@ ROB CARSON
Last year’s sweep of the Hilltop Crips scooped up a sizable portion of Tacoma’s gang problem and dropped it squarely in the lap of the state Department of Corrections. . . . The arrival of so many Crips in a short amount of time presented a challenge for the prison system.
Last year’s sweep of the Hilltop Crips scooped up a sizable portion of Tacoma’s gang problem and dropped it squarely in the lap of the state Department of Corrections.
The trials and guilty pleas that followed the February 2010 crackdown put 31 gang members into the custody of the Corrections Department. The arrival of so many Crips in a short amount of time presented a challenge for the prison system.
Would the new arrivals upset the power balance in the Crips organization and among rival gangs in prison? Would the influx increase gang violence behind bars and increase risks for prison workers? Both seemed possible.
Gang violence is a major problem in Washington prisons. About 20 percent of the state’s 16,000 prison inmates are gang members, but they routinely account for nearly half of reported violent infractions.
Prison gangs are highly organized, according to those who study them, with power structures nearly as specific as corporate organizational charts.
So, did the arrival of Tacoma’s Crips stir things up behind bars?
In a word, “No,” said Dan Pacholke, the state’s deputy director of prisons.
The Hilltop Crips disappeared into the corrections system with barely a ripple, Pacholke said. There was no discernible increase in violence.
“Nobody at DOC was nervous or went on high alert because of these guys,” agreed Chad Lewis, a team leader in the Corrections Department’s communications department. “This is what we do.”
WHY THE QUIET?
The lack of commotion was due to a several factors.
In the first place, not all of the convicted Crips went to prison at once. Their pleas and convictions were staggered over several months.
And the pool of Crips in Washington’s 12 prisons is large. At present, 623 inmates are in the Crips gang, making it the largest in the prison system. At the end of May, the incarcerated Crips included 167 from the Hilltop gang.
Nine of Tacoma’s Crips caught in the crackdown were convicted of relatively minor crimes and were in and out of prison quickly.
The rest were spread out at eight corrections facilities across the state. The largest group – nine men – was sent to Walla Walla, where prison security is toughest.
But the overarching reason, corrections officials say, was changes the agency made in its strategy of dealing with gangs beginning four years ago.
The new approaches were inspired by an increase in prison violence.
Violence in Washington prisons jumped to a rate of 1.26 violent infractions per 100 inmates in 2008 from 1.05 in 2006, going to 2,367 from 1,940.
Most recently, the rate dropped – to 1 per 100 inmates (1,461 total infractions) – despite budget reductions and staff cuts, according to Corrections Department statistics.
Greg Senderhauf, who works for Teamsters Local 117, the union that represents Washington corrections employees, doesn’t trust the statistics. He thinks the department cooks them to look good.
“There’s a lot of pressure on the Corrections Department to present statistics that show reduced violence,” Senderhauf said.
Even so, he agrees that gang-related violence has dropped well below what it was in the late 1990s.
“It has been reduced greatly from that,” he said, “but there are still many concerns.”
A gang-fighting initiative the Legislature passed in 2008 included $131,000 for research into reducing gang-related activity in prison. As a result, the Corrections Department refined its gang-related practices on several fronts.
TAKING A COUNT
In spite of staff reductions, the Corrections Department increased efforts to identify gang members upon their initial entry into the prison system.
All male prisoners convicted in county courts are taken to the Washington Corrections Center north of Shelton, where they are stripped to their underwear, examined for gang-related tattoos and interviewed to determine gang affiliations.
“It can be difficult to tell,” Lewis said. “It’s not as if you can just X-ray them to find out.”
The Corrections Department also increased its use of national law enforcement and gang databases to identify and track gang members. And it began paying more attention to assessing incoming prisoners’ potential for violence.
Based on their histories, behavior and associations, prisoners are assigned to one of several security risk levels.
When beds are available, prisoners are assigned to permanent quarters where the level of security matches their threat level. The hardest cases go to the hardest prisons.
“They (the Hilltop Crips) didn’t all go to the same facility.” Pacholke said. “They were dispersed throughout the system.”
“There was a huge spectrum,” he said. “Sentences ranged from hard time down to community custody.”
MORE INTELLIGENCE-GATHERING
The Corrections Department also increased its intelligence-gathering and surveillance activities and its use of confidential inmate informants.
The prison telephone system, which can link criminals inside with those outside of prison, now is monitored more strategically, said Steve DeMars, chief investigator at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton.
All 35,000 outgoing calls prisoners make each month are recorded, but the volume makes monitoring all of them impossible.
Better intelligence has made monitoring more efficient, DeMars said, by narrowing the number and placement of calls to those thought likely to be most productive.
Power players in gangs might have all their calls monitored, he said, and automated alerts sometimes identify connections between particular parties.
The limited social interactions among gang members also are monitored, DeMars said.
“We watch them in the yard, the way they do their daily activities, who they talk to, who’s hanging close to whom,” he said.
Increased intelligence helps corrections officers separate individuals and groups with personal grudges or other reasons for violence.
“There are pluses and minuses to separation,” Lewis said. “Keeping them together may reduce violence, but it might make things worse by making them think: ‘We own this unit.’ ”
Two gangs that are separated from the outset are the Mexican American Nortenos and Surenos, who officials say have a “fight on sight” policy.
For hard-core troublemakers, the Corrections Department uses its Intensive Management Units – essentially prisons within prisons.
At the Shelton unit, inmates are isolated in individual cells for 23 hours a day. They eat their meals in their cells and perform their brief daily exercise alone in a concrete room about the size of a handball court.
On the brief occasions when IMU prisoners are allowed out of their cells, they are chained and escorted by two corrections officers.
BREAKING GANG TIES
Efforts by gangs to strengthen group ties are squelched when violence might result.
For example, at the gym at Shelton, when Mexican American gangs began exercising as a group, calling cadence in a pseudo-military fashion, officials put a quick stop to it.
The Corrections Department also began encouraging and helping gang members inclined to opt out of gangs.
“We encourage getting rid of gang ties,” Corrections Supervisor Dan White said. “The gang guys back home don’t support them in prison. They’re on their own.”
The Corrections Department also makes educational and work programs available, as well as chemical dependency and other treatment programs. Keeping prisoners busy not only reduces violence but also helps prepare them to go back to the outside world.
A “Step Down” program rewards offenders with lower custody levels for positive behavior.
“The DOC is not going to tolerate any negativity from anybody,” said Marc Milligan, an early member of the Hilltop Crips, now in custody at the Washington Corrections Center, where he’s been for most of the past two decades, most recently for second-degree assault.
During a recent visit, Milligan, 50, recalled his youth with regret, much of which he said he spent hanging around the corner of 23rd Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way on Tacoma’s Hilltop.
Milligan said he has a News Tribune newspaper clipping about last year’s Crips crackdown, with photos of those arrested, taped to his cell wall.
He said he knew most of their parents and feels sorry for them.
“They didn’t know what bad choices their kids were making,” he said. “Everything they were taught in their environment was wrong.”
Milligan said he was not surprised that the 31 Hilltop Crips who have wound up in prison since the sweep created no particular stir. The main reaction among gang members when fellow members show up is not complicated, he said.
“They’re happy to see each other, that’s all,” Milligan said. “It’s bad when you’re having reunions in prison instead of in school.”
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