Organizing Behind Bars

Prisons have long been recognized as schools for criminals, institutions that can -- and often do -- turn amateurs into professional lawbreakers. Lately, however, it has become obvious that the prison curriculum has broadened considerably. As if a trade school had turned into a university, the lessons in criminal know-how from fellow inmates have now shifted to a more general unofficial education in sociology, history and politics. The growth of the new curriculum has coincided with a widespread proliferation of new prison organiza tions. Some have provided a useful self-help structure; others have merely helped to pass the time constructively. A few are responsible for a frightening new element graduating to the streets. Perhaps the most vivid example is the Symbionese Liberation Army which grew twistedly out of the peaceful Black Cultural Association, a five-year-old California prisoners' group.

Big Shots. Criminal organizations are no newcomers to the nation's 700 federal and state correctional facilities. Mafia chieftains like Vito Genovese have seldom found it difficult to control many prison activities and sometimes outside operations from their cells. Even without certified big shots, few penitentiaries have ever been free of jailyard governments that enforce rules and pecking orders among inmates. It was the civil rights movement of the '60s that brought a new turn in prison society. Just as it did for other groups, the movement helped raise political consciousness among prison inmates.

An early sign was the cons' new awareness of their legal rights. Courts had long kept hands off prisons on the theory that wardens and guards needed virtually unfettered freedom to control convict populations. But judges too had experienced their own consciousness raising and could no longer overlook outright brutality. If the right not to be barbarously treated was recognized, could other rights be far behind? The Black Muslims scored a major victory when they persuaded federal courts in 1961 to recognize their right to bring suit protecting their religion. Other legal challenges followed. In a series of state and federal courts, prisoners have won the right to form cultural and educational organizations, to complain to newspapers, to correspond with their attorneys without officials opening the letters and to have less censorship of other mail and reading material. Last week even the Supreme Court put its stamp of disapproval on such censorship, saying that it was constitutional only in limited situations that substantially affected "security, order and rehabilitation."

The painstakingly won array of new rights was directly connected to the upsurge of varied convict organizations. Most of the religious groups have contributed toward improving the quality of prison life, although one seems clearly frivolous. Prisoners at penitentiaries in Atlanta and San Quentin have formed the Church of the New Song (CONS). They claim that their ritual requires them to eat porterhouse steaks and drink Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry and are suing prison authorities to get the needed ingredients for their menu.

Many of the new prison organizations remain straightforwardly criminal. In California's correctional institutions, two Chicano fraternities, the Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia (Our Family) vie viciously for control of the gambling and drug rackets inside the walls. Officials recorded more than 450 stabbings (the bulk of them nonfatal) in the state's prisons between 1971 and 1973; they attribute two-thirds of them to the two Mexican-American gangs. Some of the violence may be the work of the neo-Nazi Aryan Brotherhood, an antiblack group composed largely of members of motorcycle gangs; they frequently hire out as mercenaries for the Mexican Mafia. Illinois' State Penitentiary at Pontiac has also had gang trouble with such Chicago street groups as the Vice Lords, the Black P. Stones and the Black Disciples--all of whom continue to recruit members and occasionally war against one another in the prison.

Political Prisoners. Authorities are most troubled by the radical political organizations. Most officials will not admit the existence of such groups, let alone identify them, fearing that naming suspected leaders will erode discipline within their institutions. "Even if we knew of any, we wouldn't want to legitimize them by publicity," says one officer from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Nonetheless, there is little question that radical groups do exist within the nation's prison system. Whether they are also violent is less clear. Vermont is keeping an uneasy eye on the left-leaning members of the Vermont Prisoners Solidarity Committee at the State Prison at Windsor. The California-based Venceremos group (named for the Castroite slogan "We shall conquer") is believed to have supporters in various prisons.

The largest is the militant Black Guerrilla Family, which grew in California from the nonprison Black Liberation Army and picked up increased support among blacks following the 1971 San Quentin death of Black Panther George Jackson. Though its membership is secret, the B.G.F. is dedicated, says its manifesto, to "survival within these fascist concentration camps within the United States of Cowards." It considers all its members to be political prisoners, despite the fact that many of them are behind bars for such nonpolitical crimes as murder, assault, robbery and rape, and pledges itself to the "merciless destruction" of anyone who stands in the way of its vaguely defined goals.

Many prison authorities agree that the growth of such organizations stems directly from the growth of inmate rights. To prevent violence and head off the formation of revolutionary prisoner groups, prison officials regularly transfer leaders or troublemakers to other institutions, a practice now under attack as unconstitutional punishment in various courts. Some hard-line penologists are also seeking to overturn court decisions concerning the attorney-client privilege and are hoping to regain the right to censor prisoner mail and restrict the flow of supposedly radical reading material into institutions. As an example of the kind of material he would keep out of prisons, Sergeant William Hankins of San Quentin cites the books found in George Jackson's cell after his death, notably Das Kapital by Karl Marx and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Other prison officials place the blame for radical attitudes largely on outsiders, who, they claim, reach the inmates through lawyers or cultural groups.

Critics contend that outside influence is hardly to blame. As Fay Slender, a San Francisco attorney who works with inmates, explains: "We treat everybody in prisons so badly that it isn't surprising that we produce these intense, very romantic, revolutionary people. When people have been caged up as long as they have, the wonder is that we don't see more violence than we really do." Indeed, despite some isolated improvement, most prisons are still better equipped to punish prisoners than to rehabilitate them. Official prison structures remain more likely to make new criminals or harden old ones than to reform anyone. Thus the new breadth of the schools for crime is especially critical in determining how a prisoner will turn out. And if a convict's rage against imprisonment is mixed too explosively with warped philosophies of justification, the results can be frightening instances of terrorism.

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