ROMPIENDO AMARRAS
EL ENFERMO SE AGRAVA
The foregoing discussion seems to raise a paradox: although K6G dorms are more overtly antagonistic than GP, more chaotic, and more likely to be the site of physical altercations, K6G’s residents—many of whom have previously done time in GP, either in the Jail or in state prison or both—uniformly feel safer and more able to relax in K6G than they would in GP. That this situation seems paradoxical, however, only indicates the need for a more precise description of the violence GP inflicts, the safety K6G provides, and the relative humanity K6G represents.246
the gay boy beat up the queen and she got all scarred up and she had a bad bruise on her face.”).
243Int. 101, at A21 (“[T]his guy got sliced up—he was my homeboy—by this girl named
Ray-Ray, who’s a queen. And she just sliced him up and went to the hole and she got an added charge . . . . They will hurt [you with] razors. I’ve seen a lot of razors.” In K6G? “Yeah, the little razors. I don’t know how they give those to us, but, I mean, we all need shaving. But they’ll hurt you with the razors.); Int. 111, at D4 (“I’ve seen people pull out razors and use them to cut people in the face and all that before. I mean, people have broken razors and used them.”); Int. 89, at D12 (“[I’ve seen] someone get his face bashed in with a lock in a sock. You know, a big old can of roast beef inside a sock.”); Int. 89, at C14 (“I was in [one of the K6G dorms], and these two, a couple, got into a fight. And she pulled out a blade and just whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom—cut a hole right here in his mouth. You could see right through. It was just horrible. There was blood everywhere.”).
244See Int. 89, at C6 (“[M]ore people are running their heads against the wall in K[6G]
than GP. Now, I say it like that because in GP, you may get your head ran against the wall . . . . But in the K[6G] tank, you’re running your own head against the wall.”).
245Int. 89, at C19. People who have done time in the Jail’s GP will speak of having to
“sleep with [their] shoes on” because they never knew when something would snap and they would have to wake up fighting. Id. at D13. No one wanted to be caught in the middle of an outbreak of collective violence without shoes. Hartman found a similar imperative in force on his arrival at CSP Lancaster in the mid-1990s, where he learned that, among other “bizarre and inane rules that most of [his] fellow prisoners regard[ed] as nearly sacrosanct, . . . you aren’t supposed to walk out of the shower before putting your boots back on. This is, ostensibly, because we all have to be prepared to fight at any time.” See HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 156.
As has been seen, K6Gs know they still face an ongoing threat of physical violence in the K6G dorms. They might be the target of a random assault by someone who is mentally ill. They might be hurt by someone to whom they owe a debt. They might get into a brawl with someone whom they provoked or who provoked them. At the same time, they do not fear being the victim of sexual or physical predation because they are gay or trans or do not otherwise fit the model of the tough alpha male. And they do not fear being forced at a moment’s notice to engage in physical violence against people with whom they have no issue—indeed, whom they may affirmatively like and respect—in order to avoid either being physically disciplined later on for failing to jump in, or seeming weak in the eyes of men looking for ready victims.
Thus, as might be expected, to some extent the violence from which K6Gs feel protected is physical violence: being raped, stabbed, beaten, or otherwise harmed by fellow inmates who are policing compliance with the gang code247 or otherwise looking to shore up their own images. But there
is another crucial dimension to the safety K6G provides—again, despite the real possibility of bodily assault from a number of quarters—that is largely separate from the threat of physical violence. I am referring here to the
psychological violence of life in GP, and the psychological relief to be had
from living in an environment where people need not be constantly on their guard against saying or doing anything that might violate the culture’s strict behavioral norms or otherwise expose themselves as weak and thus a target. At its most extreme, the hypermasculinity imperative demands constant vigilance by people who are continually being sized up by their fellows for signs of weakness and vulnerability. This scrutiny can be exhausting, and the demands it makes—that one be forever checking oneself, suppressing natural instincts, and even looking for ways to exhibit unprovoked aggression and hostility—may over time corrode one’s sense of self and compromise one’s ability to connect with the best parts of one’s own humanity. Some men in GP no doubt thrive on this culture: one can, for example, imagine young men who have spent much of their lives moving between the streets and juvenile facilities, and who know no other way of being. But it seems fair to assume that most people in GP find this brutalizing dynamic unwelcome and oppressive, and would prefer to live in
247One long-term prisoner in the California prison system told me of “Cowboy,” a friend
of his at Folsom Prison in the late 1980s. Cowboy was a white man who one day received a visit from a black woman. At the end of that visit, they “kissed goodbye.” For that transgression of the racial divide, gang soldiers policing the color line “cut his neck open.” Letter from Jeffrey Scott Long, San Quentin State Prison, to author (Feb. 2012) (on file with the author).
an environment where they could relax, drop the mask, and do their time in peace.
