make telephone calls out of here every day. They keep up with what’s happening on the outside. And just because they’re locked up on the inside doesn’t mean they’re not controlling their members outside to a certain degree. You still walk the same walk, do the same thing; it’s just you’re confined.

Say somebody wanted to make a telephone call. The gang members would make their phone calls first, and that person would only be able to make theirs when the gang members are through. And you don’t have anything to say about it. There’s things we can do about it if we find out about it, but half the time we don’t find out about it even though we know it’s going on. We try to regulate it if we see it, but an inmate would walk up to you, oh, Officer, I don’t mind him using the phone in front of me. I don’t mind at all. It’s okay. Can we go down this way? Okay. After you. The prisoners organize for their own rules and regulations, and the secrecy. If you break the rules, they have their own penalties for what will happen to you. They’re a law unto themselves. What can you do? If someone complains, then you can do something about it.

If they’re known gang members of particular gangs, we try to separate them when they get to the jail, but every now and then when it’s overcrowded, they mix to a certain degree and they separate themselves. They mix in the dayrooms. In the divisions. You find more gang members involved in drug crimes than you do in traffic violations, even murder. In the maximum security units, Divisions 9, 10, 11, you find more gang members and more drug dealers.

Gangs are different today. Gangs control the streets with youngsters from grammar school to high school to college and from one business to another. Gangs are not just running the streets; they’re buying businesses. They sell narcotics in the street to buy a barbershop now, to buy a recording studio and produce music. And when they’re busted with something else, you find that their gang is related to the music shop. High percentages of the contracts of the recording artists—the gangs take money from you from the beginning to the end. It’s a corporate enterprise now. It’s not the “I’ll beat you up on the street” thing; it’s “I’ll take you to court if necessary.” It’s like ghetto business school.

We have people in here for drug offenses, mostly those who are using drugs rather than those who are making the profits; they’re not the higher-ups. Most of the prisoners are here for drug-related crimes. I would say it’s pretty close to 65 percent of drug-related charges here in the jail. Crack cocaine, heroin, selling drugs around schools or in different areas. The drug dealers have the cripple selling drugs in a wheelchair. If a guy is here in a wheelchair, it’s because he was caught with drugs in the wheelchair. Little kids—they have anybody selling drugs. If you’re old enough to talk and walk, then they try to recruit you to sell drugs. Some use and sell; some just sell. We have treatment for them here.

You could end up in Cook County Jail with any kind of narcotics. But you can be cleaned up faster or treated and get back to a normal life faster with some drugs than you can with others. As to the penalties for one kind of drug being harsher than for another, like crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, that’s another thing. When you’re in jail you go by the law, and the law says this and you do that, even though you might think that this is gonna be different. But, now, we’ve never been in a fair world, so what do we do? We find that everywhere we go—inside and outside. The state has a problem too. When a person commits a crime, we the public are the first ones to say, put them in jail.

If I were in charge, I would say half of the men would stay here. The other half I’d send to some kind of medical treatment outside the jail. Doctors can give you a physical status of a guy who’s using drugs and one who has made it a lifetime of using drugs. You can’t get that guy cleaned up who’s made it a lifetime of using drugs as fast as you can a guy who’s just got in. If you catch them early, you might turn a whole life around as far as drugs are concerned. I’m not saying that our medical clinics aren’t full up on the outside, but we know we’re overflowing in the jail. And we’re sending somebody downstate to a prison with the same problem he had when he came in here, and it’s gonna take some changes in prison to get straightened out.

I believe drugs is a crime, and I believe treatment for the crime does not have to be serving time in jail. If you’re a user and all of your violent history, all of your negative history, is coming from using drugs, then we ought to try to solve that drug problem and we might not have an inmate. I believe it’s a disease like anything else. There’s medicine for it; there’s treatment for it. A lot of them that are cured go into other things. There is another way to handle drug problems. I would say over 60 percent of the people in Cook County Jail are drug users who are suffering from an illness that should be cured somewhere else. If they didn’t have a drug problem, they would probably have a job or probably still be in school, or probably be doing something positive. So I would take them out of the prison, the 60 percent of the inmates, put them in hospitals, in medical programs, clean them up, and get them back into society. It’s easier to get an ex–drug addict, an ex-user, a job than it is before he kills somebody for drugs or before he robs for drugs.

The state is getting these people off the street and putting them in prisons, but then they’re coming back. Fifty percent of the men who are here are doomed to be in this jail or in a prison for the rest of their lives. They’re here till they check out. One circumstance or another they’ll be here or they’ll come back. And that’s sad. This is why we work so hard with the programs in the jail. We have ministers who offer programs in all religions, who take prisoners to Bible class. They graduate from Bible class and they’re happier that way. They study their Bible, they study their books for school, and this takes up their mind to a certain extent where they don’t have as many fights or misunderstandings between each other. The more programs we have, the better the tension is in the jail. In a Bible class of thirty people, if we can get three or two to continue their religious life when they leave here, we consider that a breakthrough.

We have different programs in the jail now, like art classes, computer literacy, celebrations for ethnic holidays. That’s why it’s better and quieted down. There are law libraries here. The teenagers have to go to school, and we have a Consuella B. York Alternative High School where they can get their GED. Certain times of the day they’re taken out and put in school classes, and they have to come back and do the homework. That helps. And they learn.