Locked away in ‘breeding grounds for hatred’

OVER THE LAST few weeks, some local politicians have expressed fears that the racial violence in the Los Angeles County jail system could spread to the streets. County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke warned that if the violence escalates, it has the “potential to bring the whole community down.”

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is so concerned that the rioting could go beyond the jails that he has offered to help Sheriff Lee Baca keep the peace. The mayor insisted that the “matter should be of utmost concern to all Angelenos.” He’s right. But not exactly for the right reasons.

As it turns out, there’s little chance of widespread racial warfare on the streets. But day in, day out, riots or no, the race problem in California’s jails and prisons is actively producing bigots who, when released, will poison society in a much subtler way.

Law enforcement officials have said that the feuds in the jails stem from tensions between Latino and black street gangs in L.A. True enough, but those tensions aren’t primarily racial. Although gangs are drawn largely along ethnic and racial lines, they are more concerned with territory and drug distribution than they are with race. Racial enmity may fuel the rivalries, but the endgame is about organized crime.

All that changes when gangsters go to prison. Their criminal identities give way to less nuanced markers, with race chief among them. In 1937, sociologist Hans Reimer published one of the first empirical studies of an American prison population. His view of the incarcerated community as a primitive society helps us understand that along with their freedom, prisoners are stripped of what characterizes the rest of us.

On the outside, men are fathers, brothers, sports fans, the devotees of certain types of music -- or members of a gang. On the inside, however, where the environment is closed, hostile and populated by people who have demonstrated their unwillingness to abide by accepted social norms, men group themselves according to any identity that promises to help them achieve their primary objective: survival.

For most of U.S. history, prisons were racially segregated, and power was divvied up along ethnic, class and geographic lines. In all settings, “in” and “out” groups emerge. Child molesters, ex-cops and informants, no matter their race, are beyond the pale. In the Soviet gulags, petty criminals ganged up to exploit and brutalize political prisoners.

From the 1950s on, a series of court cases forced the desegregation of U.S. prisons, and race became the dominant category among the incarcerated. Emboldened by the Black Muslim movement, black prisoners were the first to start racial prison gangs; Latinos were soon to follow. White prison gangs were the last to emerge, generally as a response to the threat from black and Latino inmates. By the late 1980s, the Aryan Brotherhood was reportedly responsible for most of the gang-related killings in federal prisons.

Now, inmates feel obliged to identify with racial groups in order to avoid being targets for violence. That means a level of racial tension that far exceeds the level on the outside. In the words of Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, prisons are “breeding grounds for hatred.”

The white men who chained a black man to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to death in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 are said to have learned their bigotry while serving time. Last year, a Jewish inmate at San Quentin sued to be reclassified as “other race” rather than “white” so he would not be housed with anti-Semitic white supremacists. An expert witness testified on his behalf that prisons had more anti-Semitism than any other place in the country. The same holds for other prejudices.

In the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court mandate to integrate inmates in California, racial violence -- and even rioting -- may only get worse in prisons. The threat to society at large, however, will be a more insidious -- and corrosive -- hatred that ex-convicts carry back with them to their communities.