K6G offers such an environment. In K6G, there is no hypermasculinity imperative, because there is no one in the unit with either an investment in having other people behave a certain way or the broad support required to implement a regime in which people are always being watched and judged. When, on occasion, a newcomer tries to “start something,” he is quickly shot down.248 This freedom from scrutiny and
the need to be on one’s guard is a large part of what makes the place feel so safe. The sense of safety it confers is partly physical, because an environment where hypervigilance is required is one in which a person may be physically victimized if he fails to keep the mask in place. But again, it is also psychological, because once people are able to relax the vigilance and self-constraint, it becomes possible for them to stay connected to who they are and to the essential aspects of their personhood. It is the possible sundering of this connection that is part of what can make life in GP so scary and degrading: scary because, where this pressure is the greatest, one can lose a sense of who one is and become something frightening even to oneself, and degrading because this demeaning posture—at best denying one’s own humanity and at worst being the agent by which others lose theirs—may sometimes be the only realistic option, given the conditions in which people are held. That some men who are not gay will nonetheless pretend to be gay to try to get into K6G and away from the Jail’s GP gives some idea of how oppressive the experience of GP can be when this pressure is at its height.
All this raises a question: if this is what violence and safety mean for the people in K6G—and arguably, by extension, for many people in the Jail’s GP—what would humane carceral conditions look like? The experience of K6G suggests at least a partial answer to this question. Humane conditions are those in which people feel safe both from the threat of physical harm and from the need to be constantly on their guard, lest they say or do anything that might suggest human vulnerability. Humane conditions allow people to maintain and develop a connection to their own identities and senses of self. In the sections that follow, I identify several factors that have—almost accidentally—come together to make K6G a relatively safe and humane environment in these three important respects (i.e., protecting people from physical harm; affording them psychological relief from the need for constant vigilance; and creating mechanisms by 248K6G’s “easy-going program” is a big part of what makes it so appealing to many men
with a long history of time in GP, who feel the need for a break from the gang life that governs in the rest of the Jail.
which they can remain connected to—and develop—who they are as people). As will be seen, this account suggests that the possibility of genuinely humane conditions requires an institutional commitment, not only to ensuring the physical safety of those in custody, but also to treating them with fairness and respect, as people and not simply as inmates. To regard those the state has incarcerated as somehow outside society’s moral circle, as no longer entitled to the respect and consideration owed fellow human beings, is the essence of dehumanization. A careful study of the factors that explain the relative humanity of K6G begins to suggest what a shift away from dehumanizing practices toward humane and humanizing ones might require as a practical matter.
III.WHAT MAKES K6GK6G?
In the Jail’s GP, gang culture and the hypermasculinity imperative are mutually reinforcing. The resulting environment is both scary and stressful, even for those who manage to keep the mask from slipping.249 In K6G, by
contrast, not only are there no gang politics, but there is no hypermasculinity imperative. Residents are free to be themselves.250 The
unit is consequently much more relaxed and, though not without its dangers, much safer and more humane than GP.251
What explains this dramatic difference, the absence in K6G of destructive dynamics that are found not only in the Jail’s GP but to a greater
249In such a climate, almost anyone can be a target. As Craig Haney reports, “one study
of a large and representative sample of prisoners found that fully one third of male prisoners reported having been victimized through some form of physical harm” in the preceding six months of their incarceration, and among those suffering from “mental disorders, the rate was nearly half” of the sampled prisoners. Haney, supra note 14, at 128 (citing Nancy Wolff and Jing Shi, Trauma in Incarcerated Persons, in HANDBOOK OF CORRECTIONAL MENTAL HEALTH 277, 283 (Charles Scott ed., 2010)). In those facilities where the pressure for hypermasculine performance is at its most intense, life in custody can be a daily hell for those people most readily seen as weak. For example, Roderick Johnson, “a black gay man with a gentle manner,” spent eighteen months in a Texas prison as a sex slave to the Gangster Disciples prison gang. Adam Liptak, Ex-Inmate’s Suit Offers View into Sexual Slavery in Prisons, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 16, 2004, at A1. Renamed “Coco” by the gang, Johnson was “forced into oral sex and anal sex on a daily basis,” “bought and sold,” and “rented” out for sex for the benefit of the gang. Id. During this period, Johnson was repeatedly gang raped in the prison’s cells, stairwells, and showers. Id. A 2001 Human Rights Watch report documented similar cases of sexual slavery in prisons in Illinois, Michigan, California, and Arkansas, as well as Texas, where, according to prisoners’ reports, sexual slavery is “commonplace in the system’s more dangerous prison units.” HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, supra note 87, at 14.
250See supra note 214.
or lesser degree in many men’s carceral facilities around the country?252 It
is tempting to try to explain the unusual climate of K6G by the sexual identity of its residents. Later in this Part, I consider the various forms such an argument might take, and assess their respective explanatory powers. As will be seen,253 sexual identity is not irrelevant here. But it would be
misguided to look no further than this factor to explain K6G’s distinctive environment. K6G is full of people well acquainted with the GP code. Many have spent years in GP units in the Jail or California prisons or both, pretending to be straight to avoid being victimized or escaping the worst effects of this cultural system by hooking up with a stronger prisoner, exchanging regular sexual access and obedience for protection from assault by others.254 For people with direct experience of GP suddenly to relax and
engage openly in the very behaviors that they know would endanger them elsewhere in the Jail, something more has to be true about their new environment besides simply close proximity to other gay men.
That “something more” is simple: unlike the men in the Jail’s GP, people in K6G independently feel sufficiently safe and protected that they do not have to posture or look to the gangs for protection. The puzzle then becomes: how, in a facility as violent and dangerous as Men’s Central, have the people in K6G come to feel secure enough to abandon many of the artifices on which men in GP routinely rely for self-protection? Why do K6Gs feel largely able to be themselves while men in GP often feel compelled to work hard to deny the very things—the emotions, the needs, the vulnerabilities—that make them human? There is no single answer to this puzzle. Instead, my research suggests several factors that have come together to help create the conditions in which the people in K6G feel safe enough to relax and be themselves—factors that are only contingently connected to the sexual identity of people in the unit. These factors include: (1) an institutional commitment to rigorous implementation of the consent decree that first established K6G; (2) the fact that for almost its entire history, the unit has been run by the same two officers, who have treated unit residents with respect, evenhandedness, and concern for their well-being; and (3) the small size of the unit, which, together with a high recidivism rate and the automatic reclassification to K6G of former unit residents who return to the Jail, has fostered over time a sense of community and personal connection among those in K6G.255 There is also
252See supra notes 30, 197. 253See infra Part III.C.
254See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 11–19 (explaining the process by which weaker
prisoners may “hook up” with more powerful prisoners in a protective pairing).
a possible fourth factor: the degree of attention K6G has received from outside organizations, media outlets, and even researchers like me.
Arguably, none of these factors alone would have been enough to make K6G’s relative humanity possible. None, moreover, was the intended result of deliberate efforts to reduce the appeal of gang politics or hypermasculine performance. Instead, each emerged almost accidentally in the wake of the 1985 court order that created K6G.256 Together, they have
helped create a relatively safe space in which hypermasculine performance is unnecessary. This safe space represents the primary background condition without which, I argue, no humane carceral environment can emerge. At the same time, the K6G experience demonstrates that, once the conditions of safety are in place, the resulting culture can have its own positive second-order effects, enabling the subsequent emergence of multiple avenues for healthy self-expression, which can in turn help to mitigate the destructive and dehumanizing effects of imprisonment and further promote a relatively healthy climate for the people inside.257 In
short, to a significant extent, K6G is a case of accidental humanity begetting a virtuous circle of desirable effects, a vivid contrast to the too frequent inhumanity of incarceration in American prisons and jails and the vicious circle of violence and abuse it can yield.
The sections that follow explore the four distinct factors just noted, which inadvertently have helped make K6G what it is.258 First, however, I
address a question that the contrasting accounts of GP and K6G are likely to raise: whether K6G’s population is sufficiently similar to GP’s to warrant comparative judgments.